Stretch goals, therefore, are an extension of your current goal for adding a new feature, function to your product. Mostly, the original goal is enough to cover the production costs of the product. To include these in the original funding would mean to increase the amount significantly. Worse, it could also mean failing to deliver the complete product in time and disappointing pledgers. Hence, stretch goals are ideal for creators who are successful with the first round of pledges and have successfully delivered on the product and are now looking to enhance their products.
There is no separate mechanism or page to create stretch goals. Instead, you can advertise it as perks or enhancements that will be unlocked if a project achieves a certain milestone.
If that milestone is achieved, your product will get a new feature which these backers can get exclusively as part of a reward or perk. You can offer stretch goals for social media likes and shares or for getting new backers. The milestones and perks are entirely up to you.
Our research suggests that though the use of stretch goals is quite common, successful use is not. And many executives set far too many stretch goals. Many organizations have experienced noteworthy failures with stretch goals. The consequences of setting and then missing stretch goals can be profound. Failures can foster employee fear and helplessness, kill motivation, and ultimately damage performance.
So, before launching stretch goals in sales, production, quality, or any other realm, how can you be confident that your grand aspirations will trigger positive attitudes and actions rather than negative ones?
You need clear guidelines for assessing and addressing risk. You have to know when stretch goals do and do not make sense, and when to employ them rather than set more achievable objectives.
Two critical factors consistently seem to determine success at meeting stretch goals. Is your organization coming off a win or rebounding from a loss? Winning affects attitudes and behaviors positively.
When confronting an extremely challenging task, the employees of recent winners are more likely to see an opportunity, systematically search for and process information, exhibit optimism, and demonstrate strategic flexibility. Companies experiencing weak results, however, are not well positioned. Their employees are more likely to see a stretch goal as a threat, grasp for externally sourced quick fixes, exhibit fear or defensiveness, and launch new initiatives in a chaotic and ultimately self-defeating fashion.
The effects of recent performance are often seen in sports, where exceptionally difficult contests are viewed in an entirely different light when athletes and teams have been doing well rather than poorly.
In a baseball game, for instance, players who are at bat are more likely to see opportunity if their recent turns at the plate have produced hits rather than strikeouts. The same thing happens in the corporate world. Though its customer was demanding unheard-of cost points and precision levels, Nypro had just pulled off a couple of challenging projects, such as developing a revolutionary process for producing Swiftach, a price-tag attachment system now used by almost all major retailers.
So the staffers felt a sense of opportunity and determination rather than worry over possible failure. A great deal of other anecdotal evidence from sports, business, and government, as well as systematic evidence from the fields of psychology and organizational science, suggests that organizations should take bold, risky actions when they are strong rather than weak. That may sound intuitive, but our research indicates that it is not obvious to most organizations. The second and even more critical factor is the availability of resources in an organization.
It can help organizations search broadly for ideas, experiment with them, and remain committed in the face of setbacks. Well-resourced organizations are better positioned to absorb failures that come with trying a variety of new ideas—not just because they have funds to move forward but also because they have emotional reservoirs that increase their resilience. On the other hand, in organizations that are strapped, managers have a harder time conducting and sustaining experiments and may jump at Band-Aid approaches that rarely succeed and are hard to learn from.
Extra resources give organizations the freedom to try various tacks, including parallel initiatives in different groups and units. The team tried out 80 hybrid technologies before narrowing the list to four and then settling on a final choice. By examining recent performance and resources, executives can assess how feasible stretch goals are for their organizations.
We have developed an analytical framework to help them do this. It breaks all organizations down into four distinct categories on the basis of where they stand on these two factors.
Understanding which category their company falls into will give managers insight into whether they ought to try for a long shot. Opel, the European carmaker, is a vivid example. Meanwhile its limited resources allowed little margin for error.
Even so, that year the company predictably adopted a stretch goal—a return to the black in only two years. Despite some advances, Opel did not even come close to meeting that target, and its failure just served to deepen its morale problems. For those rooted in the proud Opel tradition dating back to the s, it was a very difficult period. Unfortunately, the organizations most poorly positioned to succeed with the use of stretch goals—those without recent success and slack resources—are, paradoxically, the ones that are most likely to pursue them.
When choosing between bold action and playing it safe, firms that are struggling usually favor the aggressive path, as studies of railroads, radio broadcasters, and many other industries have shown. We call these organizations failing but grasping. With disappointing track records and resource constraints, they lack the capability, momentum, and resilience needed to pursue stretch goals.
Our framework clearly suggests that organizations with strong recent performance and slack resources are in the best position to benefit from stretch goals. Yet such organizations are unlikely to reach for the seemingly impossible, because success tends to create risk aversion. If things are going really well, why undertake bold action or change? Why not stick with what has been working? Similarly, organizations with ample resources tend to become conservative because they want to preserve their gains.
Complacency has caused many firms to stumble and even die, particularly in the face of disruptive technologies and business models. Blockbuster, Digital Equipment, Kodak, Smith Corona, Wang, and Woolworth are among the many companies that were once well positioned to make leaps but instead rested on their laurels, even in the face of strong challenges from new entrants.
On rare occasions, however, successful and well-resourced organizations have recognized the need to explore dramatic changes by setting stretch goals. DaVita, which provides kidney care and manages and operates independent medical groups, exemplifies this ideal. Use CrowdCrux as your resource going forward for all things crowdfunding!
Salvador Briggman is the founder of CrowdCrux, a blog that teaches you how to launch a crowdfunding campaign the right way. What Are Kickstarter Stretch Goals? Written by Salvador Briggman. Do stretch goals always coincide with a funding target?
How do you finance stretch goals? If you found this article to be helpful, let us introduce you to some more resources here at CrowdCrux: Subscribe to the CrowdCrux email newsletter and Youtube Channel for all the best insider tips, tricks, and secrets. Check out the Crowdfunding Demystified Podcast and this book for interviews with wildly successful creators who have run six-figure campaigns. For in-depth insights on an A to Z crowdfunding strategy, check out: The Kickstarter Launch Formula — through this book or this course.
Looking for more personalized advice? About Author Salvador Briggman Salvador Briggman is the founder of CrowdCrux, a blog that teaches you how to launch a crowdfunding campaign the right way. Further Reading
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