How We Crowdfunded $80k on LaunchGood in Ramadan: Ten Lessons from a Successful Campaign
You have a great project. Now, you need to fund it.
Before you get carried away, remember: this isn’t Field of Dreams.
Your idea may be awesome, but don’t expect everyone to support it spontaneously.
To succeed, you need to prepare.
If you prepare, you may succeed far beyond what you thought was possible.
That’s what happened with our “2000 Books Behind Bars” campaign in Ramadan 2017. First, the campaign was just a cool idea. But then we committed to do it. We did everything we could do, and also got featured in LaunchGood’s Ramadan challenge. By Eid, we had raised $81,340.
Here are 10 important lessons we learned along the way.
Lesson #1: Know your purpose
The “book” in “2000 Books Behind Bars” is Revelation: The Story of Muhammad, by Dr. Meraj Mohiuddin.
Dr. Meraj is very clear about the book’s purpose: to connect people to the Prophet ﷺ. Everything else is in service of that mission.
Dr. Meraj didn’t initially plan to become an author. He’s an anaesthesiologist by profession. But about 10 years ago, based on a brief suggestion in a lecture from Shaykh Hamza Yusuf, Dr. Meraj started a personal project to organize information from the seerah. Eventually that project grew into a 450-page textbook.
To say Revelation has been well-received would be an understatement. Prominent scholars have been effusive in praise:
“Revelation is a game changer for both teachers and students of the Prophetic biography.” — Usama Canon
“It is the most important work on the Prophet’s life I’ve come across in the English language” — Suhaib Webb
“Looking over this text is akin to seeing the internet for the first time.” — Ubaydullah Evans
Like so many Muslims in America and around the world, Dr. Meraj is inspired by the life and legacy of Malcolm X. One of the pivotal phases of Malcolm’s life was his time in prison, when he began to read vast numbers of books.
Dr. Meraj is also a longtime supporter of Tayba Foundation, a Bay Area nonprofit that provides a free distance learning curriculum to about two thousand incarcerated American Muslims. He knew that Tayba’s students are among the most focused, dedicated, passionate students of religion anywhere.
The “2000 Books” campaign started off as a conversation. Dr. Meraj wondered if there was a way to get a copy of Revelation to each of Tayba Foundation’s students. He knew, without a doubt, that Tayba’s students would be overjoyed to receive a book, and would read it cover to cover many times over.
Giving the book to incarcerated Muslims would definitely help them connect to the Prophet.
Lesson #2: Gather your team
At least half a dozen people played important roles in the “2000 Books” campaign.
The two “team members” displayed on the campaign page are Meraj and myself. Behind the scenes, though, Meraj’s family, the staff at Tayba Foundation, and several others all helped in significant ways.
Our team members were located in New England, Arizona, and California. Some of us have never met in person.
In the months leading up to the campaign, we connected by phone and email. Soon we made a WhatsApp group to coordinate, and used phone and email where necessary.
LaunchGood’s strategy guidelines state,
“Fact: Campaigns with teams raise twice as much compared to campaign creators without teams.”
I would go one step further: Without a team, your project might not happen at all.
Lesson #3: Use LaunchGood’s resources
Here’s another fact: LaunchGood’s resources for campaign creators are awesome.
Of course the step-by-step guides are top notch. But that’s just the start.
Once you begin the campaign creation process, you get paired with a Campaign Coach from the LaunchGood team. You set up a call with your Coach, and he or she makes sure you’re on the right track.
After your campaign launches, you continue to have access to your Campaign Coach through your dashboard, at the click of a button.
In this age of automation, it’s incredible to have that kind of personal attention and support. It really shows you that LaunchGood is also invested in your campaign, ready to go above and beyond to help you succeed.
Your Campaign Coach has seen it all. They help you get over the hump, and launch!
Lesson #4: Don’t sweat the small stuff
We wanted to launch on Ramadan 1, but it didn’t happen.
It cost us.
I hardly remember what held us up. I know we were still working on our campaign video. Maybe there were other things too. In the end, we went live on Ramadan 10.
People give a lot of money in the first 10 days of Ramadan. We missed out.
No doubt you’re familiar with the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the results usually come from 20 percent of the work.
Make sure you do that vital 20 percent. Don’t worry as much about the rest.
You also know the “multiply by zero” rule: any number (no matter how large!) multiplied by zero is still *zero*. If you worry so much about the small stuff that you don’t launch, you get ***ZERO***
Launching is always a little scary, because when you go live, you find out how much support you really have. But you just have to go for it, and trust your network to support you.
Lesson #5: Count on your people
When your people show up, it feels really good.
The day we launched, everyone on our team sent messages, emails, and posts out to our networks. People responded immediately. When I checked our campaign notifications, I saw a lot of names I know.
I was most impressed, and touched, by the number of people who supported “2000 Books” at the $80 “Teacher” level. $80 is the list price of Revelation, so this was equivalent to giving one book to one incarcerated Muslim student. By the end of the campaign, we had 114 people give $80, which is more than the number of people who gave $50 or even $25. (Most of those actually gave $86.32, which is $80 plus credit card & platform fees. LaunchGood makes this really easy, and almost everyone does it.)
