Crowdfunding

Step 4: Planning your campaign

Once you’ve decided that you’d like to try crowdfunding, and you know which platform you’d like to use, you need to plan out your campaign page. The first thing you need to do is to research. This should look something like:

1. Find similar projects on your chosen platform.
2. Analyse what is working well on highly funded projects.
3. Analyse what isn’t working on failed campaigns.

Let’s go through a quick example. Here’s the scenario: I’ve decided to crowdfund my women’s education center on Indiegogo.

The first thing you do is to search for ‘women education’ on Indiegogo. Then, create a spreadsheet and start recording data from all the projects you’ve found. Get as many results as you can. What you’ll see is that certain types of your project are more popular than others. Some wording or rewards are better. You are able to quickly see that most ‘Women Education’ projects failed or had a limited number of backers. Even successful projects usually had only a few hundred backers. The average backer, however, paid around $100. You can use this data when setting goals, which we’ll get to shortly.

On top of your research, there are some things that every successful campaign page needs:

1. A good title: be clear, not clever!

Do not approach your title like you’re writing a blog post. The only people who will see your title are people who are interested in backing projects in your category. If you try to be clever with a title, most users will skip over you because they’re not sure what your product or project is actually offering. To write a good title, keep it very simple. There are 3 components to this:

1. Your product or project name
2. What is your product or project in plain terms
3. What’s unique or attractive about it.

Now put those all together with as few other words as possible: Remember that if you’ve identified that there’s a desire for Women Education that is different and achievable, there’s no need to be over-creative or super clever. Just make sure that anyone with that desire will know that you can fulfill it if they read your title.

2. Video or written pitch

Even if someone is interested in the idea you’ve come up with, convincing them to give you money for nothing tangible (in the short term) is not easy. On some platforms, like Kickstarter, you mainly tell your story through video. It’s the first thing people will watch when they land on your page. Creating a video is far more impactful than a written text so be brave and create one. On others, like GoFundMe, the story is usually written out. It’s not easy to create a convincing pitch, and your first few will not be perfect.

However, there are a few things you can do to put your video pitch quality at a high enough level to get backers on board:

1. Be transparent: It’s an unwritten rule for successful crowdfunded projects that the founder or main project officer should be either in the video, or at least providing a voice over. No one’s going to give money to someone in advance if they don’t even know who the responsible person is.
2. Be clear: Just like the title, if someone can’t easily identify the 1-3 most attractive features of your project quickly, they won’t continue watching. You can’t count on people watching long videos, make yours as concise as possible.
3. Have a quality standard: You don’t need to hire some $10,000 per day video production company. But, you also can’t have a bad camera and interference in your audio.

3. Set a reasonable goal
Set a goal too low, and you might not maximize your funding, especially if your cause is charitable. Potential backers see that you’ve hit your goal and don’t contribute. But set your goal too high, combined with too slow of a start, and it scares off backers who don’t think you can reach your goal. You need a happy medium.

To set your goal, you need to consider:

• The minimum amount you need to start the first year of your project
• Would more than a certain number really help?
• How does your financial goal compare to similar projects?

If you’re on an all or nothing platform like Kickstarter, be conservative. Many projects in the past have wildly exceeded low goals. For example, the famous author Seth Godin set a goal of $40,000 for one of his books and raised $287,342 on Kickstarter!