ScandiShip: Changes and lessons learned

Last year’s trip to Australia was an enormous success for us all as creators. The content it generated (and we still haven’t finished processing and posting it all yet) was incredible.

John Bull spent more than a week ransacking the Sydney Maritime Museum archives (who would have suspected they held an extensive set of resources on Naval Military Holy Orders!) while the sheer number of ships and accompanying naval plans Drachinifel and Dr Alex were able to pour over was almost overwhelming. Overall, the trap cemented our belief that these excursions exponentially increase the amount of content we can capture and generate for you all.

The Australia trip also taught us, however, some real lessons on the logistics around organisation and rewards for that, and for future campaigns. So below is the summary of what we’re calling the “do different” list for ScandiShip. If you have thoughts and comments we’d love to hear them.

Lesson one: Real life will sneak up on you with a very big stick

For all of us, the last twelve months turned out to be an endless procession of events that seemed determined to keep us away from doing things we wanted (and needed) to do. Those of you who follow us on our channels and elsewhere will know these in detail – from baby Drachinifels, to unavoidable house moves, to accidentally ending up in charge of a major football club. It’s been a wild ride. And the casualty of that ride has been time to organise things like tours, dinners and recordings.

The do different: When we sat down and looked at what we need to get existing things – and new ones – prioritised, what we quickly realised is that what we’ve been lacking is an experienced organiser – both someone with the time to secure and negotiate dates and events, and coordinating plans across our diverse calendars.

So we’re delighted to announce that Mrs Drachinifel will be taking on this role officially going forward. So please welcome her to the team!

Lesson two: Sourcing challenge coins is bloody hard

It’s not that there aren’t plenty of sites that claim to sell them. As we’ve discovered over the last nine months, it’s that most of them don’t know how to do them well. For us, that means delivering a challenge coin that has a good level of quality, fidelity in design and colour in its finish. If we say ‘Irn Bru’ for a coin, we want it to be Irn Bru coloured!

The do different: It’s taken a lot of back-and-forth and test runs on this, all of which have taken time. We’ve now found a firm that does them well, however, and have already received all the back-ordered coins for Australia. We’re ordering Scandi coins from them as well.

It looks like we won’t have Scandi coins ready before we (hopefully) depart, which is a shame. But we wanted to prioritise the Australia ones first to catch up. We’re giving people a little bit of time to update their addresses before we send all these, but they’ll be inbound shortly alongside everyone’s promised books.

Lesson three: Leave more time for rest and writing

By definition, we aim to squeeze as much into these trips research-wise as possible. What we discovered in Australia, however, was how quickly this lead to burnout. Especially as we never want to turn down an offer, or an opportunity, to meet with fans in the evening.

We were able to maintain a good backers’ update schedule in Australia, but frankly there was so much stuff we could have shared with you and didn’t – snippets of content and behind-the-scenes videos that aren’t good enough for a full channel update, but would have been wonderful extras for you.

The do different: Not travelling as far helps here – not least because the time-zone shift isn’t as drastic. What we’ve also done, however, is engineered in more time during the day when we can just throw out some quick content for backers only. In addition, we’ve spent this year completely overhauling the tech behind how we do all this to make everything less time consuming all-round. More on that shortly!

Lesson four: Iterate the technology

On a tech level, everything last year was something of an experiment – from how we managed the crowdfunding, to where we hosted videos and how we pushed content out to backers. Mostly it worked… okay. But various parts of the process were way too time-consuming, and we had lots of people who needed manual interventions to fix their accounts when they tried to read their first backer post.

The do different: Having extra administrative hands in the form of Mrs Drach is going to be a huge help here. With much of the ‘tech support’ previously sitting on John Bull, it meant that it was only outside of content gathering times that things could be actioned when a human intervention was required.

We’ve also been overhauling the tools we’ll be using, behind the scenes, to make things more efficient and robust going forward as well. The highlights there are:

• Buttondown for email updates – which will allow us to push these automatically whenever we post a backer update here, complete with content so that you don’t need to come to the site to read (where possible)
• Moving the crowdfunder element to Thrinacia – a dedicated reseller crowdfunding platform – rather than an embedded WordPress solution. We were hugely disappointed with the stability of the (highly rated) wordpress version, and it was very complex to administer.
• A positive lesson: Vimeo was bloody brilliant and everything we could have wanted as a way of delivering backer-exclusive videos. So we will absolutely be using that again.

Lesson five: Security clearances make everything painfully slow

This is actually our first lesson of ScandiShip. We have been delighted with the level of interest in what we do – and the access people want to give us – in Sweden, Norway and Finland.

But without going into detail, it has meant jumping through some long, painful – but understandably necessary – security hoops. This has been very frustrating as it meant we couldn’t even officially announce what we were doing or begin crowdfunding until now.

The do different: Let’s just say we have already begun conversations with officials at our intended destination next year. In the meantime though, it does leave us racing to fund this one. So finally – officially – over to you all now, for your help!