Raising money for your startup isn’t easy at all! However, in todays climate of new ideas and available finance, it’s proving to be a lot simpler as long as you have a service, project, team, or cause, worth shouting about, along with an engaging vision and a plan to to gain high visibilty. Below are some learnings from a recently successful crowdfunding case study that we’ve picked up.
The Desolenator is the first easy to use, low cost, solar powered water desalination system that can make almost any type of water – including sea water – drinkable. And here is the story of how we assisted in helping them raise over $150,000 in 6 weeks with a video and some data.
Aim for the sun and you will at least hit the moon
Week 0: In trying to hit a $150,000 crowdfunding target (which tends to be quite common these days), it makes sense to aim for more. In fact, with any amount you may be aiming for, it makes sense to aim to exceed the target. Depending on the platform that you are running your campaign with (be it Crowdcube, Indigogo or Kickstarter) and your agreement with the party, you may or may not receive any funding if you don’t at least hit the target. But one thing is for sure… Even the platforms that are flexible on agreements will end up taking more equity if you do not hit the target by the deadline. The Desolenator team had let their existing network know about the video before the campaign began, so interest was already lurking before content had been created.
Create Some Powerful Content That Will Resonate With Your Audience
During the launch of the Desolenator video, our client needed a visual that would introduce them to the world, engage a socially aware and (non socially aware) audience. Therefore the content was equally as important as the promotion of the video. We went to great lengths to explore ideas, concepts and narratives to find the right tone for the video. This time, we didn’t go for the highly popular animated explainer video… but more of a touching and sentimental live action piece, based more on corporate documentary style production. Music was an integral part of this and so was live footage. Introducing a credible team along with communicating the water crisis that is upon us was a conversation stimulating and thought provoking message, which, no doubt captured the hearts of the audience.
Speaking of the audience, thorough research was implemented to discover how peer organisations – those who specialize in developing world innovation – look and sound when it comes to their visual identity and messaging. This is key, as targeting effectively is a common reason people do not reach their audience. E.g if you are launching a university comparison site, you could target young adults who visit education based websites.
Launch and Exhaust all avenues to target and reach the audience:
Once the video had launched, a big mix of activities, are what stirred interest from the video, from mail outs and reaching out to existing networks on Facebook, to video focused PPC campaigns and seeding the video to publishers with a wide audience (who would care about the content), gaining the campaign high levels of visibility outside of the video sitting on their Indiegogo page. The data from this initial push tells an excellent story, as there were a good $30,000 + in donations on the very first day. It also helped inform where all the main traffic was coming from, therefore assisted when it came to opimisation and budget re-allocation.
Test & optimize distribution:
When we had 22 days left till the deadline, we were worried that we may not hit the target. However, video marketing best practices reminded us that every detail from thumbnail to call to action, needed to be tweaked, taking the Indiegogo page from a struggling campaign to a successful one. The main three things to optimize when it comes to your video on your crowd funding page are:
Interesting Video Thumbnail:
A visually entertaining thumbnail will grab peoples attention. A thumbnail that is relevant to the viewer will also engage people. A strong combination of these two factors will result in more click throughs for the campaign. The idea is to test various thumbnail images on various campaigns that you run and evaluate the success of each image by the number of click-throughs. The Desolenator campaign used a number of different images in the PPC campaign
Interesting Title:
Your titles must be based on key word research and also be easy to comprehend. Longer titles do better than shorter ones and titles with lists tend to be shared more. Again, it is all about testing your different ideas for your titles on platforms like twitter to see which ones get clicked the most.
Powerful Description:
Most people make the mistake of copying and pasting the description from somewhere else, but its highly important that you keep the main goal (in this case, getting $150,000 in donations or more) at the forefront of your activity, so remind people of what you’d like them to do when they have finished watching the video. Aniboxxers (our customers) often hear me say this a lot.
Create a simple follow up promotional video if need be
In the final two weeks till the deadline, we managed to create a short animated viral which managed to generate more interest. Again, this means titles, thumbnails and images were altered, which generated new traffic from the same target audience.
Results:
We hit the $150,000 target with only 9 days to go. In the end, the campaign ended up being 106% funded, racking up a total of just over $164,000. Shout out also to the guys at Sutro Digital, Baxter & Bailey, who also contributed to this campaigns success.
