Project Page – why design is everything
Who's Worried About Raise and Why You Should Pay Attention – Startup Fundraising Explained
A History of Raise Refuted
Today, we will look at project pages and how to build your page. The big thing about getting an upscale look is colour and design. Interestingly, this is most difficult with the Kickstarter and Indiegogo editors – they can't support custom fonts or columns, so we recommend using a different program like Canva to make your iconic brand elements available through the page. Section headings are a great way to introduce interesting colours and fonts to your page. So, I recommend going through your production document and coming up with headlines before you start to write the story. Please note that the ways to design your page are the same between indiegogo vs kickstarter.
Nonprofit Fundraising: The Bizarre Secret of Raise
Anytime it comes to your nonprofit fundraising goals, sometimes the amount you raise is alot less important than how you do it. You want to make sure to connect with your funders in a way that allows for you to
From each of the main sales points: challenge, features, insights, background, future, and call to action, look at the phrases – can you develop a 3-5 word headline to describe your project and help orient the page? There are two ways headlines are used: to organize the reader's minds through your pitch and to create a big, bold, and emotionally evocative language for them to feel energized and inspired. What is the envisioned future for your project? What is a one-line description of the Life-altering benefit the reader receives when they pledge?
Now, write down four organizational headlines and four evocative headlines, and we'll go to Canva and choose a font for our slider, then export slider images for each headline.
The next most important component of the project page is images. You need the “hero image” for your main project and a handful of colourful images to be used on the page. There are three ways to get this. The first is to take a photo of your product. If it is more community-based, think of what imagery “implies” the content of your project. Look back to the intro segment for doing a competitive analysis and see what kind of hero image your competitors used. Can you create a photo that looks similar to your industry?
The other important thing to include is PEOPLE – beach more than selling a project; you are selling a human's experience of the project. So, use stills from your video, take some sample shots, or take professional photos from the free stock photography links in the useful design and image apps for the lesson. Try to have at least photos on your page of a human enjoying the result and envisioning the future of your project.
When you have selected enough images, now drop them under the appropriate heading. Finally, there is one remaining thing to do with Canva – create your project timeline and your reward tiers – look at this example. Still, you want to use interesting font and shading to demonstrate to people when and how the project came to be and when they can expect shipment.
Then, you want to make the table show more details about the various rewards. Use a square image template from Canva to specify five featured rewards and clearly show the pledge amount needed for each project.
Now that your imagery and headlines are in place, it's time to consider the interstitial text. Try to make paragraphs with whitespace … use a double gap between paragraphs to make it easy on the eye, use selective bold to make certain statements stand out, and voice paragraphs that are longer than 3 or 4 lines tall. This ensures that readers are not alienated when they look at your text.
Now, copy and paste the whole heading from your production doc: try to drop the most important content on the page, and then start editing.
Finally, make sure to confer that it is “all or nothing” and that you need everyone to chip in to reach the goal and complete the project as described.
I hope this has helped you see the steps to create a nice-looking project page. When you finish your first draft, this is your time to share it with someone close to you, have them proofread it, and offer edits.
Perks, Rewards, and Early Birds
Now we're going to discuss pricing – this is a crucial element to drive momentum for your project because it is the final gateway that someone needs to feel inspired by before pledging. Anyone who pledges to a project first needs to select a “pledge level” and then go out to feel inspired and happy about what they are getting.
So, we recommend creating a spreadsheet to lay this out and to practice editing.
First, choose the pricing. For general fundraisers, creative projects and or music
You might have a $25 option, a $45 option, a $75 option
For products, you need to price yours according to the actual retail cost and develop numbers so that people who are early can receive extra discounts. Make sure to build into it your crowdfunding PR cost, which can sometimes be about 30% of your intended raise.
Say I was making a new kind of biking glove. I've competitively priced it at $149. For Kickstarter, I would create early bird tiers. I would sell the first 50 for $99, then the second 50 for $109, then the third 100 for $119, then the fourth 100 units for $129, then the rest for $149.
Because early bird pricing often can take up a lot of real estate on your page, you want to be careful about how many options and different rewards you offer. You want the rewards to be simple enough so that your backers spend more time thinking, “Am I in or not?” versus “Which one do I want?” I recommend having no more than two versions of your main reward and focusing on delivering just one or two good-quality rewards.
The higher pledge levels are also helpful because there might be a group on your list who you know is well off financially. For fundraising ideas for nonprofit and creative projects, this is where you think about how to increase the “personalization” of an experience – signed copies, invitation to special events, personal online time with you, a deluxe package with added components.
For the products, we see bulk pricing for the main reward: pack of two, pack of three and pack of four. These can also have early bird; for the product I mentioned, I would have the first 25 of a two-pack available at $175, then the next fifty would be 2 for $199, then the next hundred would be two for $220. This way, people see savings.
So you can see, if you are launching a project, and you have a product with four early bird pricing tiers and a two-pack with three pricing tiers, that is already seven rewards for people to choose from.
