The 7 Fundamentals Of A Successful Crowd-Funding Campaign

A successful crowdfunding campaign is often akin to a range of important and well-stocked ideas. If you have the ability to implement these, you can potentially make well over the original asked fundraising amount. Not only that, but the reach your campaign finds could be much larger than expected, allowing you to generally expose your product and business to a much wider consumer base than originally predicted.

The 7 fundamentals of a successful crowdfunding campaign are as follows. This will be applicable to any form of campaign, whether a product, service, creative artistic pursuit or all of the above:

A Comprehensive Vision

It’s important to ensure that your offering has a comprehensive vision behind it. This is because people aren’t simply being wooed on the content of your most positive declarations. If they’re to provide you with investment, they’re often looking for a much more interesting perspective around whatever you are hoping to sell. A comprehensive vision makes this all the more important. This means you need to present what the product is, and why you’re making it. Ideally, you also want to explain what inspired you to take action and make the product you care about. Passion drips from the pages of the well run crowdfunded campaigns, even if that’s not explicitly stated.

There are many ways to present your comprehensive vision. All art forms are required here. You should have concept art, a presentation video where you and the team talk a little about your project and summarize its good points. It’s also important to have formed a company that is attributable to the project. Read more on starting your company to ensure this is in place. You might even decide to use music to determine the mood around this, but unless you’re offering a creative project this might not be completely required.

Still, people can obviously detect when effort has been put into a project. Text is not enough. A novelist would not head to a publisher with a faint outline and a few ideas of what their novel will be about. They must have a broken down and thorough plan dictating exactly what the book will be about, and how it will be researched and written. People like concreteness, especially when taking a risk with their money. This means that if you have to delay your crowdfunding page to get all the elements in play, you must do that. Remember, you only get one shot at this entire affair, and if you’re unable to pull it off correctly you will likely sully your reputation and prevent another attempt at this from gaining traction.

A Clear Timeline

Part of your comprehensive vision is a clear timeline. This is of course flexible, but at least a relatively simple plan should be in place. If you earn the money you want access to through this project, each investor who has contributed will desire to know when their investment will be rewarded with whatever they had hoped to become a reality.

A clear timeline will help with that. You might not even have a fully scheduled work routine, but a goal to push towards is always good. For example, let’s say you’re designing a video game. If you’re unable to suggest that people can play it in two years at the most, the investor cannot imagine themselves playing the product. It’s too far off, and the landscape will look too different by that time. This timeline will vary from project to project, but for the most part a solid idea of how and when you’ll get to your next deadline is essential for the project to be well rendered and received.

Exciting Potential

While it’s important to stay realistic with your project and not sell deceptively, you should push the benefits of your product as much as possible. What do you bring to the table that no one else does? What is the market missing out on by not investing in your forthrightly? Why are you even bothering to dedicate your time and put together a team?

Infuse every little portion of passion and excitement you have felt in every word, image and video file you place on the page. Allow this creative interest and insight to drip from the pitch you give. This form of excitement is absolutely engaging and serves to draw people in, even if they’re slightly skeptical about the project from the beginning.

Also, you can transmit exciting potential in many other ways. For example, the ability to attractively present your information, ensure the writing is good and well formatted (at the very least spelt correctly,) and that the entire information of the page is structured in an aesthetically pleasing manner will allow the idea of attention to detail to permeate the impression you give. Nothing exemplifies positive potential more than this.

Behind The Curtain

So, part of crowdfunding a campaign is that you’re likely the new kids on the block. You might not be, but that’s how you should consider yourselves. This allows you to re-introduce your team with a fresh perspective. After all, your idea might be absolutely solid, but without a sense of who the team behind the project is, people will likely not give you their money.

So introduce the team! A simple ‘meet the team video’ can suffice. Don’t overproduce this video or make it seem too slick. People just want to see the honest people behind the project. So allow them to speak! Allow them to write down what brought them to the project and the skills they can bring. Let them explain this. As they do, you’ll find that over time the crowdfunding campaign is infused with a sense of authenticity. Not only will this look good on the part of your campaign, but it will motivate your team to feel connected to the project in a way that truly matters.

Regular, Complete Updates

Getting the money isn’t the end objective. Developing the project well is, and for that you should keep your contact base open and alive. This means ensuring that you open social media accounts, purpose built emails and a website to overtly ensure that your backers can reach you at any time they hope to.

The regular, complete updates that you bring to the table will not only allow backers to give their feedback, but for you to be open and presentable about everything you are doing. Sometimes development diaries can allow backers to feel connected to the project. It might be you could even raise more funding via a donation button on your website if you schedule this correctly.

Reach & Connectivity

It’s important your campaign has reach. Regularly tweet about it. Drum up support with flyers, and maybe even take out advertisements elsewhere. Have your team spread this information through their families and friends, and encourage they do the same. Word of mouth spreads, and you might be fantastically rewarded if you set this ball rolling. With the vitality of a campaign skyrocketing, people become excited and orbit around your idea. The idea is to get that started from the get go.

Reason

You must treat this period of time with reason. People will ask you the same questions over, over and over again. People will test you and try to see any and all holes in your presentation. You might even have people demand refunds because they realize your project isn’t what they’re looking for in the end.

You must hire a campaign manager, or if you fulfil this role yourself be absolutely willing to be accommodating as possible. Do everything to have the patience of a saint. One bad slip up can turn people off from your campaign, and this can lead to unfortunate results.

When you have all of this in play, you can be sure that you’ll be well prepared for success. We wish you the best of luck in your efforts, and hope this advice leads to plenty of successful projects in the future.