Often entrepreneurs believe that Crowd funding is a platform where they are able to access capital without navigating through the traditional channels such as venture capital, investors etc. which is certainly true, but comes with its own set of challenges. Crowd-funding plays a vital role in creating engagement with customers while getting the product in the market. Inventors and entrepreneurs look to inspire their target market to such an extent, that the people are willing to fund the development of the product in exchange for the opportunity to be among the early adopters and a few bonus goodies.
Here are a few tips which will help you run your crowd-funding campaigns successfully.
1 – Communication
It is important to clearly define your goal before you start. Make sure you send out a clear message telling your customers why you need them, what you are and what you stand for. Clearing out these questions for your campaign will make your work easy and deliver your idea to the customers.
2 – Transparency
Once you begin raising money through crowdsourcing, make sure that you don’t force your audience to donate. Depending on how well you let your passion come across, people will donate and join you in the story of your success. Be genuine and transparent with what you pitch to the customer. Whichever fields your audience may be related to they always have enough experience and idea about how pricing takes place, therefore make sure they are aware of every action taken during the whole process. If your message is delivered with clarity and assurance it gets easier for potential sponsors to find the right place to invest.
3 – Socialization
Many crowdsourcing platforms are heavily linked up to social channels, as it provides functionality that can help get the word out about your fundraising efforts. So if you don’t have thousands of friends and followers, you might need to invest some time to build your network at first. Twitter or Facebook, whichever platform you choose, make sure you find majority of the crowd and people who share similar passion and interests. You can prove to be highly influential once you begin engaging.
4 – Propagation
Before promoting your campaign, make sure you are backed up with some donations since this facilitates building trust for new donators. To create that backup you need to make sure you have a crowd where you can Share your campaign privately first, for example friends, family, followers etc. This will begin the donating process and you will notice that a number of people begin to join even before the campaign goes public.
5 – Costing
While setting goals for your campaign, it is important to realize how much more money is required after completing your project. There may be various other costs coming your way, for example production and delivery costs of the perks. Just be careful beforehand and make sure you have set margins to maintain various costs that come forward later.
6 – Incentivize
Perks have always proved to be the best way to thank your audience for backing up your campaign. But before you set up your perks, make sure to conduct a survey on what kind of perks interests your customers the most. Make sure you choose the options that cost less if not ordered in bulk because at times providing incentives to a less number of people may certainly cost more. Once your audience is paying for your campaign, make sure you reward them, keeping in mind the most cost effective options that may have a stronger value than money.
Conclusion
Crowd funding is about running a campaign on collaboration basis and not just about money. Your success counts only when users begin to be equally active to achieve targets. To achieve a successful crowd funding campaign, you need to make sure that the tasks mentioned above are proficiently accomplished.
