Before you begin building your reward tiers and add-ons, you will first need to itemize everything you plan to offer. Creating an item for each individual reward will help you to:
- Easily put together the building blocks of all of your reward tiers and add-ons
- Provide a clearer insight into the quantities you will need to produce for each item
- Give your backers a more detailed overview of what each reward tier includes
- Make it easier for backers to select their reward preferences with Kickstarter’s Backer Survey tool
To set up items for your project, follow these steps:
- Select the ‘Items’ option on the Rewards tab of the project editor
- Click the “+ New item” button to the right
- Enter a title for your item, something that quickly and clearly describes it (e.g. Deluxe board game)
- Add an optional image to help your backers understand what comes with their reward
- Each image must have a 3:2 ratio, be no smaller than 348 x 232 pixels, and no larger than 50MB
- We accept JPG, PNG, or GIF file types
- Remember, our rules for visually presenting your project apply. Check how to honestly and clearly present your project here
- When finished, click the green “Save item” button in the top right corner
Once you’ve finished adding all of the items you plan to offer you’re ready to start creating your rewards. The items you’ve added will appear in a drop-down for you to select and include in the reward tier or add-on being created.
For example, if you are planning to offer a combination of 2 board game versions, a normal and a deluxe one, you might add the following 2 items:
- Item 1: Board game
- Item 2: Deluxe board game
After creating these items, you can then go ahead and easily build out a variety of bundles using these items:
| Reward 1: Basic Tier | Reward 2: Upgraded Tier | Reward 3: Deluxe Tier |
| - 1 x Board game | - 1 x Board game - 1 x Deluxe board game |
- 3 x Board game - 3 x Deluxe board game |
This way, once you are concluding a successful campaign, you can easily see how many of each item you need to prepare for your backers in your backer report.
If you are planning to offer multiple variations of a reward item (e.g. a T-shirt in a variety of colors), you will be able to collect each backer’s preference when sending out surveys after your project ends.
Best practices for itemizing your rewards
We’ve compiled some best practices to help you correctly itemize the rewards you plan to offer. These tips will help make it easier when you come to prepare for production and fulfillment of your items:
- Create items for everything you offer, including “intangible” items.
Create an item for all of the things you’re offering during your campaign. For example, a thank you shout out in the acknowledgements section of the book. This will help you to track each item and make it easier to ask questions in the backer survey for all backers who have the item included in their pledge.
- Keep each item separate, do not combine multiple items together.
We strongly recommend creating each item individually, you can then bundle items together when creating your reward tiers and add-ons.
- Do not add quantities to items. Instead, add quantities when you combine items into reward bundles.
None of your items should have quantities. If your reward contains multiples of the same item, you can set those quantities when adding the item to your reward. For example, if a reward tier contains 4 stickers, create one item for “Sticker” and when you add the “Sticker” to your reward tier, set the quantity to 4.
- Keep your item names simple
There’s no need to repeat the name of your project in each reward. For example, if your project is titled “Unique, Colorful Ceramics” and you are offering bowls and cups, you can title your items “Bowl” and “Cup,” instead of “Unique, Colorful Ceramics Bowl” and “Unique, Colorful Ceramics Cup”.
These past projects provide a great example of itemized rewards:
After you’ve itemized all of the rewards you plan to offer, you’re ready to begin creating your reward tiers and add-ons. You can find the steps for this in our "How do I add rewards to my project?" article.