Crowd-funding: Tips

So, as some of you might know already, uh, I've been running a crowdfunding campaign to fund the production of the follow-up to my George or to help animation that I made last year. It's in the final days of the campaign, so if you didn't check it out already, please do so. The link is in the info box, and also you see it across the bottom of this, uh, video.

I use Indiegogo to create and run the campaign. It's probably less well known than Kickstarter, and there are a few important differences. Last time I checked, Kickstarter only allowed people with U.S. bank accounts to set up projects, so that wasn't possible for me. Indiegogo looked like a good alternative. The most important difference, apart from the U.S. bank account thing, is that Indiegogo has a system of direct donation transfers, while Kickstarter uses a deferred transfer model.

So, when people donate on Kickstarter, that donation only gets transferred if the required donation amount is reached before the end of the project. The result is that with Indiegogo, it can be the case that you don't reach your project target, but you still have money that people donated. For many projects, this can be an awkward situation. Think about what you will do if you don't have enough money to realize a project but you have some money. Ideally, you don't fund projects that are like that with Indiegogo.

In my case, it wasn't a problem because I knew that the film was going to be made anyway, and it was just a matter of how quickly I could get it done. The more donations I received, the faster I could publish the new film. Indiegogo is very transparent and easy to use. The staff were responsive and helpful. My campaign was featured on the homepage of Indiegogo, which I was quite excited about, but I didn't notice any real increase in engagement that resulted from it being featured there.

So don't overestimate how useful that will be for you. I underestimated the amount of time and energy that I would have to put into running the campaign successfully. I knew it would be demanding, but I ended up spending a lot longer on that than I thought I would need to. In my case, I was working alone, so if you're part of a team who are all involved in the promotion, that will be a lot easier. If you have the luxury of choosing your team members, then go for people who are already actively using social media like Facebook and Twitter and that kind of thing.

Promoting the campaign for me was an ongoing experiment. I would try stuff and then adjust my approach based on how much interest I was generating through doing those things. The first things you'll probably do, and the first things I did, was send out emails, post on Facebook and Twitter, and your blog maybe, and that works really well in the beginning.

You'll see a kind of peak as your friends hear about it, and those who are interested get involved, and then that quickly drops off afterwards, or at least that was my experience. I read somewhere that the average person needs about seven exposures to a campaign before they decide to contribute, and that's quite a lot. They have to hear about it seven times.

So then, if that's true, then you have this difficult situation where you don't want to irritate your friends and the people you're contacting, but you do want to give a gentle reminder to those people who might just need one more nudge to contribute to it. What I've tried to do as much as possible was to combine reminders about the campaign with other information that people might be interested in independent of being interested in the campaign.

So, for instance, you might post about how the Indiegogo site is working for you or how you made your campaign video. Or, like this, you could talk about the process of running the campaign, and I think there are potentially people in your social group who would find that kind of information useful. There might be people considering crowdfunding the project themselves.

In general, the idea is to try to minimize the spamminess of your communications about the project. What didn't work for me was Google and Facebook adverts. I ended up spending significantly more on those than they ended up delivering in terms of contributions. Google adverts were particularly bad with respect to getting image adverts approved. That's taken more than a week so far, and I'm still not approved.

So bear that in mind if you do want to try and use those. I would advise against it. I won't be using those again for any future fundraising projects of mine. While the campaign's running, try to look for events or things you can participate in where it would make sense to talk about your campaign.

So, while the Edgar campaign was running, I gave a talk at the first Agora I/O online conference, and the subject of my talk was designing effective pro-liberty propaganda. So, of course, I was talking about Georgia to help and about Echo the Exploiter and about how I was crowdfunding the new project.

Doing the talk, it was a kind of video conference thing, and so during that, I had an overlay over the video which gave the URL of the campaign page. I made sure to explicitly plug the campaign at the end of the video, so be sure to try to take advantage of those kinds of opportunities. I ended up with a couple of people very generously donating as a result of that, so that really paid off.

I didn't have a great deal of success in getting the campaign picked up by blogs, but where it was, I think it helped that I made it easy for the editors of the blogs to make posts out of it. To do that, I included a publicity image they could use, and I wrote the email in such a way that they could copy-paste it if they wanted to make it easy for editors.

The most successful rewards I was offering, as in the ones that had the most claimants relative to my expectations, were the $30 badge rewards. I think this has partly to do with that they are a way of a person being able to announce their involvement with a project to the world or their support of an idea. If I were doing the campaign again, I'd add more rewards of that kind.

So I was thinking of mugs, bumper stickers, window stickers, t-shirts, and all that kind of thing. Another piece of advice by the Indiegogo site, which I think is very important to bear in mind, is that you shouldn't be afraid to offer rewards that cost you money. Producing these kinds of things. Another reward that I added late into the project but that also did very well was the Lessons for the Young Economist book.

Again, if I were doing the project over again, I'd include more ready-made rewards like this, so items that relate to the topic of the project with a markup added. Also, while I was adding extra items, I'd try to aim for a more fine-grained price gradient, at least under the hundred dollar mark. So I'd try to aim for a reward at every ten dollar increment.

So, yeah, I hope some of that was useful for anyone considering crowdfunding their own projects, and yeah, please check out the campaign page in the last days of the Edgar the Exploiter campaign. Thanks a lot.