I don’t have a community: can I still launch my crowdfunding campaign?
(TL;DR) No.
(drop the mic 🎤)
Because your community is the backbone of your future crowdfunding campaign. Without them, you’ll never reach your financial goal. But if you work hand in hand with your community, you can reach new heights.
Of all the possible topics to talk about when it comes to crowdfunding (and, believe me, there are an infinite number!), I’ve chosen to start with the one that usually is a thorn in the side of project owners: the community.
Let’s start with a little background. I’m going to reconstruct right here a conversation we have with 95% of our prospects:
😊 “Hello, I’m contacting you because I need your services to help me launch my crowdfunding campaign! The prototype is ready, we have communication material, we’d like to launch the campaign within one or two months.
👩🌾 The project looks great, there is indeed material to create the campaign page, and we’ll discuss your campaign strategy together. Can you tell me how many followers you have on social networks?
😅 Euhhhh (yes, I’m French), I’m not too comfortable on social networks, so well, I don’t communicate too much about my projects…
👩🌾 OK. And do you have a mailing list? If so, how many subscribers do you have? (and if you can give me the open rate and click rate, that would be perfect!)
😬 I don’t have a mailing list…
👩🌾 Do you have a Discord server by any chance, or any other community communication channel?
😁 Yes! I have 30 people on my server, but they don’t interact much.
👩🌾 Since you need a minimum of 500 backers to finance your project, the very first thing you need to do is work and grow your community!”
This conversation (100% authenticated by the team) is recurring. Indeed, most project owners are extremely competent in their field (game or game product creation), but not necessarily in marketing or communications. Which we can fully understand.
Nevertheless, and we’re very firm on this point:
⚠️ A crowdfunding project cannot succeed without a crowd ⚠️
Now that the most important thing has been said, let’s take a closer look at what a community is, and why we say that working upstream on your community is as important as the project itself to its success.
1. What is a community?
Let’s start by laying the groundwork: we hear this word everywhere, but ultimately, for a crowdfunding project owner, what is a community?
💬 It’s a group of people sharing a common interest in your business, your products or the project you’re about to launch.
Now that we have a simple definition, let’s look at the characteristics of your (future?) community. It’s made up of :
- Passionate gamers,
- Fans of the type of games you offer,
- People who identify with your creative vision,
- People who appreciate and know you,
- People who have already tested and approved your previous games,
- (non-exhaustive list).
💡 Asking yourself WHO might make up your community will then help you know where to go to find them and what to talk to them about to encourage them to join you… and stay!
2. What can you expect from your community?
The rest of this article answers this question in part. However, let me say THE most important thing, in my opinion, to answer this question: a community will give you back what you give it.
If you don’t involve your community in your projects, if you don’t meet their expectations, don’t expect them to do anything for you. Your community is a mirror of your behavior towards it.
💬 On the contrary, if you talk to them regularly, tell them about your plans, ask them for their opinion, be present and make them feel that they count and that you respect them, they’ll support you. Just like any other human relationship, after all!
3. How quickly can you create your community?
This is a very frequently asked question. Unfortunately… there’s no easy answer. All I can say is that it depends on :
- Your quantitative expectations (you can’t build a community of 5000 people as quickly as one of 500),
- The means (human and financial) you’re willing to invest in creating and animating your community,
- Your current situation: Are you starting from scratch, or do you already have a small community? Are you comfortable with web communication, and are you used to communicating about your projects?
And, even taking these elements into account, it’s difficult to accurately predict the speed at which your community will be created, as well as its size, since these elements can vary so much from one project to another.
⏰ As a very general and arbitrary rule (and depending on your answers to the previous questions), we advise our customers to start building their community at least 6 months before the launch of their campaign, in order to create a dynamic of contact, conversation and exchange about the project.
But, once again, the answer will largely depend on your ambitions and your means.
4. Validate public interest in your project
At The Crowdfunding Agency, we have a principle that we don’t deviate from:
⚠️ We don’t start a crowdfunding campaign until its Coming Soon page has gathered a sufficient number of followers.
The ability to publish a pre-launch page has existed since late 2019 on Kickstarter, and has always been present on Gamefound. This is an extremely useful feature for :
- Maximize the project owner’s chances of reaching his financial goal,
- Validate public interest in the project.
