Create A Successful Crowdfunding Campaign

There’s a lot of work to do. I would recommend to have at least one or two months without any other tasks. And even then there should be some time in between of the preparation time and the start of the campaign. So at first you have to define the project, the target group, the target of the project itself of the campaign and do a market research also concerning the crowdfunding itself. So are there other crowdfunding campaigns which were on similar products? How did they create it? What target did they have? What goals did they reach? Second, you decide the platform – again, research is necessary which platform fits best. Third, you produce the content for the platform, which means you write the texts about the project, about yourself. And then for the rewards, you set the financial target. Sometimes it has got a first step and a second step. So we have to define both. Describe at heart why is this money needed, what for? And you need pictures as well as a very good video, especially for the video. It’s important to have a story. So you have to think about the story and the vision. You want to create within the video and you want to transport to the viewer, then you have to get feedback for it. So ask as many people from your crowd, not only friends and family, but try to find more people who give you feedback on your texts, your videos, your pictures, and whether it makes sense, whether it is interesting, and makes people want to support you. Fourth, you have to plan the campaign. So plan all the marketing and communication activities beforehand and within the campaign period. And then fifth, which is one of the most important aspects, is to build a crowd. This should happen way beforehand, the crowdfunding itself, because when you start the campaign itself, you should already have the crowd who’s willing to support you. Six, you review your actions you did already and you plant and get feedback again on it and then you decide for the final starting time. In the end, you finally start your crowdfunding campaign. And then the whole communication around it should go on.

From what I see, having a big crowd is absolutely necessary, at least when you have a big financial target and the crowd should also be willing to support you. So it’s not enough to have it, they should also be willing to pay a certain amount of money and your rewards should fit to the crowd. So everything has to fit together, of course. Then I realized from my own experience that usually a B to C product is more successful than a B to B product. But that probably also depends on the platform. So a product that is for a private customer usually reaches more people because on the platforms, the people are behaving as private persons, usually not as companies. Then I think fast-moving consumer goods are often more successful. There was a very successful campaign on StartNext about soap. It was just a piece of soap, but they made the campaign so great and reached so many people that the campaign was really successful. It’s important that the first financial goal of the project should be realistic. Besides that it has to be realistic for you, it should also look realistic for your audience. So when they think, “Oh, this is way too high, they will never reach it,” it’s unlikely that they will support the project because they might think, “ah, it’s not going to happen anyway. I don’t put any time in it.” So when the first goal is realistic enough, then I think there’s a bigger chance that the crowd funding campaign is successful. And another thing is, what I already mentioned is having a good story. So you have to really take the people into your boat to make them sponsor you.