So you're looking to raise money for your project and think NFTs are a good idea. Great! We do too! NFTs are a low cost giveaway that can make your users happy vs. other high cost items such as swag or food products which can take 50%+ of funds raised. But the problem is how to integrate the NFTs into your Kickstarter project. Well we have a solution for you. But let's start by examining what it takes to successfully integrate NFTs with any fundraising project.
To successfully integrate NFTs into any fundraising project you need to think through 4 things. First, the design of the NFTs. Then how to give the NFTs to your fundraising participants or get them into their wallets, what is referred to as minting. Next, is managing the database of your NFT holders so you can reach out to them as needed. And finally creating various exclusive experiences for your NFT holders to add value. Let's go over each of these requirements in more detail.
1 - Designing your NFTs
NFTs serve as great digital collectibles and keepsakes for fundraising participants. But you want them designed professionally so they are artistically fun to look at. You likely also want to design multiple NFTs to suite different tastes and let users pick which ones they are interested in. Developing donation tiers is another possibility where you'd want higher donation amounts to get rarer collectibles. All of this can be difficult to do through a fundraising platform that doesn't specialize in fundraising via NFTs. But we'll talk through below how the Panxpan platform is focused on exactly this.
2 - Minting NFTs
NFTs are minted on the blockchain and then stored in wallets that your participants have. So you'll need to be able to mint the NFTs and then transfer them to your participant wallets. Some participants however will not have wallets so you need to allow them to create new ones as part of your giveaway process. Further the value of NFTs is also in their exclusivity. So you want to make sure that the NFTs can be minted during the fundraiser only but not after. Also no NFTs should find their way to users that haven't actually donated. Again, if you're using a fundraising platform that doesn't specialize in fundraising via NFTs, all of this is now manual and can be hard to manage. But with Panxpan's NFT fundraising platform this comes out of the box.
3 - Managing your NFTs
Once your fundraiser is over, you want to be able to communicate and network with your fundraiser participants (likely for future fundraisers as well). But NFTs, unlike email addresses, can be sold and transferred to other interested users. So understanding who exactly has your NFT can be tricky. Further it isn't easy to just reach out to wallets with messages so you need some way to shepherd and communicate with your NFT holders. One solution for this is leveraging a communication platform such as Discord. For Panxpan's NFT fundraisers we integrate a Discord server with each of our fundraisers. This way participants of the fundraiser are able to join the server and get updates on the project or cause over time. And this is gated to NFT holders only. We'll talk about gating next.
4 - NFT Gating to Create Real Value
Once your NFTs are in the hands of your participants, you want to offer them exclusive incentives for being NFT holders. This is what can really make your NFTs valuable (see how this was implemented by the Bored Ape Yacht Club which is one of the most valuable NFT ecosystems today). Perhaps your initial fundraiser promised tiers where certain tiered donation amounts received unique access or updates on your project, custom swag, exclusive events, discounts, freebies, etc. So now you want to be able to offer them these exclusive rewards and experiences for donating to your fundraiser. However, NFTs can be sold or transferred to others, so you only want to provide these rewards to your current NFT holders.
So you'll need to do two things. First, create pages where these experiences can be learned about or accessed. And second only allow current NFT holders to obtain access to these experiences. This is what is known as NFT gating or token gating. With Panxpan's NFT fundraising platform you can not only create and mint NFTs, but you can also build these NFT gated experiences for your users once the fundraiser is over. This is how you make sure participants derive real value from your NFT and you make your next NFT fundraiser a greater success.
By now you probably have an idea of where we're heading. Integrating NFTs into a Kickstarter campaign is pretty difficult as you need to think through all these things. But the good news is this is why we started Panxpan. NFTs are a low cost way to provide giveaways to participants to increase engagement. At the same time, building out a few NFT gated experiences for your NFT holders can really make the NFTs valuable to your community. We can help you with all of this. Learn more about Panxpan's NFT fundraising platform here or start your NFT fundraiser here.