Campaigners, the missing link in successful crowd sourcing.
Look at this medical bracelet project. Or this one about nature conservation. They sound great, impactful, potentially making a difference in many peoples’ lives. They could make the world a nicer place.
Yet they failed.
This post is for everyone who is considering to run a project with the help of their friends, fans and community. Bottom line: make sure to collect your campaigners first. They are the key to your success, will help you tackle social media (and we have a tool for it!).
Over 70% of crowdfunding projects fails.
Not because the ideas are bad, or the people running the campaign lack talent or stamina. But because they never reached their crowd. Not enough people have had the opportunity to encounter these projects, so they could even consider supporting them. And that is a shame.
For crowd funding and for crowd sourcing, project starters need to find their crowd first.
Now let’s be clear about this: In the media storms of these days, it is a very hard job to get yourself heard in between the daily twitter storms, hypes and cat pictures roaming our timelines. And we cannot expect everyone with a great idea to be natural campaign experts for their projects.
People with great ideas and the courage to put them up for support, need help. They need campaign help so that their initiatives that might change your world get the opportunity to be seen. These projects need campaigners!
Campaigners are the fans, the supporters, the ambassadors, the storytellers, the promoters of an idea. They are the people who like to share the message of a project because they are enthusiastic about the project.
At Heroes & Friends we realized the critical importance of this role, so we made a button for it. One click and you’re a campaigner.
Campaigners are critical for projects, just like fans are critical for musicians and artists. They don’t necessarily buy their product, but they endorse and spread their messages, in this way increasing the podium and the community.
We want you to realize that you too are a campaigner with your social network, if you want to. The connections to your friends, and your sympathy for a project is valuable to projects that are looking for their crowd to help them to become reality.
By joining the project as a campaigner you add your friends on social media to the reach a project can achieve with its stories. But what’s more is that your friends will be more inclined to notice the project’s stories because you act as an endorser. Your friends will read it, you will hear it back from them and from the project, and your reputation as a connected and opinionated individual will rise!
In numbers your campaign power looks like this:
Your facebook will have 425 friends on average . If 25 people close to the project become campaigners, for an average of 2 story posts per week, the project has an organic reach increase of 21.250 people.
Average facebook profile: 425 friends
Average mandate of shares on Heroes & Friends: 2 per week25 campaigners gives additional reach up to 21.250 views weekly.
40 campaigners gives additional reach up to 34.000 views weekly.
100 campaigners gives additional reach up to 85.000 views weekly.
To compare: Dutch leading tech blog BRIGHT.nl has 13.500 likes, and a printed edition of 22.500 copies monthly. A mention to your project on this kind of blogs is what you normally hope for when you run a crowd based project. And here is a tool to collect this reach yourself!
Quality of reach - the sweet spot of the Facebook algorithms: Organic reach, by small profiles, through regular sharing.
Now, we have to talk tech a bit, to illustrate the value of these numbers.
The way Facebook chooses what content you get to see in your timeline is one of the great mysteries of our times. What’s clear is that Facebook has several objectives that drive the optimization of their algorithms:
- adds have to be paid for: commercial content from big pages is filtered down. Content from small (individual) pages is filtered up.
- the timeline has to be newsworthy: old stories die out.
- You get what you’re looking for: Stories you like, or sources you’ve seen before will be served more frequently to you.
- You get to see what your friends see.
(Not) coincidentally campaigners on Heroes & Friends help project campaigns to profit from exactly these characteristics of Facebook's algorithms.
- They are sharing genuine content — not adds.
- They share simultaneously, thus driving the actuality factor of the story — a lot of people talking about it at once.
- They share it from their personal small profiles, and if they remain campaigners, the next campaigned story will reach even further, since it is a recurring source in the same community.
Of course there is more to running a crowd based project than getting the word out there. But if you get this communication part right — and we hope we lowered the bar for you with our campaign tool — you are more than half way in creating amazing connections with like-minded people, that will get you results you’d never have imagined.
Let’s do it together.
Heroes & Friends is a tool for crowd funding, crowd sourcing and self organization of impactful projects. Check out our product if you are considering to take your idea into the real world with the help of your crowd. We can help you and it is free.
heroesandfriends.com
