There’s another side of Kickstarter that most people never get to see. These are the tools that help creators stay on top of their projects and communicate with backers. We've recently released a slew of big improvements to these tools, so we thought we'd give everyone a quick tour.

Backer Report

At the heart of the creator tools is the Backer Report, which lists each project's backers, their chosen reward, and other information. Today the Backer Report is getting a major overhaul, with greatly improved filtering and search functions that make it much easier for creators to organize and drill down into their backers.

Today we also added a "reward sent" checkbox to the Backer Report so creators can keep track of which backers they've taken care of. The new Backer Report is available to all project creators beginning today.

Surveys

Once a creator is ready to begin sending out rewards, they use Kickstarter's survey tool to request the necessary info from backers. Here's what the survey creator wizard looks like:

Once backers respond to the survey, their information is automagically integrated into the Backer Report. From there you can export it in a file that you can open in Excel and other programs.

We also provide creators with a unique card for each backer that collects their info, survey responses, notes from the creator, and other information.

Project Dashboard

The flashiest of our creator tools is the Project Dashboard — a central hub for live information about a project’s progress and stats. At the top of the Project Dashboard is a graph of the project's funding progress:

Through the Dashboard, creators can track where their pledges are coming from. The Dashboard lists each referral source and the number of pledges generated. There's even a pie chart showing what percentage of backers came from sources within Kickstarter and how many came from external sources.

We're excited about today's updates to the creator tools, and we'll continue to work on making them even better. Thanks for joining us for our tour! Perhaps you'd like to start a project of your own?