Workshop: Crowdfunding For The Win
A few days ago I attended my first workshop at the still new WIMPSpace. The topic was something I’ve been toying with for a while, Crowdfunding For The Win, so I was looking forward learning more. It was led by Nancy Hayssen, who just had a successful crowdfunding campaign and raised $5000 to create a children’s book with the theme of courage and travel. The tagline of the book “Wild African Safari Book Gives Children 3 – 8 Years Old Courage to Dream!” It was a fun and informative morning and I learned quite a bit. She handed out several worksheets and information sheets and they will all come handy. However, because I have been playing with the idea of doing my own crowdfunding campaign I was already aware a lot of the aspects of such endeavor she mentioned. Below is the summary of the points that I didn’t know or wanted to ingrain deeper:
- Why people fund you: they like you, owe you (e.g. a favor in the past), are inspired by you.
- kickstarter.com all or nothing, only takes amazon payments
indiegogo.com : flexible and fixed funding, takes paypal and CC - Put time in creating the solid strategy ahead of time, so when you launch things would be in place.
- KS has an intuitive template. They used to review the project. Now they allow it to go live without review, but you can ask for them.
- Contacting KS people is useless.
- Tiered level reward structure is important. Not enough or too many options.
- Have a great video, failed campaigns had boring, long talking head videos
- People can opt for no rewards, just get money
- Create digital rewards for under $25
- Average pledge is 25 no KS
- Include rewards in the body of the page too
- Break down how you would spend the figure you want to raise in % (e.g. KS is 5%)
- Include this kind of verbiage for each item “include all rewards above”
- Giving an experience for someone is best for the highest rewards
- When you get your email list together: reach out to them a few days before their launch
(Reading Rainbow example, they reached their goal fast and then added stretch goals ) - Stretch goal: extra goodie for funders
- When you reach that: give a unique experience. (up your pledge)
- Mid-way rewards you can add later; price them lower than retail cost
- Charity is tricky on KC: but it can be a gift: make a child a pilot for a day.
- You don’t want the project to be complete. You want ongoing support to make it happen.
- 46% of KS projects go funding
- It’s a full time job to reach out everyone every day. Keep asking/email people, send out well-crafted messages to funders
- KS page stays online even after time is up. You can delete it before it ends though
- You cannot give away other people’s stuff, keep it in your brand.
- Get another organization to send out your message.
- Ask existing pledgers to up their pledge
- Swap pledges with other KS campaigns
- KS has good statistics, including on video views
- You can hire someone to do the pre-work, but during the campaign it needs to be you who is reaching out to people. Post-production is on you too.
- Saving grace: Save the person who knows you and has money the last
- You can export the list from KS in Excel
- In order to get people who don’t know you they need some momentum: Have some funds already in there.
- Food related crowdfunding for food: Credibles.co
- Patreon.com for ongoing project
- Video is very important: storyboard it, make it not boring, add music
- Have a call to action in the video itself
WOW! What an efficient summation! Thank you Gabor for breaking down the tips simply to share others. Love it. And thank you for coming 🙂