Why Planning is Everything
Kriterion Monrovia, Liberia
Over the years, we have met and supported the initiators of many beautiful, inspiring projects all over the world in the past decade. To share their stories and their campaign experiences, we asked some of these projects for feedback. In this blog, one of them will take the spotlight: Kriterion Monrovia — an independent cinema by young Liberians.
“When we talked about our plans to start crowdfunding, many people responded surprised about the high target of €50.000, and questioned if this wasn’t over-ambitious. Don’t let this discourage you: it’s in your own hands and if you want it to happen, you can make it happen!”
The campaign for this project was organized by teams from Young Urban Achievers in both Liberia and the Netherlands. The team in Monrovia, Liberia, included five students: Pandora, Hawa, Jackie, James and Eddie. They ran the crowdfunding campaign in collaboration with the Dutch team to collect funds to open their own cinema. Liberia had been struggling with civil war and the Ebola crisis in the recent past, and its economy is currently still recovering thereof. As a result, job opportunities are scarce, especially for graduates with no former working experience. Therefore, students try to work while they are still studying, and the cinema Kriterion Monrovia gives the opportunity to do so. Besides, it acts as a meeting place for young people, where they can hang out and exchange ideas.
Kriterion Monrovia decided to work with us to run their crowdfunding campaign because of our focus on do-good projects and our big network in Africa. In the period leading up to the start of the campaign, YUA spent quite some time on preparations for their campaign. As we tell all our initiators, a thorough preparation is the foundation of a successful campaign, and, in this case, has led to the impressive results for Kriterion Monrovia: a total raised amount of €42,058 (from the targeted €50,000). Even with a well thought out plan beforehand, running a campaign was much more intense and time consuming as they expected:
“Campaigning turned out to be a ‘24/7, 7-days-a-week-thing’. You could really notice the days you weren’t as active: less people would donate on those days. We learned that we couldn’t permit ourselves to ‘do nothing’ for a few days, which can be intense. But the other hand, every effort would pay off really quickly — which worked very motivating!”
The beauty of crowdfunding, in our eyes, is the way it increases people’s engagement in a community. This too is what the initiators of Kriterion Monrovia experienced during their campaign. The amount of people they reached with their campaign and the increased involvement and enthusiasm gave them the motivation and adrenaline boosts to keep going.
Most successful: “Our campaign strategy was focused on positivity and the young team of Kriterion Monrovia as individuals and their personal stories. The colourful campaign visuals (focused on the five team members) is something we are really proud of and we believe these expressions were vital for the success of the campaign.”
In the end, the team of YUA managed to gather an extraordinary target amount. In their opinion, their two-fold campaigning strategy was the reason for their success. On the one hand, they focussed on their own network, took a personal approach towards supporters and made verbal agreements about donations before starting their campaign. On the other hand, with a well-working marketing- and PR-plan and a diversity of communication materials (from Facebook-banners to video messages from the Liberian team) they made sure they reached a broad and diverse group of possible supporters. Besides, they worked together with multiple organizations and succeeded to get their press releases published in different platforms and newspapers.
Least successful: “Our campaign was planned in detail, but after a while we discovered that it was impossible to live up to the initial planning. Some things didn’t go as planned, other things we didn’t even know would happen, so after a while we learned to be more flexible. We also had to let go of some of our plans and ideas. Besides, while crowdfunding there is always more that you can do, but it can be healthy to set a limit somewhere after a while.”
In conclusion, this campaign and the team running it are the living proof of the importance of a good preparation of your campaign! All the time and effort put into their campaign is what made realizing Kriterion Monrovia possible.
