Being a Kickstarter creator is a serious endeavor, and verifying you are who you say you are ensures the integrity of the Kickstarter platform. It also protects you by preventing someone else from running a project under your name. Verifying your personal information, along with those of any other individuals or businesses raising funds for the project, is mandatory.
How to verify your information
You can verify your information from the Payment tab of your project draft. There you’ll select how you’ll be raising funds (individual, business, or nonprofit), after which you’ll be prompted to “Continue to Stripe”, our payments processor. Depending on who’s raising funds and the country of your project, you will be asked to provide certain pieces of information, which are typically names, birthdates, addresses, tax identification numbers, and government issued documents. This process is typically quick, but can take a few business days in some cases, so we recommend factoring in a few extra days to complete this process when planning your project’s launch timeline.
If you have not received an update on your identity verification after 5 business days of submitting your information, please reach out to our Support team.
If your verification attempt fails
If you are having trouble verifying your information, make sure that any name, birthdate, address, and tax information you’ve input matches exactly what is shown on your government issued documents. Typos are the most common reason for not getting verified, so we recommend double-checking everything. You’ll see more specific error messages from Stripe, our payments processor, after clicking the “Continue to Stripe” button on your project.
To ensure the best chance of a smooth verification process, we recommend keeping the following in mind:
- Make sure you meet the eligibility requirements for launching a project from your chosen country
- Double-check the name, birthdate, and address you’re entering matches exactly what's on your government issued documents
- Check formatting and spelling
- If prompted to submit a document, make sure the image is clear, in color, without any edges cut off, and no shadows
- If prompted to submit more than one type of document, make sure you’re not uploading the same document more than once
- Acceptable document types vary by country. If you’re unsure about the documents you have on hand, you can check acceptable documents by country
- For Japanese projects, if your name cannot be written out in kanji, you can use latin characters or katakana instead when entering your first and last names
- For US companies only: Your business URL will be used to verify your business/identity. Please ensure that this is a public link and is formatted as “https://www.example.com”. You can share your business URL, Kickstarter profile URL, or a business social media URL. Alternatively, you can choose to add a 2-sentence product description instead.
Please note: The URL you submit must show the product or service you intend to produce using your Kickstarter funds.
If you continue to experience difficulties getting verified, please get in touch with us for help with further troubleshooting.
Changing your verified information
The verified identity, entity information, and bank details are locked in after passing through the verification process. If you need to make any changes ahead of launching your project please get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to help.
We take the security and privacy of our community very seriously. For information about privacy on Kickstarter, please read our Privacy Policy.