Three reasons your crowdfunding campaign could struggle
I’ve mentioned before how celebrity can be used to accelerate a crowdfunding project. The most notable examples are probably Zach Braff and Kristen Bell, well-known faces on the successful fringe of the TV and film worlds, who spearheaded huge campaigns to get their latest projects off the ground.
But here’s the thing: celebrity only works if you build on something that already exists, and even then only if you do it the right way.
For example, my friend Rod pointed out this dismal failure by Melissa Joan Hart (perhaps better known as Melissa the Teenage Witch). At precisely the same time that Braff was raising $3m on Kickstarter, Hart cancelled her own film project after she’d managed to find just 2.5% of her audacious $2m goal in three weeks of campaigning.
Not only does this prove that fame doesn’t automatically lead to success, it allows us to reverse engineer success a little bit. After all, once you take fame out of the equation, the reasons for success or failure can be more visible.
Here are three things I think are vital to any successful crowdfunding campaign. They certainly worked for us, and they are common traits I see among most of the good projects I’ve been watching as part of my Year of Giving Dangerously series of posts.
Leave a note if you’ve got any more.
Have a strong, direct and emotional pitch
The tone can vary — strident, heart-wrenching, witty, irreverent, or whatever matches the nature of the project and your audience. But you have to make people care. Why this project? Why now? What problem are you solving? And make sure the text of your pitch makes it clear what’s happening too.
Prep your existing fan base
Whatever networks you have, get them ready to spring into action. The 30% rule comes into play here: you want your most dedicated friends, followers and fans to sign up to your project as fast as possible — momentum is crucial for success.
Communicate on the right channels
This is where you try to match your message and the medium. You want to make sure that potential supporters are in the best position to pledge as soon as they hear about the campaign. That’s why Twitter and Facebook are big drivers of traffic to crowdfunding campaigns: because they help reduce friction. Ideally you want to reach out to people there, not in conversation or in public speeches or via barely-watched YouTube channels or leaflets.
Note some of the things that aren’t on this list: rewards, updates, and stretch goals. More on those another time, perhaps.
I’m going to take an example I’ve just spotted and see how these things apply. It’s a campaign for His Heavy Heart, a short film being put together by Alan Moore and Mitch Jenkins. It’s a day old, and has raised about £7,000 of a £45,000 target.
Now, on one hand this looks pretty good: £7,000 is not an amount of money you should sniff at. But this is Alan Moore! This is the beardy-weirdy, occult-worshipping god of graphic novels, whose arcane scrawls and mad gestures and voluminous ideas have generated a series of amazingly successful books and movies. He’s got a highly-connected, outsider-friendly fan base that should be tailor made for this kind of stuff.
As a result I have to admit that the uptake on this has been much slower than I expected, and I’ve not seen much about it in the places I would have expected to. So what’s going on? Here are a few thoughts.
The pitch is indirect and lacks emotion
The video is beautiful, but it takes a long time to tell me what I’m there for. And even when it does, I don’t really get a sense of the film itself, or the world they’ve created in this series. It also seems to be predicated on a familiarity with the project: the Jimmy’s End cycle of films, says Moore, “of which you may have seen a couple of episodes upon YouTube” — yet YouTube suggests only tens of thousands of views for other films in the series, so the chances are most visitors to the Kickstarter page haven’t seen it.
2. Has the existing fan base been prepped?
This is a complex one, and it’s not clear. But I am only now just starting to see websites that I’d expect to be all over this campaign even deign to mention it. I did a quick Google search, and absolutely none of the Alan Moore fan sites I found seem to have picked it up. From here, it looks to me like the team thought the campaign itself would do the marketing, rather than preparing the ground to make sure it got the best possible start.
3. Are they communicating on the right channels?
Again, this is hard to unpick right now, but there does seem to have been some traction on Moore’s official Facebook page (1,500 likes, but a far smaller 123 shares). However, that doesn’t seem to be translating into pledges (maybe 1% of people who like the post are also backing the scheme). On Twitter, meanwhile, I’m not seeing a great deal of mention, despite the fact I have lots of comic-reading, film obsessive friends who I thought would have picked this up and Neil Gaiman, who has nearly 2m followers, picked it up.
Still, the campaign is gaining momentum. I’ve put in £60, and I’ll be watching the numbers closely to see how it progresses.
