8 Steps to Get A Successful Crowdfunding Campaign Going

So you want to launch a crowdfunding campaign but don’t know where to start? Good news. Here’s how you can get your campaign going in a few steps. It might not be easy, and it will take a lot effort. Don’t be faint of heart, you can do this, and here’s how.

1) Build Your Team

Every campaign needs a team to run like a well-oiled machine. There are important roles for a campaign team. The specific titles of team members can vary depending upon their responsibilities. Whether you have a paid staff, or volunteers, without the team there would be no campaign.

2) Brand It

Your business is composed of details, graphics, rules and regulations, and most importantly a mission. If your campaign doesn’t coincide with your mission, your branding is off. Branding is the most important thing a business has when it presents itself to the public, especially when the business needs money for a campaign.

Come up with a brand strategy for your campaign. How will you present it? What fonts and logos will you use? How will you implement your business in the course of action for this campaign? This is where you build what you will take to the public. It’s essential for a successful crowdfunding campaign.

3) Set Goals

According to the experts at BDO, “Crowdfunding has become an intensely popular method for small entrepreneurs to raise the funds necessary to make their ideas for products a reality.” So why does your business need this crowdfunding campaign? You will need to set realistic goals to ensure your campaign will be successful. Plan what your company or new startup business needs from this campaign. Goal setting requires hard dates of when each goal should be achieved by.

Raising money requires money. You’ll have to spend money on materials to get your campaign out there. You should take into account the amount needed, and make sure it follows the amount you want to raise for your goals.

Your goals should also be more than just money. You want to reach your target audience. The demographics in which your campaign was designed for. Make goals for the statistics of your campaign as well.

4) Share What It’s About

This is the step where your hard work in preparation and branding meets the public for the first time. The launch of a crowdfunding campaign is where you introduce the campaign, and make people aware and gain their support. You’re at the step where you tell people about your campaign.

This is the step where the your new website or blog becomes up and running, and open to the public eye. The infographics, flyers or brochures are out there for people to see. A social media strategy can create awareness through posts on various social media platforms. Emails are sent. The campaign is officially launched and public.

5) Show People Why They Will Benefit

To make people care and support your campaign, you have to show them why they should care, or how they will benefit from giving you their support. In order to do this, you must learn from other successful campaigns.

One successful campaign would be the campaign to resurrect popular children’s TV show Reading Rainbow” where they raised almost $3.5 million dollars. The campaign had more than 76,000 people that believed in Reading Rainbow enough to give their support.

You can learn from other campaigns that were successful and achieved their goals to see how you can reach yours.

6) Don’t Give Up

If you don’t want your campaign to fail, take into account lessons learned from campaigns that failed. Do you research to understand what launching a campaign means for your business, and why it’s vital to your business that you don’t give up mid campaign.

It’s okay if you don’t reach all of your goals. Preparation is key to running a smooth campaign, but in the event that a crisis occurs, you should have already come up with a back up plan if your campaign starts to fail. Pure dedication and strict management of the crowdfunding campaign will help you.

7) Have an Outreach

Get face to face with your target audience. It’s one thing to have a video for the campaign, send out emails and post flyers. If you can afford an event in the budget, gather people together in person.

Hosting an event will bring your crowdfunding campaign to life. Have a live speaker that can reach the crowd and enable on the spot fundraising. Put names to your audience, and allow them to see faces behind the campaign.

This helps the audience of the event to understand why they should donate to your campaign and where their money is going.

8) Put it in the Books

Whether your campaign was successful, or if it failed, you still need proper documentation of the campaign. To end the campaign, the statistics, the funds and anything else required during the campaign should be organized into a company document. If for any reason you need to go back and see what happened during the campaign, you’ve got it in the books.