The Ultimate Kickstarter Guide – Download Now
No matter how you specify it, we recommend not having more than nine rewards for people to choose from, and the sweet spot is better with 6 and 7 reward options. The main thing to note though is that backers only come from your existing audience, so make sure to price your items according to what your friends and Family would actually buy.
Sometimes, rewards have unique details that can't fit into the reward description. This is where you use the pricing table on your main page to add more details. For projects with multiple options per reward, such as colour or size, make it just one reward and then explain you will collect people's desired colour options during the email survey after the campaign.
Once you have detailed all the rewards, input the data into your crowdfunding platform. Now is a good time to send it to a friend for feedback to make sure this all makes sense.
Once your project page and the rewards are all done and have been reviewed by at least one other person, you send the “Can You Help” email campaign, offering the preview link and asking for advice via email from everyone whose contact info you have.
Get Feedback (and apply it)
So now that you've warmed up your contacts via social media and a “hi how are you” email campaign, and you've finished your project page and made the big decision about kickstarter vs indiegogo, it's time to send the next in the series. We would like to have the subject of this message be “Can you help”. Remember that it needs to be only a few lines to feel personal enough. Something like: Hi John, the project is almost ready! Here is your preview link :
Can you take a few minutes to review this page and let me know your thoughts or edits? Your help is so appreciated!
Kind Regards,
Michael
In your fundraising strategies, you craft a very specific pitch to someone who influences social media, someone who works at blogging and has an interest in your industry, or someone who has their own newsletter list, either through blogging or having an online Business.
Additionally, utilizing fundraising software can help manage and streamline these partnerships and fundraising efforts.
In many types of crowdfunding marketing agency, this kind of email is the key to getting more backers.
In the tier one email document provided in the introduction, you'll see another example of this “can you help” example.
So, go ahead and draft your outreach email with the preview link, and send it to everyone whose email you have access to. Remember to do separate campaigns for different audiences because the template you send to a blogger or someone you've never met will differ from how you talk to a friend, family, colleague, or coworker. Finally, the send method we recommend is via SerialMailer, MixMax, or Easy Mail Merge because you want to increase the level of personalization attributed to your message to maximize the replies.
Once you send this out to all your qualified contacts, be responsive as people write back and do what you can to integrate their edits. You don't have to follow everyone's advice, but it'd be good to collect all the feedback on your preview page in a single document, and then after a week or so, you can review and apply the changes you are recommending.
Finally, as the email comes in, ensure good customer service and reply to everyone who writes to you.
For Bigger Campaigns: Recommended PR & Ad Strategies
Okay, so you've exhausted your contacts list and are buzzing on Facebook. But you ask – how do the bigger campaigns get 80k, 200k, 300k? Well, the answer is about strategic partners and also putting together some budget for ads and PR.
I'll start with strategic partners, we covered this in an earlier lesson regarding the launch team, but a strategic partner is a little expanded. This is the only free or somewhat free way to get traffic that you don't already have. When with a thing you do in your fundraising strategies , you want a new style of making things work. The last kind of strategic partner is a student in school groups or organizations that study your topic or people who run meetups, conferences, festivals, and competitions in your industry. You want to list out everyone who could meet these qualities who you know, and go in search of people you can talk to about this and pitch your partnership idea.
For Facebook, you can use the intel-sw Facebook search tool to find people who “like” your industry. Add their friend, and if they add you back then say hello online and give your pitch.
One additional thing you can do is go to upwork, which is a platform to hire global freelancers, and search for people who are skilled in verified lead generation & research. You can hire someone to search the internet and get contact info for people in your industry who might be interested in the project. With some fundraising consultants $350 can get you sometimes up to 1000 additional useful leads to reach out to. As a reminder, cold calls to people return at a much lower rate than people who you have been introduced to or people who you connect to gradually with social media, so a research list from upwark is a great addition, but it cannot be depended on in the same way as your personal email contacts.
So, you've found everyone in the industry, you've been connected to local business owners with lists and you've had your friends introduce you to influencers they know. You've sent your pitch about the project to see if people write back.
If no one is writing back, or if you want a higher octane way of driving “people who don't know you” to your project page, you need to employ “the system”, which costs money. To be in business and drive awareness outside of the networks you already belong to, projects often choose to get PR and Ads partners.
Make sure you do a comprehensive indiegogo review to make sure that it's the right platform for you. Sometimes the 8% fee if you miss your goal can be hefty.
My disclaimer – I have worked with the agencies mentioned below with good results, but results always vary. Do not do PR or Ads for less than $2,000, there is absolutely no way you would get a valuable real partner to pitch you anything below that price.
For ads, you can hire a PPC firm to manage the ads, and you will pay for the ads on top, or someone like Funded Today can drive traffic to your page with just a test fee and a significant equity share of your company.
For clients who want to raise $100k – $200k, this is an absolutely essential investment, and I highly recommend working with a professional press person who can help you arrange day one.
Whoever you get, the most crucial part is to make sure that they agree to post on a specific day and time – 12-24 hours into your launch day – so that you have a better shot at gaining their favor and building a team of links to go live about your project on the launch day. This type of team building is what most people describe as crucial in their Kickstarter faq.
