Convince More Backers To Support Your Crowdfunding Campaign With These Steps

 

The biggest obstacle is convincing the potential backer that they can trust you to deliver the product you’re promising after your crowdfunding campaign ends. Think about it, you’re asking someone to give you money for an item that doesn’t even exist yet, will not be shipped immediately, and may in the end never be shipped at all. This is not typical commerce, therefore, you owe them a lot more in terms of an explanation and transparency. Plus, this is a marketing and community building exercise. So, use the opportunity to learn more about your own message and your target market and your community will grow naturally.

Bear in mind that all of the suggestions below first require that you have set up a landing page for your campaign in advance. Check out sites like launchrock.com or leadpages.com to get that started before following the advice below. Check out sites like launchrock.com or leadpages.com to get a test campaign page started before following the advice below.

 

Get Your Family and Friends on Board

One of the key stats behind crowdfunding is that approximately 30% of your funds will come from your immediate network. The challenge is to expand beyond this and get the rest of the 70% necessary to fund your project.

First, you have to get your family and friends on board to be your loudest cheerleaders and your first supporters because with their early support comes increased digital credibility for your campaign. But, how do get them to commit to backing you (early) without being pushy and potentially damaging relationships?

 

Ask Them For Advice

You have likely been talking about your campaign with your friends and family for some time before this point. They’ve seen you putting all your energy into a project that gets you excited and they are already interested because they love and care for you. They want to see you succeed. So, share the process with them. When they feel as though they are important to your success they will 1. Have all of their objections answered already 2. Feel emotionally connected to the project themselves 3. Help to amplify your message.

 

Dealing With The Objections

Some people will say they are going to support you and will then go quiet when the time comes. That’s inevitable. However, you can mitigate this by being transparent and asking for their advice first.

 

Step 1:

Send the landing page to your closest network and ask for feedback.

Say something like, “Hey friend, you know how I’ve been talking about project X for a while now. I have set up what I think will be the basis of my campaign page. Since you’re so good at [Y] (point out a good quality that you think will truly help the effectiveness of your campaign page and they will live up to it) I would really appreciate your feedback. Can you give me one thing you like and three things you would change?”

In this short message, you have engaged your friend, made them feel good about themselves, made them feel good about their relationship with you, and given them a defined task. The defined task is important because it takes the pressure off. You will still have some friends who don’t really follow the direction at all and send you a novel full of feedback and some who simply tell you “looks great!”.

More importantly, you have given your friends and family permission to be critical. You do need to know what to keep and what works, but it is much more important to find out what doesn’t and fix it. Giving them permission to be critical creates a barrier between your relationship with them and your project. They know this is purely about the project and what they say will not affect the relationship.

Remember, you don’t have to follow all the advice offered, but you do need to evaluate it from their point of view because likely they won’t be alone in a particular objection or question.

 

Step 2:

Deal with objections.

“Objections are nothing more than your potential client asking you to slow down, clarify a point or educate them better before asking them to make a decision. Your job is to keep them emotionally involved in the benefits they’ll receive from your product or service. Once they own it emotionally, they (and you) will find plenty of reasons to rationalize the final ownership decision.” Tom Hopkins, author of the bestselling How to Master the Art of Selling 

One friend with a marketing background may offer advice on the key message or suggest a change in some wording. Evaluate their experience and consider making changes. Another friend may say, “I don’t understand what crowdfunding is”. Don’t ignore this friend, find a way include a brief explanation of the process on your page, send them the one to two sentence explanation and ask if it makes sense now.

 

Create A Crowdfunding Campaign Page That Converts Visitors

Now that you’ve asked your friends and family for their feedback on your page and made some adjustments, it’s time to test it with the wider audience. Start collecting email addresses through your landing page. Capturing an email address is counted as a conversion on this page. The goal is to test the conversion rate.

 

Building Confidence and Transparency Into Your Campaign Page

Time to think about what will help to make this page appealing to strangers. Your friends and family know who you are. They know where to find you if you don’t deliver and (probably) would forgive you and move on. Strangers don’t know you and therefore you need to earn their trust.  

How can you build a favorable reputation among those who will be seeing your campaign for the first time? Remembering that this is not a typical e-commerce cycle and that there is less trust between you and your backers than if you were a typical online seller, you should be thinking about how you can overcompensate for this while building your campaign.

 

Go With An All or Nothing Model

Many donation sites operate on a ‘keep it all model’ however if you’re launching a rewards based crowdfunding project with the aim of building a business or testing a product then you’re defeating your own purpose if you don’t choose the ‘all or nothing’ model. Why? Because you need to have confidence in yourself to hit the mark if you expect backers to have confidence in you to deliver.

Another good reason is that keep it all models are more successful.

 

Why you?

Because you came up with the idea is not good enough... sorry. What is more important to the potential backer who is viewing your crowdfunding campaign is that their money will not be stolen or misused. If you build your campaign page with this in mind, ask yourself, “What would you want to know”?

 

  1. That the creator has the experience and commitment to follow through on the promise. Provide your credentials within in a story that explains the backers’ problem and how you’ll fix it. How will your education and past successes contribute to the success of your project?
  2. That the creator has a team of people who believe in the project as much as the creator herself. And, that the team possesses the necessary experience to ultimately deliver an awesome product. If you have a tonne of design experience but lack the financial know-how then bring on a CFO and introduce this person within the campaign.
  3. That the creator is a real and honest person. Include pictures, tell people why you want to create this product, keep them updated and engage with them. Showing people you care about them is one of the most oft-overlooked aspects of crowdfunding campaigns. Just because it’s digital doesn’t mean it can’t be personable.  

 

Where is the money going?

One of the chief reasons people donate to any given charity is if they know exactly what their money is going towards. Efficacy, in this case, contributes to transparency and improves confidence in your campaign. Showing a simple graphic of how the money will be used is enough to overcome this barrier and should not be overlooked. If your intentions are honest, then why hide them? If you need it to build the website, make bulk orders to lower the costs, invest in a piece of technology, etc. - then tell people this!

 

Use These Hacks

  • When creating your video, look at the camera (studies have shown this to initiate a feeling of self awareness that proves more effective in converting donors)
  • Write your story using second person narrative (ex. ‘Your child will learn the beauty of culture through sound’ instead of ‘this children’s book uses music to teach diversity’)
  • Help backers connect with you by appealing to their emotions or showing them your quirky personality
  • While capturing emails on your landing page, start a conversation (from the founder) with those who signed up. This can be automated and is an opportunity to learn more about your target market.

 

Once you have taken in all of this feedback from your network and a wider audience you can then work with your chose crowdfunding platform to take all of this information and launch your campaign.  

 

At Next Chapter, we work with female entrepreneurs to develop crowdfunding campaigns that will showcase your product and launch your product.

We have a detailed manual that Next Chapter campaigners work through that covers these topics in details to increase a campaigners chance of success.

To learn more about what we do send us a message at [email protected] or start creating your campaign today!