Top 11 Tools From Our Crowdfunding Success Manual

 

Crowdfunding is not an easy task. It takes planning, preparation, a solid team and plenty of motivation. This is all a lot easier with a good platform and the right tools. If you’re a female founder or co-founder and want to find out if we’re the right platform for you, check out our process. In the meantime, here is a list of tools that we use and which we regularly recommend to our campaigners. They’ll help you work smarter and more efficiently when it comes to building your community and sharing your message with the crowd.  

 

1.

Canva

For crowdfunding campaigns, this is the perfect tool to create page images quickly and beautifully. It doesn’t have all the capabilities of Photoshop but it definitely does the trick. You’ll be able to upload your own images, overlay text, create custom dimensions and there are plenty of examples for inspiration!

 

2.

Survey Monkey

You’ll need to ask your target market some questions in the early stages of your campaign preparation. Survey Monkey is an easy to use (free!) tool that helps you collect and compile responses.

*Next Chapter tip - keep it short and sweet and let the recipient know how long it will take them to complete in order to maximize responses.

 

3.

Hootsuite

Social media marketing will be a key component of your crowdfunding campaign. Using HootSuite, you can find potential customers by creating threads and monitoring their activity. It is a good way to find and connect with relevant press and bloggers to whom you can pitch your product. You can even schedule posts across multiple platforms, saving you a lot of time and helping to keep your message consistent.  Also, there’s a free version which is kind of hidden. So, here’s the link.

 

4.

Buffer

This is another social media scheduling tool. It has a less functionality than Hootsuite but I have found it’s scheduling component to be a little easier to use. With the free version, you can load up to 10 posts across 3 platforms. It’s a good tool for the beginner social media user because it’s simple. Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in all the functionality of Hootsuite when all you want to do is set up your posts at a specific time.

 

5.

Untorch

Setting up a referral program can be done for free if you’re quite savvy with code and google analytics. However, Untorch can save you the hassle if you’re not quite so experienced but still see the immense value of a referral program.

 

6.

Bit.ly

This is a link shortener with some pretty good analytics built in. Sign up for a free account and you get a dashboard where you can manage, customize, analyze, and share links. This helps to keep your social media posts looking tidier and you can view all the analytics across platforms in one place (as long as you’ve used the shortened bit.ly link).

 

7.

Green inbox

With this tool, you can email all of you facebook friends, Linkedin contacts, and twitter followers. You simply link your account with green inbox, it pulls their email addresses and then you can customize and send emails. This is incredible because it cuts through to using the most powerful sales method (email is still top for conversions) on all your contacts rather than hoping they will see your posts on social media. It’s not free, or very cheap, but it should be money well spent.

*Next Chapter tip - use bit.ly link so you can easily track your progress with using this tool. You can use google analytics as well of course but a unique link and bit.ly’s easy to use dashboard make things a bit simpler.

 

8.

Leadpages

This is the leader in landing pages. If you’re using WordPress for your site, there are free some alternatives tools to use. But if it’s early days and you need to set something up to capture emails and test out your message then this is a good option. The wide range of templates are easy to use and look great.

 

9.

Launch Rock

A free, powerful alternative to Leadpages (sort of). You can create a landing page to tell people about your upcoming campaign and collect emails. It also helps to get your product in front of early adopters because it hosts your page on their site. For only $5 per month you can customize and get access to free promotion.

 

10.

Social Animal

Part of your promotion strategy for a crowdfunding campaign will include connecting with bloggers and influencers to pitch them on writing about or supporting your product. This is the tool to find those people. You are limited in the number of searches you can use with the free version so plan your inquiries before getting started or sign up for the free trial and do all of your searching within those 14 days.  

 

11.

Drip

Plug all of your contacts into Drip, set up a workflow to promote your campaign and watch what happens. This marketing automation tool takes the outreach and follow up off your hands so that you can focus on other things. You write all the emails and depending on how your contact engages with your content they are led on different paths. You’ll be able to see who’s opened your emails, clicked links and send more information accordingly. Best of all? The entry level is free and pretty powerful.

 

Our detailed manual has a lot more tools and advice to help make your crowdfunding campaign successful. The more prepared you are prior to launch, the better chance you have of success. We support our campaigns not only with the platform to launch but also with 1 on 1 consulting. We support female founders to launch, scale and grow their businesses through crowdfunding. Start creating your campaign today. Or, learn more at nextchaptercrowdfunding.com.