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