A few weeks ago, this inspiring young music industry businessman reached out to me via email. 17 year old Riley Soward was helping his friend and client Zach Gospe fundraise $10,000 so he could record an album in L.A.
Having done his research, Soward came to the table with a compelling pitch and awesome story. He wanted to share his experience raising $7,676 through grassroots marketing and hard work. I was throughly impressed.
The team’s Kickstarter campaign is still accepting pledges with 11 days to go. I urge you to check it out if you are passionate about music or want to support a team of inspiring music entrepreneurs. I’ve included the video below.
How to raise money without a dime of capital
This is a guest post written by Riley Soward, an up-and-coming 17 year old music industry businessman.
I believe that anybody with a creative passion, ambition, and a unique project can raise money on a crowdfunding website. It’s definitely not easy. Successfully running a campaign requires a ton of work. However, you don’t necessarily have to have years and years of experience in business or public relations or any other fields to lead an online fundraiser.
I’m currently running a Kickstarter campaign for my best friend and client, Zach Gospe, who is a very talented singer-songwriter. We are both seniors in high school and neither of us have any real-world business or public relations experience. We built our campaign on our own and are currently 75% of the way to our goal of $10,000.
How have we done this? We’ve worked hard and taken initiative.
To begin, we researched a lot beforehand. I watched around 50 videos from music projects to get ideas for our video and looked through about 100 music projects to get ideas for rewards.
Although this took time, it’s paid off tenfold. Our video has gotten a lot of good reception, and our second most popular reward is something I never would have considered until I saw it on another musician’s Kickstarter (the reward is two copes of the album $50, which is exactly double the price of the one album reward).
Outside of learning from projects themselves, there are so many online crowdfunding resources that have benefited us. Everything you need to know about running a project can be found on the web, you don’t have to have prior experience. I especially would recommend reading through the articles on CrowdCrux, because there are so many different posts from people who have personally led crowdfunding campaigns.
After we did our research, we spent a week discussing and typing up our story on a word document. At this stage, we had not filmed our video nor created the project page yet. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of spending time thoroughly developing your story. Having a good story helps make the project more than just about taking money from other people’s wallets. Stories make potential investors feel connected to you and your project, thus increasing the chances they will contribute.
Additionally, having a good story increases the chances that websites and newspapers will pick up your story. Unless your project is incredibly unique and revolutionary, writers don’t want to just focus on the fact that you’re running a crowdfunding campaign. They want to write an interesting story.
Knowing our story before we put together our Kickstarter page was quite beneficial. It gave us a strong direction for our video and information section, and also allowed us to send out potential article angles to writers and bloggers before we even launched our project.
This brings me to the next thing we’ve learned: contact people before launching your project–reach out to potential bloggers/journalists and build up hype in your target audience. We had a strong launch and raised $2,500 in our first 24 hours because people knew about our fundraiser before we went live.
I attribute our fast start to a few things:
1) Starting a month before launch we mentioned our project to as many people as we could.
2) We specifically asked people to be waiting online, ready to share and donate as soon as our project went live. This really helped us pick up momentum in our first hour.
3) The very second we went live, we sent out personalized emails–that we had already typed up–to our friends and relatives.
4) We had a “launch party” the day after we went live; Zach performed and we gave out free pizza. This was a fun way to spread awareness about our project and get people directly involved.
5) We were proactive with contacting media; the day after we launched there was an in-depth article published in our local newspaper and two blog posts published online.
Following our strong launch, we’ve continued to work quite hard to keep our momentum going. It’s easy for campaigns to slow down after the first big push, however, by actively working everyday to promote our fundraiser in some way, we’ve continued to receive donations. Each day, I identify and contact two potential websites or blogs. I’ve found that sending a few personalized emails is much more effective than sending one mass email to every blog out there.
We’ve also organized many events to get Zach’s music in front of as many people as possible. We had Zach perform in the quad of our high school during lunch one day, we hosted a really big house concert, and we have scheduled many other performances throughout the campaign period. Promoting our “product” (which is Zach’s music) in-person has led to a lot of donations. The house concert we hosted brought in over $1,500 of Kickstarter contributions in just a few hours. I would definitely recommend finding ways to display your product/project in person, even if your project isn’t centered around music.
One of the things I was quite surprised with was the low amount of views our campaign has received considering how many people have been exposed to our Kickstarter video link. We’ve gotten a bit over 1,000 video views, even though our video was shared by 85 of our friends on Facebook in the first day alone and our project has been featured on quite a few news sites and blogs. It’s possible we have a lower-than-average conversion, but the main take-away is that not as many people are going to click on your video as you think.
I was also surprised by the lack of donations we received from the audiences of a couple of the blogs that covered our story. Our story was picked up by a popular Nashville blogger and a Canada blogger, however, neither of these posts led to a single donation. I think our main problem was that these blogs weren’t the right audience. The Nashville post was on a music marketing blog, which is primarily read by musicians and music industry businessmen, rather than music consumers. The Canada post was on a finance blog, which was definitely not our target audience.
Another issue with these two blogs is that they only exposed the readers to our project once. In our local community, people heard about our campaign through Zach and me, Facebook, and/or word of mouth, and then saw the articles about us in our local newspapers and/or heard him perform live. We’ve found that most people don’t donate on their first impression–either they plan to contribute later or simply don’t consider donating–but after reading about us or hearing about the project again, many more people contributed. The blog posts in Nashville and Canada lacked this follow-up second impression. I think it’s important to dedicate time to reaching out to bloggers in relevant fields and to making sure people hear about your project more than once.
The most important thing to our campaign has been our hard work and ambition–not any prior experience. The bountiful amount of information online about makes crowdsourcing campaigns accessible to anyone. I encourage anyone with a creative idea to give it a try–if two high schoolers can launch a campaign, then you probably can too.
Support this inspiring team!
Be sure to check out Zach and Riley’s campaign. They are still accepting pledges and have raised more than 70% of their fundraising goal.
