How to Crowdfund

It is entirely possible to run a very successful crowdfunding campaign without being absurdly well-connected or quitting your day job. It just requires a little more planning. Here’s how to do it:

Edit Steps

Part One: Figuring Out Your How and Why (2 Months Before)

Figure out what your reasons are. About two months before you release your campaign, you need to figure out your how and why. As crowdfunding consultant Sydney Malawer put it, “Do you have a legitimate ask besides ‘we want money’?” People want to feel as though they are a part of something bigger than themselves, and they want to know that their money is instrumental in accomplishing that goal.

Do a lot of research on your goals. To justify and support your goals, you'll need research about what the money you're asking for will do.

Present your goals. Use graphs as appropriate. Write out an estimated budget for your campaign, based on any quotes you’ve received from manufacturers, insurers, lawyers, suppliers and distributors. Sound like a lot of work? That’s why you have to start early.

Research crowdfunding, too. Both Kickstarter and Indiegogo have a lot of helpful tips of their website. Mike del Ponte wrote a great post on “Hacking Kickstarter,” Marked Point compiled a list of factors to consider that contribute to campaign success, and the Unreasonable Institute put together some good learnings from their failed campaign.

Find a videographer. Your video will make or break you. Consider getting a professional videographer who is willing to work pro-bono for you, or make a compelling video yourself, so long as you focus on telling a compelling story and keep it under three minutes. There are lots of good resources online to help you edit your video. A new start up called Ignite Video even has an app to help you edit videos from your phone.

Part Two: Designing Your Campaign (1 Month Before)

Decide which platform to use. There are literally hundreds out there just waiting for the JOBS Act to pass, but Kickstarter and Indiegogo are the two best options at present.
- Kickstarter is the more trafficked of the two, but is a lot pickier about the types of projects they’ll allow (strictly creative). It's harder to make it onto their homepage since they do have more high-volume projects.
- Other options, like Indiegogo, may be able to feature you more prominently on their homepage, newsletter, and social media outlets because they are smaller.

Design the layout of your campaign. At this point, you should have story-boarded out your video and crystallized your pitch. Try explaining your value proposition to a five year old. If they get it, you’re golden. If they love it, put them in your video.
- Your campaign should be image-rich, with just enough content to answer the predominate questions of “why should I care” and “what are you going to do with my money?” Most people don’t read so make sure all of this is in your video too. In general, its a good rule to not overestimate people’s attention spans so you’ll also want to keep your campaign short, around 30 days.

Answer the question “what are you going to give me?” Yes, technically people are donating to your campaign but it isn’t necessarily out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s a little bit of that plus a lot of “that looks awesome, I want that.” This is where your rewards come in.

Plan for enticing awards. Offer an appealing reward at the $25 level. This is by far the most popular pledge amount. But you should also dream big and have a multi-thousand dollar reward that offers some sort of incredible experience related to your product. Consider something like a “weekend of health and wellness at a Napa winery” for $5,000. You never know who you might inspire to donate!
- Do not forgot to factor shipping into the cost of your rewards. Your final price for the rewards will likely be the cost of the goods, plus shipping and a crowdfunding premium that includes the percent that the platform will take, along with a little extra because these people aren’t just purchasing a product, they’re getting an idea off the ground.

Make sure that the estimated delivery date is something you can deliver on. You may need more than three months - it generally isn't enough, which is why about 70% of campaigns don’t deliver on time. You’ll probably want to give yourself six months.

Part Three: Building the Movement (2 Weeks Before)

Make sure you have a core team of people working on this with you. Maybe its your co-founders; maybe its your mom. It doesn’t really matter so long as these people are ready to go out to their networks to make this campaign a success. Now the key is to increase that number.

Grow your network. Create a simple ambassador form in Google that everyone on your team can send out to their networks two weeks before you launched. The goal is to get a lot of very excited ambassadors who are willing to go out to their networks for you. These people are signing up to get short-term spammed, because your job is to send them sample social media posts and emails every week during your campaign. (You should tell them this in advance).

Reach out to organizations, too. Organizations make even better ambassadors because they often have much bigger networks than individuals. Make a list of local organizations related to your cause or field and contact them asking if they’d be willing to post about our campaign on their social media.

Prep the media. You should draft up a standard press release as a template but understand that personalized reporter pitches are what will actually get you covered. If you can, find a friend who works in PR and ask if he/she can download a list of reporters from a media database like Cision or Vocus. You’ll also want to spend time looking for relevant bloggers. Often a good place to start is by looking at who covered campaigns similar to yours.

Don’t expect that most reporters will respond. Follow up to help gain some momentum.

Part Four: Launching the Campaign

Know your goal. It should be to raise 25% of your funding within 24 hours, which is roughly the amount that should get you featured on the homepage of Indiegogo or Kickstarter. This day is critical, so make sure that you’re prepared. And be sure to wake up early.

Remind your network of the launch day. Two weeks ago you sent the ambassador form and your launch date to a list of friends and family. Now you should send an “its here” email to everyone you have ever met or interacted with.
- An easy way to do this in Gmail is to click on Contacts → More → Export (All Contacts, CSV). Then you can import those contacts into your preferred email service provider (we use MailChimp).
- Take a deep breath and then send out an email to all of those people. Note that you should only do this once in a blue moon otherwise you’ll be marked as spam, kicked off your email provider, and your friends/family will begin to hate you. Encourage your teammates to do this as well but don’t force it, this type of email isn’t for everyone.

Focus on key influences and social media. After sending that email you should spend the rest of the morning reaching out directly to key influencers, posting on social media and watching as that little green bar moves towards the right. Then you should go to your day job.

Celebrate and encourage your campaign with a personal pitch. That evening, you should host a launch dinner party with all of your family and friends. If you’re a bunch of 20-somethings, you should ask your parents or someone older to host it (a.ka. someone who has friends with real money). Over the course of that evening you should show your video, give a short heartfelt speech about what this campaign means to you and then make sure that everyone in that room has access to multiple computers with your campaign on it.

Enjoy the results. If you do your preparation and launch day right, the rest will follow. You should plan on sending updates to your backers and networks throughout the campaign, ideally in video format for a few of the critical moments such as when you’re halfway to your goal or 80% there.

Part Five: Ending Your Campaign

Thank everybody! At the end of your campaign you should be sure to thank everyone who backed you, ideally in a video format. You should also celebrate! Throw a big party and invite everyone who supported your campaign to attend.

Keep everyone in the loop. Make sure to add all of the emails you’ve collected to your list and to keep everyone updated on your production timeline. If you do it right, a successful crowdfunding campaign can help launch your idea to the world and finally let you quit your day job.