During the campaign, when I had a low moment, I would remember the folks who gave $80.
I would think how one of Tayba’s students was going to read that one book, in his cell, like Malcolm.
It was powerful.
Lesson #6: The Ramadan Challenge is a game-changer
Halfway into the campaign, we had raised over $19,000 from about 75 supporters.
By itself, that’s not bad. But our goal was $80,000. We weren’t even a quarter of the way there.
With just over a week to go, I didn’t think we could make it.
But on the 23rd night of Ramadan, when I got back from taraweeh, I checked the campaign on my phone.
We had over 1,000 backers and almost $30,000!
In a matter of hours, we had gained more than 50% more funds and 10x more supporters! By morning, it was even more:
That night, LaunchGood featured us in the Ramadan Challenge. In Ramadan 2017, more than 15,000 people signed up to give to at least one LaunchGood campaign daily. Over 5,000 of those used automated donations, giving a pre-set amount each day. On the night of Ramadan 23, LaunchGood pointed some of those automated donations our way. Between isha and fajr, we added over 1300 people and $12,000 to our total.
Suddenly it looked like “2000 Books Behind Bars” campaign might actually succeed. We still had a long way to go — we weren’t even halfway there — but now we had almost 1500 people behind us!
It felt like a really big deal at the time. But it wasn’t until after the campaign ended, and we looked at the numbers in more detail, that we realized just how important all those small donations were.
Lesson #7: Big and small supporters work together
We closed “2000 Books” the night after Eid. When I left Eid prayer, this is where we stood:
By the end of the day, 8 more people had contributed, bringing our campaign totals to $81,340 from 2008 supporters.
But here’s how that was distributed:
- 8 supporters gave $43,000 combined
- The other 2000 supporters gave $38,340 total
- The 42 supporters who gave $200 or more contributed $55,765 all together.
In other words, 2% of our supporters gave about 68% of the money we raised. It’s also important to note that most of these large supporters were personal contacts of our team.
But this doesn’t mean you should just focus on large donors from your personal network. Far from it.
Every supporter, from $1 up to $10,000 or more, is valuable.
Here’s why.
Even though we knew most of them personally, almost all of our large supporters made their contributions after our campaign already had 1500+ supporters.
Large supporters want their money to make an impact. When a lot of people support a project, it suggests that project is more likely to be successful, both in raising the money, and — much more important — actually accomplishing the project goals.
Everyone wants to be a part of something successful.
Once we had 1500 supporters, we raised another $50,000 in just 6 days.
Lesson #8: LaunchGood’s Facebook ad features are extremely effective
Even without the Ramadan Challenge, I think the “2000 Books Behind Bars” campaign could have succeeded if we’d put more effort into Facebook ads.
Facebook ads brought in about 20% of our total supporters, and 10% of our total funds raised.
Here’s a screenshot from my ads manager dashboard:
One of the most important columns is on the far right: “Website Purchase ROAS” or “Return On Ad Spending.” Overall, for every $1 we spent on Facebook ads, our campaign brought in $14.61.
I would gladly trade $1 for $14.61 anytime.
With more planning, I think we could have done even better. We hardly scratched the surface of what is possible.
LaunchGood is one of the only crowdfunding platform that supports Facebook ads. This is such a powerful feature, it’s hard to overstate its potential impact. One recent LaunchGood campaign raised over $500,000 from over 4,000 supporters, largely by using Facebook ads — and it wasn’t even Ramadan!
Like us, one of the keys to that campaign’s success was video.
Lesson #9: Invest in video
If I could change one thing about our campaign, I would use more video.
We made a 5 minute campaign video, and a few 60-second clips for Facebook ads. But we could have done a lot more, and we could have done better. A good video helps people connect to your campaign easily. It’s hard to get that with just text and images.
When we started our Facebook ads, we didn’t use video. They worked, but not very well. Once we added videos, they took off.
You can do a campaign without video, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Lesson #10: Make du’a
At the end of the day, your campaign won’t succeed or fail based on your own efforts.
Your success or failure is with God alone. That’s why, in addition to organizing, preparing, and working hard, you need to ask God for success.
Make du’a for yourself, for your campaign team, for everyone who supports your project, and for everyone who benefits from it. Make du’a for everyone your campaign touches. Make du’a for LaunchGood 🙌
If you make du’a that your campaign will be good for you in this world and the next, God willing, your success will be assured, whether or not your campaign reaches its financial goal.
Bonus lesson: LaunchGood is the best crowdfunding platform, period.
LaunchGood provided at least 3 key features that were critical to our success, that we couldn’t have found anywhere else:
- Advice from a Campaign Coach
- Facebook advertising features
- Ramadan Challenge support from 1300 people
I’m tempted to include “community” as a fourth feature, because a great number of our campaign supporters were already members of LaunchGood, which made it really easy for them to participate.
I’m convinced “2000 Books Behind Bars” could only have succeeded on LaunchGood.
Knowing what I know now, I’m confident we could do it again.
And so can you.
If you’re planning a campaign, there’s no better time than Ramadan. Submit your campaign for the Ramadan Challenge now!
Even if you don’t have a campaign this year, make sure to join the Ramadan Challenge as a supporter!
