1) Create a Landing Page or Website
It’s imperative that you set up a landing page or website before launching a crowdfunding campaign. Why? There are a few reasons.
- A landing page or website will allow you to capture email addresses of interested backers, supporters, or journalists as you lead up to the launch of your crowdfunding campaign.
- Having your own domain name makes it easy for customers or supporters to find you online after reading about you, seeing your message on social media, or hearing about you from a friend.
- After you install google analytics on the website, you’ll get an in-depth view of who your visitors are, what type of content they are interested in, and where your visitors are coming from (twitter, facebook, google, email, referrals, etc).
- Your own website will give you the flexibility to provide extra or exclusive content. You can explain in-depth how backers can support your project or give more information about your team and how the project came to be. Many people underestimate how important education-marketing is leading up to a campaign’s launch.
- As you market and promote your product leading up to the launch, you need a place to send visitors aside from your Facebook page or Twitter profile. In addition, after your campaign is finished, you can turn the website or landing page into a store to sell your product using Shopify or another tool.
You can set up a landing page with a website-building tool like SquareSpace, Wix, Shopify, or a self-hosted WordPress website, in which place, I recommend using BlueHost (what I use for this site) and their one-click wordpress install. There are some great premium WordPress themes and plugins out there, but it will take a little more computer savvy to customize them.
2) Study what works on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and More.
As I describe in my course on launching a successful Kickstarter campaign, building up a social media following is only one part of the equation to having a great launch experience. You must also test out what types of content do well for your audience and track your tests with a social media analytics tool like Buffer or Hootsuite.
For example, you might find that sharing behind-the-scenes videos might get a lot of shares and clicks on your social channels, which may lead to pledges, but that when you ask people to directly support the campaign, it hardly is shared at all. You wouldn’t know that unless you tracked the social media posts with an analytics tool.
The Buffer team has put together some great tips on mastering Facebook marketing. We’ve talked in the past on how to improve your results with Twitter. This is a great post on how to up your Instagram game and conquer the mobile marketing game.
3) Calculate Costs and Plan for Taxes
If you’re running more of a donation-based crowdfunding campaign, you may not need to pay attention to this point as much. However, if you are going to be shipping out rewards to your backers or going to be fulfilling pre-orders of your product, then you need to plan for the best and worst-case manufacturing or shipping scenarios.
If you are going to go with the “keep what you raise” model of fundraising, then can you ship out rewards to your backers, even if you don’t hit your fundraising goal? How much will it cost if you end up raising more than you thought? Even a slight miscalculation in the input costs for a perk or reward could be compounded exponentially and become a larger mistake as you attract more and more backers.
Finally, I would recommend talking to an accountant to gain some clarity on the tax ramifications of raising money online. We’ve also put together a short guide on taxes here.
4) Re-Establish Old Relationships and Form New Ones
Counter to popular opinion, you need to bring a bit of your own crowd if you are going to succeed in the crowdfunding arena. This means that it’s vital you re-connect with old friends that you may have forgotten to reach out to lately and to begin networking with influencers, organizations, and other creators in your target market.
Individuals in your social network can bring a lot more than financial support to the table. Many crowdfunding videos are produced by friends, colleagues, or friends of friends who are helping out the person raising money pro bono. Remember that each friend also has their own social network, which can exponentially increase the number of people that see your crowdfunding project, should they choose to share it.
I would treat online networking the same as in-person networking, meaning that you need to:
- Take an interest in other individuals.
- Interact and add to a conversation to build relationships.
- Provide value before asking for something in return.
- Get to know people over time. Great relationships take time to form.
For more tips, I highly recommend the book The Startup of You or How to Win Friend and Influence People.
5) Study Successful and Unsuccessful Crowdfunding Projects
I dissected a lot of crowdfunding projects in my ebook, which teaches creators how to raise funds on Kickstarter. Really, the best way to get an idea of what works well on crowdfunding platforms is to study other crowdfunding campaigns.
This means making a list of campaigns in a similar niche as yours and reading through the rewards they offer, watching their video, getting a feel for how they laid out their campaign page, and taking a second to see how they maintained interest with their backer community.
You can also browse through some of the podcast interviews that we’ve conducted with creators from a variety of categories and backgrounds to learn how they were able to hit their fundraising goal. Josef Holm also has some good interviews on his website, Crowdfunding.biz.
6) Set Aside Time to Manage and Promote Your Campaign.
I asked this question on our forum “How many hours do you spend/week on your project?” and got back a slew of answers.
I’d set aside at least 15 hours per week to devote to the launch, management, and promotion of your crowdfunding campaign. However, almost every successful creator that I’ve interviewed has underscored that it’s basically a full-time job.
The great thing about a campaign launch though is that you only need to work like a dog for a limited time period (typically 20-45 days) and you will learn a lot in the process, which will be applicable to your business or endeavor as a whole.
7. Create a PR Outreach Strategy.
Creating a “PR Outreach Strategy” seems very complicated and formal, however, it can be as simple as identifying and forming a relationship with bloggers in your campaign’s niche or local reporters so that when you launch, you’ll have access to a wider audience than your own social network.
Although there are a few elements to keep in mind when coming up with the story behind your project, I think that the most important factor of PR outreach to identify the best outlets that you can connect with regarding your new crowdfunding initiative. Otherwise, you might simply be barking up the wrong tree no matter how great your story is.
If you’re struggling to connect with reporters, here are a few tips that Rose Spinelli put together on the subject of pitching media publications. You can listen to her thoughts on fundraising in general here.
8. Create Interesting and Sharable Content.
Maintaining momentum throughout the launch of your crowdfunding campaign is one of the hardest aspects of the fundraising experience. MMORE raised over $80k on CauseVox and in our interview, they stressed how much they had wished they’d planned out more videos to share on Facebook to stay relevant in the minds of their donors.
It’s crucial that you put together an interesting video and campaign page, but don’t give away everything right away! Save some announcements for further into the campaign, whether that is behind the scenes footage that you plan to release, unique stretch goals, or exciting news announcements.
One tool that I’ve found particularly helpful in the last few months is Pablo, which lets you add quotes to images before you share them. I also love Canva.
9. Enroll in Our Free Crowdfunding Email Course
Lastly, before launching your campaign, I recommend enrolling in our free crowdfunding email course which will cover some essential tidbits that you should know before hitting the “publish” button and going live with your project.