- Improve the project’s ranking on search engines (crowdfunding platforms are relatively well referenced).
For a board game project, we consider that, to launch your campaign with a little more peace of mind, you need to gather at least as many followers as the number of backers you need to reach your financial goal (which is often higher than the number displayed on the campaign page).
This figure is an estimate based on observation of previous campaigns, and it can climb depending on the nature of your project, particularly for video game campaigns.
To calculate the number of backers you need to reach your financial goal, the formula is relatively simple:
🧮 Number of backers you need to reach your financial goal = (Expected financial goal) / (Average shopping cart on your campaign)
The average basket is the average amount you expect each backer to spend on your campaign.
With this information in mind, it’s easy to understand why we often delay the launch of a campaign if we find that the number of followers is insufficient. That’s why building a community in advance will make your task much easier.
5. Communicate with your first backers and extend your reach
Your first contributors will be your family and close friends (1st circle) and your community (2nd circle).
🔵 The 1st circle, while emotionally involved in your project, is often quite limited in number. They will definitely participate in your campaign, but generally don’t represent a very large number of contributors.
🟢 Your 2nd circle is your community, and if they hear about your project and you interact with them before the campaign launch, you can be sure that some of them will back your project.
A considerable bonus: your community can also talk about you and your project to their circle of friends and acquaintances (in this case, they’re called ambassadors, and managing this audience can be a communication goal in its own right), which will greatly broaden the scope of your communication, and enable you to reach a 3rd circle!
👄 For your communication, you’ll certainly be using ads on social networks, banners on specific websites, the media or calling on content creators to bring your project to the attention of a wide audience. Among these communication channels, community sharing is a powerful one. Indeed, word-of-mouth is a much more persuasive means of communication than a simple advertisement: if a friend advises you to check out a game, you’ll be much more inclined to do so than if an advert invites you to do so.
6. Maximize your chances of reaching your funding goal quickly
We’ve come to the final argument in this article for working on your community long before you launch your crowdfunding campaign! It’s all about funding your campaign quickly, and convincing your visitors to participate.
Here’s what almost every campaign looks like, in terms of funding evolution during the campaign.
As you can see, the biggest funding “peaks” occur in the first and last 48 hours of a campaign. If you want to have a (more or less) serene campaign, working on your community upstream means that you maximize the number of people who will know about your project, who will wait for it and who will participate in the campaign during the first 48 hours.
The challenge of getting as many people as possible involved in the project within the first 48 hours is a psychological advantage:
- On your side, you’re a little more confident for the rest of the campaign, since your project is funded (even if the financial goal is generally lower than the desired financial goal, which we’ll talk about in a future article), and the extra money you manage to raise will be a bonus that will enable you to improve your project, add new features or “deluxify” it,
- As for visitors to your campaign page, they’ll be more inclined to contribute financially if the campaign has already reached its financial goal. “Social proof” (which here represents the fact that a certain number of people trust your project enough to invest money in it) is a very powerful influencing factor in everyday life, and particularly in the dynamics of a crowdfunding campaign. Other mechanisms come into play, but overall :
- The more people talk about your project, the more people who aren’t yet part of it will want to join,
- The more people respected for their opinions talk about your project, the more their community circle will want to join.
- If someone visits your project page and your project has reached its funding goal, this will act as proof of the quality of your project.
So… ready to work on your community?
I hope this article has informed and convinced you of the importance of creating your community long before you embark on the great adventure of a crowdfunding campaign.
🌳 At The Crowdfunding Agency, we can advise, train and guide you on the steps to take to create a solid community.
Apart from the important financial aspect for you (as you’ve understood, creating a community takes time, and this action can be expensive if you rely 100% on external service providers for this), we don’t want to create your community for you. We believe that this aspect of communication should remain authentic and, to this end, be carried out by the project owner himself.
💡 Instead, we offer consulting-type support, to answer your questions when you have them, and help you move in the right direction.
📃 We’ll certainly be detailing other aspects relating to community creation in future articles, so if you have any specific questions you’d like addressed here, get in touch!
💌 caroline@crowdfunding-agency.com
Caroline Imbert
Marketing Manager at The Crowdfunding Agency & passionate about games, social psychology, baking and puzzles 🧩
