Recently, I’ve been getting emails almost every day asking for my recommendations regarding Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and crowdfunding consultants that can help with marketing, PR and promotion throughout a campaign. These are creators looking for agencies and individuals that can be trusted and that are near or close to full service.
I’ve already outlined some of the ways that consultants price in the crowdfunding industry, but I think it’s important we begin to get a list going so that creators can leave comments and reviews, aside from the companies who have added themselves to our CrowdCrux crowdfunding directory.
Finally, although I do not specifically vouch for any of these service providers, I do consider them to be professionals and worth researching. If you’ve used their services, please leave a review on this article. If you’d like to learn how to conduct PR or social media outreach yourself, consider investing in our course with 19 lessons and 6 hours of audio/video content.
Update: I am 100% sure I’ve left people out who deserve to be mentioned. If I have, to be added to this list, leave a comment below with your name (so I can check you out on LinkedIn) and your company website. You can also tweet at me here.
Elena Mikhaylova is the CEO of Crowdfund Productions, a company that assists creators with the PR, marketing, and content creation aspects of a crowdfunding campaign. She has also contributed awesome content to CrowdCrux like the Complete Crowdfunding Guide for Food-Related Kickstarter Projects, Crowdfunding The Internet of Things on Kickstarter [Infographic & Data], and These Serial Kickstarter Entrepreneurs Share Their Recipe for Crowdfunding Success.
One of the things I like about her website is that she includes creators that should not use her services.
“$50 – 1 hour long Skype consultation to answer the questions:
- Is your product a good match for crowdfunding?
- What are your best options for crowdfunding platforms?
- Is your funding goal realistic?
- What are the crucial steps to take to increase your chances?
- Discussion about the perks and budget
$250 – 5-6 pages long marketing plan:
- Preliminary consultation
- Written plan (platform selection, additional funding options, target groups, communication channels for each group, social media marketing strategy, content suggestions, perk options, budget, timetable)
- Q&A session to discuss the plan
$400 – basic consulting program:
- Marketing plan described above
- Readiness evaluation 4-5 days before going live
- Mid-campaign consultation (1 hour): monitoring of the results, suggestions for improvements
More complex services will require custom quotes.”
Bill Huston is the cofounder of My Crowd Rocks. He has also been a big supporter of CrowdCrux via comments and social media shares.
“What we do at My Crowd ROCKS is real simple. We will assign you a campaign consultant or manager that will evaluate your crowdfunding campaign in order to make sure that you have a fighting chance of funding success, and then help you plan, produce materials for your campaign and choose which crowdfunding platform to use. Your consultant or manager will guide you through the entire crowdfunding process from the planning through the actual campaign to the post campaign.”
Pricing: Pending.
Rose Spinelli is the founder of TheCrowdFundamentals and is a coach, blogger, and speaker. She also contributes a tip of the week to Crowdsourcing.org.
“The Crowdfundamentals combines my skills and experience as a writer, reporter and producer with my goal of connecting people and organizations with the information and tools they need to succeed in the crowdfunding space. Since 2010 I have managed and advised campaign creators on how to use effective strategies to raise money for causes and creative projects of all types. The single unifying principle to my message is how to tell your story so it has the most impact”
Speed Consulting – $50
Video Series – $69
Jumpstart Basic – $250
Jumpstart Group – $25 Per Person
Pitch Video – $500 Starting Price
What she doesn’t do: I do not accept payment based on a percentage if you reach your goal. I do not manage campaigns.
Leigh Lepore is the Founder of Crowdfunding Strategy & Information. A team of business and creative professionals dedicated to helping entrepreneurs and artists raise funds to grow businesses and launch creative projects. The company has raised over $500K for consumer products, apps, books, theatre, music, causes and more. They have raised over $6M through traditional fundraising.
Pricing: Pending.
Philip Cardwell is the founder of Universal Media Consultants, an established PR firm, and the Co-founder of Crowdfunding Accelerator. Philip has also contributed articles to our site like this one.
“We are a professional, creative team of crowdfunding campaign management, marketing, PR and advertising specialists. Crowdfunding Accelerator personnel have a combined 19 years of experience producing high-quality crowdsourcing and crowdfunding campaigns of every type and scale for small businesses and large enterprises.”
Pricing: Pending.
Roy Morejon is the President at Command Partners, a marketing and PR agency that also has worked with crowdfunding campaigns.
“Command Partners focuses on the top strategies for driving online visibility and lead generation, including social media marketing, search engine optimization and online PR. We tailor our solutions to each client, with the goals of accelerating their growth and growing the bottom line.”
Pricing: Starts at $5k (needs to be verified).
Robert Hoskins – Robert runs a blog about crowdfunding as well as an established PR firm “Front Page PR”
Pricing: “A typical 30-day publicity campaign for an individual Crowdfunding campaign costs around $2,500, which includes four press releases, wire charges and media relations follow up support with our database of 450+ Crowdfunding media contacts. We guarantee we will generate exposure in newspapers, industry trade publications, blogs and/or other types of media outlets that cover the Crowdfunding industry. The final price tag really depends on the number of hours required to service an account.
Crowdfunding platforms require a 12-month contract for a minimum monthly retainer of $5,000. To help offset marketing costs, we provide a 10% monthly referral commission for any Crowdfunding site that refers us individual Crowdfunding clients. This means that referring one crowdfunding client at $5,000, would earn a referral fee of $500. Thus, referring 10 campaigns per month would offset the entire marketing bill for a Crowdfunding website’s monthly retainer.
For Crowdfunding campaign managers that want to test the waters before jumping into a monthly retainer, we offer to write a single press release and issue on a professional paid wire service for $1,250.”
Conclusion
I feel like right now, one of the bigger problems in the industry is lack of information regarding service providers. Please contribute to the solution by commenting below with your reviews of companies and by letting me know about individuals/companies that should be mentioned, but that I have failed to include in this list.
Also, a lot of people ask me about the “being paid on a percentage basis” idea for consultants. I’ve outlined my thoughts here.
