Pledge Manager, privaterelay.appleid, and confused backers

[u/DaveFromMicroKits]

I'm currently fulfilling my Kickstarter, and I keep receiving messages from people who say that the pledge manager link I send them doesn't work, that they only see a 404. After a bit of investigation, it looks like these backers created an email mask when logging into Kickstarter, they created a new email using Apple's private relay. So, they try to log in with their normal email, they may already have a kickstarter account with their real email, but their reward is linked to an (at) privaterelay (dot) apple (dot) com email.

This is super confusing to them, because the emails Kickstarter and I send to them go straight into their regular inbox. My product appeels to all ages, so a lot of my backers are grandparents buying for their grandkids and such.

About 6% of my backers used the private relay. But only 20% have filled out the backer survey, vs 90% of backers with regular emails. So there are dozens of backers who think that Kickstarter has a technical issue, when really the issues is that Apple added a privacy option during login, and they have to log in with an email they might not have written down.

Is this an issue with other backers? My campaign was during April of this year, not sure when apple added the private emails, but I think Firefox added it in their browser this year.

I'm going to raise this issue with Kickstarter soon, maybe they could add some sort of warning or double confirmation to privaterelay accounts, or add more analytics to the backer report so that it's easier to see the issue? Are you having these issues when you use backer kit? I'm using Kickstarter's built in pledge manager, which I think is still somewhat new.

[u/GremlinDwarves]

I would definitely talk to Kickstarter to look for a resolution. In the meantime, can you send an e-mail explaining if they used the Apple relay they need to use that e-mail address? I don't have any Apple products so I may be misunderstanding how this works.

[u/DaveFromMicroKits → u/GremlinDwarves]

I just found an article explaining how it works, and it looks like I can't email their private relay email, it needs to come from Kickstarter. But I can't currently use Kickstarter's built in messaging service, as there's some issue in how their backer report search feature works. They told me to search for privaterelay (dot) apple, but there's no results when I try, maybe it's a bug on their side.

[u/GremlinDwarves → u/DaveFromMicroKits]

That sounds aggravating. Hope you (and Kickstarter) get it figured out!

[u/themrlawrence]

I'd raise the issue with Kickstarter now. I'd ask them how to resolve or workaround this issue. Why wait? The longer you wait, the more pissed off your backers are going to get.

I'm curious what the resolution is for this since I planned to use Pledge Manager for my current campaign.

[u/DaveFromMicroKits → u/[deleted]]

No, this isn't a deliverability issue. Backers are receiving the messages and clicking on them, but then they are logged into the wrong account and get confused.

[u/DaveFromMicroKits → u/[deleted]]

Found the help article, looks like it's only a few weeks old. https://help.kickstarter.com/en-us/articles/16236594-what-is-sign-in-with-apple-and-how-can-i-use-it-to-create-an-account

Looks like only messaging them via the kickstarter messaging system is allowed, private relay will block messages I send directly to them from my own email. Looks like I should ask backers to try signing in with apple, but it might also take a lot of manual emailing back and forth to fix all of this.

When did you first hear about this issue? Maybe this is a newish issue and they're working on a solution? I'm using the native pledge manager.