The Kickstarter campaign's force majeure

Hi board game developers and enthusiasts :)

I hope you're all doing great today... I was going to do a different post for you today, but unfortunately I caught a cold yesterday which made me think of my Kickstarter campaign where I also caught a cold during the fund raising period. 

I therefore figured out, that I should talk about the "force majeure" aspects of a Kickstarter campaign. The idea behind the force majeure paragraph in a contract is to make sure none of the parties involved will be responsible for losses connected with events out of their control, like hurricanes, volcanoes, war and similar. In this article I'll cover the minor factors that probably will affect your Kickstarter campaign, but still is somewhat out of your control. 

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Making room for unforeseen events
It's of course impossible to foresee the future, but planning on a few events will certainly help you when you want to start your own campaign. Some of the following things I experienced during my Kickstarter campaign

• Increased working hours on your daily job.
  
• Illness, yourself, in your team or in your family.
• Technical difficulties (fx with your machine or internet connection).
• Job loss or similar. 
• Though these are not unforeseen - don't forget to include the following in your plans - moving to a new place of living, family trips and holidays.

There's a wide variety of events you can't control to the fullest extent - and of course these will have an impact on your campaign proportional to the experience, size and flexibility of your team/company. 

Some of the things I did to reduce the impact of these events was: 

• Had enough people on the team to ensure progress in production even when 1 or 2 people were sick or busy with other things. 
  
• Added 10% more days to the campaign than I expected to need. 
  
• I made frequently backup of my work on the campaign (the game itself is of course backed up as often as possible). 
• I was completely honest during the campaign about what was going on - and I always informed people and backers before the events occurred, if I had the chance. 

But as I learned through my campaign, this was far from enough if I wanted to keep my head above water during the entire campaign. 

What I hadn't taken into account was the impact of things like:

• What would happen if I got sick, and couldn't really update the Kickstarter campaign? 
  
• What would I do when I was completely cut off from the internet - lurking around in the underground of our armies' training areas somewhere in Denmark? 
  
• What would I do when I was locked down with over 18 hours of work 4 days in a row? 

For my next campaign I'll have addressed these potential challenges beforehand - and I hope you'll do the same :)
  

Final pointers
I few things I'll be planning on for my next Kickstarter campaign and that you might want to listen in on. 

• I'm expecting to add 20% more days to my Kickstarter campaign than needed. 
  
• I'll be launching it while I have a downtime concerning workload on my job. 
  
• Furthermore it'll be planned with my better half at home, meaning that she knows when I'll be busy and when I'll be very busy ;)
• I'll keep 1-2 people close to the project that can help me update and keep people informed if I should get sick or otherwise having trouble reaching out to my backers. 
  
• The Kickstarter campaign has to be complete when launched, meaning that if I'll have trouble adding new content during the campaign, it won't hinter the whole process (this will of course have to correspond to the need of refreshing the campaign once in a while with some extra content).

I hope these inputs have thrown down some new items on your "to-do-list" before launching your own Kickstarter campaign. My list has certainly expanded since my last campaign :D 

Have a great day - and happy gaming guys! 
Best regards Emil

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