Crowdfunding Best Practice: Relaunching Your Campaign
The most essential component of crowdfunding isn't the funding part; it's building and maintaining relationships with people who share your organization's values and goals. Even the most crowdfunding campaigns can stall when these relationships become stagnant.
Here are some best practices to consider when relaunching a crowdfunding campaign.
Transparency and Trust
Although crowdfunding makes it easy for donors to contribute financial support with a simple click of a mouse or thumbprint on a smartphone, some people may feel worried about security. This fear can be overcome by being transparent and building trust.
Goals
A critical best practice for launching or relaunching a crowdfunding campaign is establishing measurable and attainable goals for everyone involved. For instance, setting the goal of "raising money to generate more money for next football season" can be easy for donors to understand, but it's not measurable or clearly attainable. You should begin the relaunching process by compiling and publishing data on your most recent crowdfunding campaign(s). Helping your donors and the people their donations serve understand how successful your past campaign(s) were can ensure that everyone has a sense of your previous efforts and your previous goals. Bar graphs and piecharts are particularly effective for communicating this information. You can easily share this via your social media platforms, along with your revised goal(s). For example, "raising $400 per player to buy new protective equipment" or "raising $2000 to add an additional coach to your staff" are specific, actionable goals.
Face Time
Another best practice for launching or relaunching a crowdfunding campaign is building trust by connecting everyone involved with your campaign. Even during these uncertain times of social distancing and stay at home orders, organizing group chats, video meetings, hashtag challenges on social media, or social media takeovers can help remind everyone involved with your campaign that they're valued and important. These tactics can be a great way to breathe life into a stagnating crowdfunding effort or for launching new campaigns.
Partnerships and Levels
A best practice for crowdfunding is looking for innovative approaches to expanding your donor base. You can achieve these ends by building partnerships or creating donor levels.
Partnerships
How does your crowdfunding campaign overlap with similar efforts in your community? For instance, if you're trying to raise money for your youth football team, your efforts probably connect with youth sports access or afterschool programs in your community. Even if you can't find a corporate sponsor or local business to contribute to your campaign, you might be willing to find someone who's willing to tackle the larger issues connected to your campaign efforts. Networking with other charitable organizations or other crowdfunding efforts near you can create alliances that drastically expand your donor base and potential. In some cases, you might also be able to connect with state, national, or international groups who are willing to partner with you to help crowdfund donations that can be split with you.
Levels
People love "free" stuff, even when they have to pay for it. Assessing the incentives you offer your donors can be a way to drive up your average contribution. You can strategize level names built with language specific to your cause and figure out the threshold for each level. To find the right threshold, you should start with the average donation size you receive. Making your entry level much higher than the average contribution might be a reach. However, you can make each subsequent tier gradually higher. Donors often don't want to give the least, but they also probably aren't ready to donate at the highest level. You can reserve these highest levels for small businesses or corporations looking to cut big checks.
Contact a consultant who can give you tips for best practices for crowdfunding to learn more.