The Crowd Funding Services Handbook: Raising the Money You Need to Fund Your Business, Project, or Invention

Chapter 4Preplanning Your Crowd Funding Campaign

In This Chapter

• Discover what you need to accomplish before launching a reward-based crowd funding campaign.
• