Need to set up a crowdfunding campaign, but don’t know where to start? You’re in the right place!
When I teach people how to raise money, the number one obstacle holding them back is not launching their campaign. They might plan it all out, get stuck in overthinking and fear, and stop themselves from getting started.
They spend months and years putting their dreams on hold, letting life pass them by. Truth is: I’ve been there.
I had a dream to turn my late grandmother’s home into a memorial that I’d buried inside for years without sharing it with anyone. Not until March 2021, when I learned that a family member back home was planning to sell the plot of land the house sits on and felt my dream slipping through my fingers.
I wanted to buy the land, but the pandemic year had left me totally broke and out of options.
Cut to me, launching a crowdfunding campaign to save my family’s land and fund a dream I’d never shared publicly before—turning the memoir of my family I’d been writing into a gallery exhibition and artist residency.
My campaign raised $35,000 with which I was able to secure the land and begin development of my project. And the most amazing part of this whole story? I launched the campaign in just 5 days.
Want to hear how I did it? Keep reading…
The first time I launched a crowdfunding campaign, I was a second year student at NYU Tisch Grad Film. When none of my classmates signed up for my short film, I had to launch a last-minute campaign to hire an entire crew.
Back then, I had zero email list, zero following, and zero budget—yet, using basic principles of communications, marketing, and fundraising, I was able to reach and exceed my goal and raise $15K for my short film.
From that experience, I developed a course teaching other people how to do exactly that. But my recent campaign turned everything I’d ever thought about fundraising completely on its head—namely that you have to spend 30-60 days planning before you can launch.
Maybe you’ve gotten tired of:
- Sending out application after application for grants, fellowships, and residencies that you never hear back from
- Working to save money for your project or business, until, just like me, you lost your job during the pandemic and don’t have any savings left
- Maxing out your credit cards and going into debt, your credit score in the toilet
- Researching in Google University, posting in Facebook groups, checking out freebies, and still not figuring out how to raise money
If that sounds like you, then it’s time to be proactive and launch a crowdfunding campaign. And once you understand what the key activities are, you’ll launch more confidently whether you take 5 days or 5 months to plan it.
So here’s a list of action steps that you can try this week:
Day 1: Choose your platform and write your campaign copy
Day 1, you’re going to choose your platform, connect your payment methods and spend a whole bunch of time copywriting.
You’re going to want to do research on the funding platforms to ensure that they meet all the criteria that you need.
The next major task for day one was writing my pitch and my project narrative. The copywriting is the who, what, where, when, why and how of your project. Pro tip: write with the tone of a hero’s journey. That means from the perspective of a hero taking on this huge undertaking with the crowd swooping in to carry you toward the finish line.
Day 2: CREATE YOUR VISUAL IDENTITY
Day two, you create your visual identity. That’s your logo, color palette, fonts, and campaign graphics. I enlisted the help of a graphic designer because I needed something really strong in a couple of days. (If you can’t, use tons of free templates for everything from your logo to campaign graphics on Canva.)
Day 3: Photos + Pitch video
Day three is all about your photos and your pitch video. You’re going to incorporate your visual identity, the colors, energy, the mood that we’re trying to evoke into your campaign images. The images you want to focus on here are your hero shots, the showcase of your project and the rewards, as well as shooting and editing your pitch video.
According to Fundera, campaigns with pitch videos do 105% better than campaigns that just have a header image. I would consider this a non-negotiable if I were you, even if you only have five days to pull a campaign together.
Day 4: Set up your campaign page + choose rewards
Now we’re on to setting up our campaign page and choosing the rewards. All of the different elements you created come together here. Most of the elements are going to be similar from platform to platform, but there will be a few differences. So there’s the pitch video, a header image, the project logo, graphics, and the rewards.
Don’t skip any of the sections or fail to explain the who, what, where, when, why, and how of your fundraiser—plus the risks & rewards—so people have the information they need to feel confident supporting you. Use pictures to break up the page and create visual interest, so backers don’t get overwhelmed by text and skip reading it.
Day 5: Social media + Outreach
By Day 5, you’ve set up your campaign page and chosen your rewards, so now it’s all about updating your website (if you have one), social media, and conducting outreach. Now this won’t necessarily be extensive because you only have one day, but essentially this means updating your web presences to reflect that you are launching a campaign and telling a few people what you’re planning, so that when you launch (on Day 6), they go to the donation page and give.
I hope this outlines how it’s actually possible to launch a crowdfunding campaign in 5 days. Having now launched many campaigns for myself and clients, it feels like I’ve finally cracked the code on exactly why this worked.
If you want to dive deeper and go behind the scenes of my campaign, check out my Launch in 5 Days intro course to learn how to set up your crowdfunding campaign page in 5 days. I’ll see you inside!
