A First-timer’s Guide to Crowdfunding

Are you thinking about crowdfunding a project? Here are some tips based on our team’s experience successfully funding a book.

1. Start with a good idea: This should be obvious, but a quick look at crowdfunding websites will unearth a cornucopia of terrible ideas. Your project should be entertaining or educational or charitable or useful. Ideally, a combination of those things. If the project is mostly self-serving, it’s likely to be a flop.
2. Spend time developing your perk structure: People want to be rewarded for donating. Unless your project is 100% for charity, you need to offer some decent perks. Our project was a cookbook, so most people who donated were actually buying a copy of the book. It wasn’t really a donation at all. It was a sale. It was relatively easy to sell because the value of the book matched the value of the expected donation. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set some “unrealistic” perk levels. We didn’t really expect anyone to donate $1000, but someone did. Just be sure you can fulfill the perk promises you make.
3. Develop your network before you launch: Use social media outlets to create interest in your project before you launch the campaign. You want to have an audience to pitch when the time is right. That doesn’t mean you have to have thousands of followers on various social media outlets, but a few hundred helps. When you are ready to launch, these people can help you spread the word.
4. Shake Hands and Kiss Babies: Get off the computer and talk to people face-to-face about your project. Hand out business cards and get names for your mailing list. Attend events in your industry, set up a booth if you can. We were promoting a cookbook, so the author set up a booth at a food market. She sold some food, but the main objective was to increase awareness about the project.
5. Invest in a good prototype or mock-up and video: This might be the most important part of the process. We had many people comment that they were comfortable donating to the project because they could see samples of what they were going to get. Our project was fully designed, which meant we had already invested our own time and money into the project. People like to see that you have put in work. It shows that you are serious. We didn’t do a full print run before the campaign, but we ran a few copies off using a self-publishing company. If you can’t make a real prototype, create a digital mock-up instead. Find someone who can design one for you and pay them, it’s worth it. The same can be said for your pitch video. Find someone who can film and edit your video. Put some effort in to it. Your chance of success will grow enormously.
6. Create Momentum: This is advice we received straight from a representative at Indiegogo, the funding platform we used. Contact all your key supporters (friends, family, followers) and ask them to help you by donating on the first day of your campaign. People want to back a winning campaign. It looks good if you start with a big boost of donations.We fully funded our project in 4 days because we made a very serious push at the beginning. After day 4, everything else was gravy. We could relax a bit and focus on reaching an audience outside of our circle of friends, family and followers.
7. Get some local love: A second wind of donations came in after we secured coverage from a few local media outlets. We concentrated on contacting relevant media contacts. Our first media hit came from a popular local food website. That helped us reach a very targeted audience of people who like food and cooking. The next big score was an appearance on the local morning news. They run a cooking segment weekly and our author was invited to do a demo. How did we secure these spots? We sent personal emails to the appropriate contacts with a press release and a link to the campaign. We offered them content in exchange for publicity, that’s how it works. In fact, the tv appearance worked so well they invited our author back, twice.

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