Projects We Love: how Kickstarter editors actually pick it

Take a walk through any Kickstarter category and you’ll see them, the little “Projects We Love” heart tucked next to the project title. Founders obsess over it. Consultants dangle it as if they’ve got a phone number for the editors. And Kickstarter, to their credit, has said quite plainly that there’s no secret handshake and no back door.

So what actually decides it? Some of it we know, because Kickstarter has published their own criteria. Some of it you can only pattern-match from watching enough campaigns. And as an official Kickstarter Expert Partner, I’ve had a good look at both the picked and the passed-over. The honest answer sits somewhere between “there’s a real recipe” and “you can’t guarantee it, so stop trying to.”

Here’s what actually matters, what doesn’t, and why chasing the badge as the goal is usually the wrong game.

What Projects We Love actually is

It’s an editorial badge. Kickstarter’s team of category editors scans new and upcoming projects and flags the ones they think best represent creativity, clear storytelling, and momentum. Once picked, your project gets the heart icon on its card, and it becomes eligible for the Projects We Love feed that Kickstarter surfaces around the site and in their category newsletters.

It’s not an algorithm. It’s not paid placement. It’s not tied to any partner programme. Kickstarter has been consistent on this for years: no application form, no fee, no shortcut. Just editors, looking.

Two things that matter about that. First, the criteria are subjective in a way that makes founders uncomfortable. Second, the same subjectivity is why the badge is worth something at all. If it were automated, backers would tune it out within a month.

What Kickstarter has actually said

The most recent guidance from Kickstarter’s own creator update boils down to about ten factors editors weigh. I’ll paraphrase them, because reading a list of ten bullet points isn’t why you’re here.

The through-line is this: they’re looking for projects that feel considered. A clean, uncluttered page. A video that gets to the point. Rewards that a normal human can understand. Photography that isn’t stock. A pre-launch that suggests you didn’t just wake up on a Tuesday and hit publish. Community engagement that reads as real rather than “please back my project” spam.

Notice what’s not on that list. Product category. Funding goal. Reward pricing. Whether you’ve launched before. Whether you’re British, American, or from Reykjavik. Editors care about the project as presented, not about your CV. That’s genuinely good news for first-time creators, because it means the field is more level than most badges of this sort.

The one criterion I’d flag as underrated: proper category tagging. Kickstarter has category-specific editors and category-specific newsletters. If your board game is filed under Product Design because you thought that sounded more premium, the Games editor never sees it. It’s a small thing that costs you nothing to get right.

The pattern in picked campaigns

You start to see it after you’ve watched a couple of hundred launches. The picked ones tend to share a few traits that Kickstarter doesn’t quite spell out, probably because they’d sound reductive if listed.

The video opens with the product, not the founder. The first image on the page is a product hero shot, not a logo. The reward tiers are described in one line each and priced in whole numbers. The story section has actual sub-headings and doesn’t wall you into a 3,000-word essay. There’s a real risks and challenges section that reads like it was written by a human who has considered the risks.

And underneath all that: momentum on day one. Editors are more likely to notice a project that’s already moving. I don’t know their exact process, but the pattern is consistent enough that I’d bet good money there’s some internal signal that flags campaigns funding fast. If your first 12 hours are quiet, you’re relying purely on the page to catch an editor’s eye. Doable, but harder.

That’s why the 12-week pre-launch timeline matters. Not because Kickstarter is scoring your email list, but because the campaigns with a real list tend to have the day-one push that gets an editor to look twice.

Stuck on whether your page is close enough to earn a second look? A £60 strategy call is the fastest way to get an honest read before you launch, not after.

What actually kills your chances

The negative signals are more actionable than the positive ones, honestly. Because “be creative” is hard to action, but “don’t do these five things” is easy.

Founder-story videos that open with 40 seconds of you standing in a workshop talking about your journey. Editors watch dozens of these a week. Nothing in the first frame tells them what your product does, so they close the tab. If you’ve read my post on the Kickstarter video that converts, you know the fix: product first, story second, keep it short.

Pages built like a slide deck. Big blocks of text, no images between them, no clear hierarchy. Editors are scanning, not reading. A page with no visual rhythm feels like work.

Rewards that don’t say what you get. “The Backer Pack, £75” tells an editor nothing. They’ll assume it tells backers nothing either, because they’d be right. Every reward tier needs a one-line description that a person seeing it for the first time can parse instantly.

Hype language everywhere. “Revolutionary.” “The world’s first.” “Game-changing.” Editors’ eyes glaze over. So do backers’. If your product is genuinely a first, prove it by showing it work, not by shouting.

Zero social signal. If your Kickstarter link has zero shares, zero comments, and no visible community activity when the editor lands on it, that’s a negative signal on its own. It doesn’t have to be huge. It just has to be more than a tumbleweed rolling across an empty street.

Why chasing the badge is the wrong frame

Here’s where I’ll disagree with a lot of the advice out there. Aiming to get Projects We Love as your primary launch goal is backwards. If you build a campaign good enough to earn it, you’ll have already built one good enough to fund. If you build a campaign optimised for editor-bait but weak on fundamentals, you’ll get neither the badge nor the pledges.

The badge is a side-effect of doing the work. It’s not the work itself.

I’ve seen campaigns pick up the heart on day two and still miss their funding goal because the product was mispriced and the audience was wrong. I’ve seen campaigns never get picked and blow through target because the founder had built a rabid pre-launch community that didn’t need Kickstarter’s homepage to convert.

Which is not to say the badge is worthless. It absolutely helps. It’s a credibility marker for browsing backers and it opens a real traffic channel via the Projects We Love feed. But it’s the icing. The cake is the page, the video, the rewards, the pre-launch, the ads, the community. Get the cake right and the icing tends to appear.

Stacking the odds without kidding yourself

If you want to give yourself the best shot, the honest checklist is roughly this. Get the page polished to a point where a stranger scrolling for 15 seconds could tell you what the product is, who it’s for, and what they’d back. Get your video under 2 minutes and opening on the product. Get your rewards described in plain English with images. Pick the right category and re-check twice. Build enough of a pre-launch that day one has visible movement. Post updates that read like a human wrote them.

Do all of that and you’re in the pool editors actually look at. You might still not get picked. That’s fine. You’ll have built a campaign that funds regardless, which is the actual goal.

Want a hand with yours?

If you’re about to launch and want an honest read on whether your page is in Projects We Love territory or still needs work, that’s exactly what my £60 strategy call is for. No fluff, no upsell script, just an hour of feedback from someone who’s been through it. If you want the full done-for-you treatment, from page build to launch, the done-for-you Kickstarter service is the way. Either way, get in touch and we’ll figure out which tier actually makes sense for where you are.