This is a guest post by Dana Ostomel, the founder and Chief Gifting Officer of Deposit a Gift, the crowdfunding platform for personal and organizational fundraising that allows anyone to easily create an online fundraising campaign for any organizational, school or personal need.
There are a few crucial steps to running a successful crowdfunding campaign. From setup to execution, you want to think about what you need to do to engage people in such a way that they are compelled to give and compelled to share. It won’t happen on it’s own. You must have a plan. Here are five essential tips that will help your crowdfunding campaign become a success.
Tip 1: Create a Campaign That Your Supporters Can See, Smell and Taste
First, you need to determine your story. What is your emotional hook? It is important to make a clear, compelling case that is brief, well organized, and most importantly, makes them care. Additionally, you need to be visually engaging. Pull together images, copy, logos, and custom graphics to help brand your effort so that the campaign speaks for itself within the first 3 seconds that people land on your site. Here are some examples:
| Show what you need money for. | Show who you are impacting. |
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| Make the need clear and engaging. | Be as specific as possible. |
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Tip 2: Visualize Your Network Potential
Image Source: LinkedIn Maps
It is crucial for you to think about how you can tap into your greater network. Think of your network like the concentric circles of a bull’s eye or the branches of a tree. You start with your lowest hanging fruit, your inner circle of supporters, and work out from there. Ask yourself how you can use one level of your network to access the next.
It is important to identify who are the key influencers in your network because those are the people who will help you access your mass audience in the most effective way. Personal asks will be critical during your campaign launch to engage these influencers and get them on your side from day one.
Tip 3: Take the Time To Outline a Comprehensive Marketing Strategy
Before you even begin, ask yourself: Do you have a dedicated resource to market the campaign? It could be you or someone else, but someone needs to be committed to marketing it daily.
Be sure to use the channels you know work well with your audience. A lot of these marketing tactics don’t even cost money, which is one of the great things about crowdfunding; your greatest investment is going to be your time.
Social media
On platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, it makes it easy to keep your friends, family and supporters up to date on your progress. You can easily post status updates, pictures, videos and create events that engage people with your campaign. Don’t forget to create your own hashtag to brand your campaign – you can use the tag across various social media platforms.
Email Communications
Another way to share consistently is through email blasts. Before your big mass launch, do a soft launch to your inner circle. You want to get the thermometer to start rising before you take the campaign mass.
The first week of the big launch, send two emails in succession to really get your campaign out to the public and make people aware of what you are doing. Then, start sending weekly mass emails as well as personal follow-up emails; it’s important to have both a one-to-one and a mass strategy. Towards the end of your campaign you will pick up the pace a bit to create a sense of urgency. Send two to three emails your final week.
Press Outreach
Sometimes reaching out to the press is a great move for your campaign. You could pitch to journalists, write an opinion piece and even ask bloggers to write a post about your effort.
Getting some good PR is one of the best ways to garner support from people that you’ve never even met!
Offline Events
You can even host offline events to market your campaign like a launch party or a mid-campaign screening. Use these as opportunities to make personal connections with supporters to engage them more fully, to drive contributions via entrance tickets and as excuses to reach out with updates.
You can also run contests to get people to give the night-of in exchange for a reward. Make sure that the URL is well publicized and even make a hashtag for the event to get people to tweet about it!
You not only want people to donate to your campaign, but also share it to reach the widest audience possible.
Orchestrate Waves of Sharing
Encourage people to post to Facebook and Twitter on the same day with a specific hashtag. You could even make it a contest where everyone who tags you or includes the hashtag will be entered to win a prize.
Use Clickable Tweets
This is an extremely easy way to advertise your campaign on Twitter and makes it simple for people who don’t have a lot of Twitter experience. Pre-write the tweet via a site like ClickToTweet.com so that people are able to just click and go. You can even track your tweet’s activity.
Create a Schedule to Remind People to Share For You
Come up with a themed messaging calendar. For example, “Give in honor of your birthday,” “Matching contest,” or “Campaign progress updates.” This type of schedule will remind you to nudge people to share on your behalf.
Tip 5: Show Appreciation
It is extremely important to show appreciation to your supporters every step of the way. You want to cultivate a relationship with people nice enough to support your campaign so that they’ll continue to do so.
This can be time consuming, so make it easy on yourself. For example, create a Thank You script that you can copy/paste (and personalize as-needed) to send to every supporters within 24-48 hours of their contribution. In that script, don’t forget to give them 3 easy ways to share the campaign and help spread the word. Another approach is to “tag and thank” them publicly on Facebook or Twitter.
Appreciation shown in the form of consistent updates creates the kind of transparency that not only keeps supporters engaged, but keeps them feeling good about their contribution because you are showing them the impact they are having, which will often lead to them telling someone else about it, which is the whole point of leveraging the power of the crowd to ultimately reach your goal!
About the Author
Dana Ostomel is the founder and Chief Gifting Officer of Deposit a Gift, the crowdfunding platform for personal and organizational fundraising that allows anyone to easily create an online fundraising campaign for any organizational, school or personal need. Whether you’re a nonprofit or school looking to get into crowdsourced fundraising, or an individual looking to raise money for pet rescue, a personal project, business, disaster relief, memorial fund or help with medical bills, Deposit a Gift makes it easy.
Follow Dana and the Deposit a Gift team on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube!
