Thought of something else...

In terms of the stretch goals, I think to add to that I'd say:

Think of donors as investors. Investors in any business have a right to know where the money is planned to be used; what it actually ends up being used on; how their investment will improve the business; what happens to their money should the business (aka campaign) fails; etc etc etc.

If you think in those terms, then you can immediately see that you should be providing as much information as possible so that your donors can make an informed choice about whether or not to donate; and if so, long-term and open communication with them is also important.

If you see this less as 'money for me/project/business' and more from 'money from me to someone else/project/business' (aka the donor's perspective) then it has quite an impact on how you present yourself.

Think of what you'd like to know/ask if I were doing my campaign now, or what you'd ask someone else for theirs. Then present your campaign the way you'd want it if you were a donor.

Investors in any business have a right to know where the money is planned to be used; what it actually ends up being used on; how their investment will improve the business; what happens to their money should the business (aka campaign) fails; etc etc etc.

This in an interesting point in regards to Kickstarter versus Indiegogo.  With Kickstarter you either succeed or fail, so having defined stretch goals is a good idea.  With Indiegogo, you can choose to have a flexible campaign.  This means you receive any money raised.  In this case, having the additional explanation of where raised money goes if you fail is needed.

This in an interesting point in regards to Kickstarter versus Indiegogo.  With Kickstarter you either succeed or fail, so having defined stretch goals is a good idea.  With Indiegogo, you can choose to have a flexible campaign.  This means you receive any money raised.  In this case, having the additional explanation of where raised money goes if you fail is needed.

This is true, although I think no matter how the funding is structured it's important to remember that people are trusting you to fulfill your promises. Go back to the investor perspective: if you are looking to give money to Red Cross on the promise that they'll use your money 'maybe, might be, on a new water pump in African city' it wouldn't inspire you to think they actually will. You might think they'll pocket the money or it will go to 'admin costs' instead. You might be inclined to be mistrustful. If you give money to Red Cross on the promise that your money will go towards that new pump, and it definitely does go towards admin costs or other non-promised items, you might be annoyed because you wanted specifically to help a poor group of people to have clean water and that's what was advertised as where the money would go.

Red Cross can say "hey, we didn't raise enough money to get everything in place so we can install the pump and we're not going to" or they can say "we raised more than expected and we'll install two" - either way they've still got to be honest about where the money goes if they fail/succeed. The point is to be upfront no matter what structure you have.

This isn't quite apt to this situation, but there's this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oatmeal_and_FunnyJunk_legal_dispute

The Oatmeal raised money for charities, and also posted photos of the money and a receipt (IIRC) of the donation. (This was part publicity stunt if you read the above, which is why it's not exactly apt as an example) He got way more than he expected to raise, so there was a lot of discussion (again IIRC) about where the extra money would go. Because it wasn't considered beforehand that there would be more money, he had to decide last minute whether to refund, whether to donate it to the original charities, whether to donate it to new ones, etc. The main thing is that people wanted to know that it wasn't just being pocketed especially as many people were donating specifically so it could reach those charities.

I hope you'll see my point about using the charities as an example. If you're as upfront as possible and stick to what you've promised, flexible funding or not, you're inviting people to be involved in your business - in its own way - and I think it's important to showing that you're responsible and respectful of whatever people donate.

I think I am calling it, time of death....

The biggest problem with crowd funding is the oversaturation of it right now.  If you don't have something unique from the start, and you don't have friends and family ready to help you hit the first 25% shortly after launch, it becomes a long journey.  I have 7 comments with 5 of them being marketing firms advertising their services.  I joined a couple of crowd funding groups on FaceBook, but of course everyone who joins has their own campaign.  Did get a few page views, and a few likes, but nothing else.  Paid 2 people on sites like Fiverr to Tweet and FaceBook the campaign, but watched to see how it was done.  Verified the scam that is, just glad I didn't spend much money on it.  The cheapest marketing firm that tried to sell me was $50 a week. 

It is all about social media.  I have always compared FaceBook to the likes of a pyramid scheme.  If your not popular, then your posts will not go anywhere.  You have to have people share it, and those people need people sharing it. 

For me, I am going to move forward as a sole propietership and build a portfolio.  I might relaunch another campaign down the road when I have more people willing to give me the initial boost. 

I think I am calling it, time of death....

The biggest problem with crowd funding is the oversaturation of it right now.  If you don't have something unique from the start, and you don't have friends and family ready to help you hit the first 25% shortly after launch, it becomes a long journey.  I have 7 comments with 5 of them being marketing firms advertising their services.  I joined a couple of crowd funding groups on FaceBook, but of course everyone who joins has their own campaign.  Did get a few page views, and a few likes, but nothing else.  Paid 2 people on sites like Fiverr to Tweet and FaceBook the campaign, but watched to see how it was done.  Verified the scam that is, just glad I didn't spend much money on it.  The cheapest marketing firm that tried to sell me was $50 a week.  

It is all about social media.  I have always compared FaceBook to the likes of a pyramid scheme.  If your not popular, then your posts will not go anywhere.  You have to have people share it, and those people need people sharing it.  

For me, I am going to move forward as a sole propietership and build a portfolio.  I might relaunch another campaign down the road when I have more people willing to give me the initial boost.  

I think the biggest issue from the sounds of it is that you're marketing to *everyone* and not specifically finding and targeting the people who would most likely use your services. Ie. instead of just putting an ad on Facebook, why not approach some wedding bloggers and see if they offer ad space and/or a freebie video for which they then review on their site? I've found that reviews are often the best because then it's not paying for ads, you get an honest comment about your work, and it's far more 'enticing' as it's not seen as cynically as advertising usually is.

