Our Indiegogo Fundraising Adventure (Day One)
So late last night we launched an INDIEGOGO campaign.
I've decided that it is the perfect thing to write about - because as there are many articles and how tos on what to do when running a crowdfunding campaign - I really did not see too many that followed someone running a campaign as they did it (and as they learned on the fly). I figure that if I am going to be religious about doing one thing every day in order to promote or market our INDIEGOGO campaign - then I should hold myself to also writing about what each of those efforts are in the spirit of keeping my focus, and helping anyone else who happens to stumble upon this series of posts.
How I Created My IndieGOGO Campaign
Our IndieGOGO campaign can be found HERE
Truth be told, I originally started out creating this on Kickstarter. I am loathe to admit that I somehow overlooked the fact that any sort of Social Network is not allowed to raise funding on Kickstarter. That was really dumb on my part - because I jumped through a million hoops to get our Amazon Payments Account up and running. That "We have declined your Kickstarter Campaign" email was a real kick in the teeth. BUT after so much work - there was no way I was going to slow down.
Plus - John Biggs, a Tech a Tech Crunch reporter had just posted his own crowdfunding campaign on IndieGOGO and had success with that - so I was feeling like maybe these were all signs that IND#mce_temp_url#IEGOGO was a better platform for us anyway (or trying to convince myself of that fact).
These are the things that I did to prepare (my campaign took a good 3-4 weeks to really perfect).
1. Multiple drafts of our sales pitch. I had a few people read through it to make sure that it made sense. I tried to make it fun and simple to understand and I included a mock up drawing of how we envision our Local Events and Activities Calendar to work.
2. A good video. I used a few tools to make our video. I'm a huge fan of Camtasia - so that is what I used to put the whole thing together. Its well worth the (pretty cheap) expense of buying the software to use it - and you can always try it out for FREE - I've DEFINITELY gotten my money's worth out of it between short videos we've done for conferences, and instructional videos we have made for the site.
I also used VideoScribe in order to change things up - and spent a few dollars on a Getty Video snippet to try and give the video a more professional look. I had to re-do my voiceover (which was very easy thanks to Camtasia) to try and sound less soothing and more ENERGETIC (lol) and to shorten it because I was running long. Everyone says keep your video to a minute and a half or less.
3. REWARDS!! I admit this was the most difficult part for me. We don't have an ITEM to sell - which makes it a lot tougher. I did decide to offer a few tangible items - and then it occurred to me that we DO have a great deal of power in our existing site. I figured I would make advertising offers, offers for free link exchanging, anything I could give away in terms of reaching the thousands of people that already use our site in return for a donation for our big dream/Phase Two. I don't know if I would have thought of all those freebies if I hadn't taken so long to develop the campaign and then had to switch everything over to Indiegogo from Kickstarter - so that was another blessing in disguise.
I would urge anyone trying to come up with rewards to try and think about offering something special. What also seems to go over well is early access to things.
What I see as our biggest challenges are:
Our target audience is women/moms - and I don't know how active that audience is or how experienced they are at Crowdfunding. They are also notoriously difficult to reach online - they will do anything for their kids, but rarely just spend money on something like investing in crowdfunding.
Getting press for our campaign. I think that most tech journalists are flooded with people pitching startups and crowdfunding campaigns. I think at this point it takes something really original combined with being in the right place at the right time to get written about.
Indiegogo's blog has a lot of good resources on it for getting the word out and I intend to mine that for ideas. I have a list of about 20 things that I intend to do over the next few weeks - and I will keep you updated with how those things do or do not affect our campaign.
Fingers crossed - because I really do believe in the project that we are trying to fund. We have also completely bootstrapped our entire site so far - as well as the iphone and android apps that we developed. So this next step is something that we hopes results in our efforts meeting with our users enthusiasm.