Another thought is this:
https://rafflecopter.typeform.com/to/TeRTNG
I've seen this advertised on a cooking blog and it piqued my interest. I haven't applied, but it looks like they do 'sponsored' blogging which might be up your alley.

In terms of paying for social marketing: don't bother. I've found that nothing beats doing it yourself. Invest in the FREE tweetdeck, schedule weekly or daily (or whatever) updates. You can hook it up to Facebook using RSS Graffiti (facebook app) which then updates your FB page automatically. It takes about 10 minutes to set up and about the same to maintain per day. I'm sure you can do the reverse somehow, or only update FB automatically, but I haven't done it myself so can't recommend another method. Either way, there are free ways to do it that only cost you 10 minutes of work per day if you keep it up. I do have some links to more, shall we say, 'professional' services, where you can set up an account to look for X kind of people on Facebook and whatever and un/follow in batches but I think these require a paid account and also a lot of time using it to get anywhere.

The other thing is that people respond to personable accounts, not robots, which is what most paid services end up being. I got a lot of followers on Twitter because I interacted with people; provided links to non-me stuff, making me seem less spammy; and generally posted stuff that people were interested in. I have often looked at competitor accounts and the ones with a low amount of followers/likes/re-tweets were always the ones that posted about products all the time and/or only ever had self-referential things.

Outside of that, I've found that it requires a HUGE amount of effort to get anywhere. I say this not only on behalf of my own business, but as an assistant for a dot com that required me to do all their social marketing. The goal was to get lots and lots and lots of followers as quickly as possible. It basically amounts to following everyone you might think is interested in what you're selling; updating regularly in a personable manner; unfollowing all the 'non-quality' accounts (bots, people who don't follow back, people who don't fit the bill, etc); rinse, repeat. It took months to get 1000 followers on twitter, and I can tell you its not a good way to spend your time if you don't have the budget for it. (This is also why it's expensive: unless you pay for robot fake accounts, it takes a good deal of tedious work to get quality followers. 'Quality' refers to anyone who will re-post, like, re-tweet, email, or in general promote; people who interact with you back or are not bots themselves; etc.)

The trick I think is to post updates people will be interested in - ie. tips about how to make a good video might help you attract people - and curate a natural following based on likeability of you, rather than 'hey look at my product'. Once again though it comes back to *who* you are targeting. Go like a whole bunch of marketing companies on FB, especially if they work on advertising that includes off-beat visual artists. They'll see you've liked them and might remember you for future work. Start a conversation with a charitable organisation on how puppets can break language barriers; etc etc. Oh, and of course, bug puppeteers. There's plenty of places to advertise: there's here, Puppet Hub, Puptcrit, your local UNIMA centre or the Puppeteers of America; there's a whole bunch of international puppet magazines and centres and etc.

Basically I've found it comes down to a choice: are you going to spend your time working on your business and having products to show, or are you going to spend your time curating a Facebook page? Your efforts are better spent actually approaching businesses and proposing work rather than hoping some guy on Facebook sees a video and likes it. (My 2 cents)

By far for me the biggest problem was never attracting people, but finding a way to convert those hits to sales. So I can't advise you there...

PS. Been meaning to reply to your PM, but have been caught up with work. Will try asap.

Leaving this here for other people who might be interested. A shadow puppet performance successfully funded via online campaign, from my home town.
http://www.pozible.com/project/8472
The perks are worthwhile using as a model. They had a small budget and were easily funded by **** 17 **** people! Makes me think they just got their friends and family involved but didn't do much wider marketing.

Or...just be a celebrity.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/tabletop-season-3-with-wil-wheaton

Raised $394,000 in 2 days!?!?

You know the sad thing is that these campaigns end up raising money for people who could probably easily get a loan from a bank, or some sort of angel funding from investors. But you or I are dependent on campaigns because most banks/investors wouldn't come near us.

I saw something akin to the following posted on a website and thought it was worthwhile repeating here. This is paraphrased quite a bit due to the need to add in some context.

Online campaigns are tricky because there are a number of things donors might factor in. There's the value they might put on the project; ie they'll be willing to donate to a high-profile project (as above) or a common cause (ie fight cancer), but they might not value an obscure project as much. There's the awareness of the campaign of course and the amount of publicity spoken about it. In the case of Wheaton, we can be fairly sure there would be lots of press releases, media attention and fan blogging; whereas we might only reach friends and family.

There's also the speed at which you get your news out. Wheaton probably had a well-timed press launch and follow-up with media and releases going out to high-profile bloggers all at the same time. This creates a wellspring as more people will donate if they know everyone else is - that whole 'dipping toes in water' thing is a cautious tactic we see if something is under-used and under-funded. "If no one else is in, why should I be?" Obviously creating urgency and surge helps.

Lastly, there's a need for donors to be in a connected community. If it's more disparate then you won't get that same surge effect, but also you're not getting to your target market. Instead of collecting fans and/or customers you're just tapping into a group of people who are more than likely not interested in your project. Ie. target market vs family and friends. This ties in with the other points because if it's a random bunch of people then there's no value to the project, but if it's a connected community then there's more value.

Awareness of the campaign and/or the (implied) value of the project has to increase in order to gain more donors. Oh, and there will be a 'long tail', or drop-off effect, after some time. This may be due to saturation or to lack of new media attention or whatever. It's best not to rely on a one-time-only release of information, but to do regular releases so that you continue to get new people to your campaign.

-- End

In other words, if you have a high-value project (Wheaton) you can get the word out with very little effort and quickly. If you have a low-value project, you need lots more effort. A good campaign would probably target a couple of well-positioned people who have the ability to get the word out to a lot of people at once, especially if they are part of your target audience.

Interesting take.  It also helps that TableTop and Geek and Sundry have a large established fan base.  I think it is a good campaign to mimic visually.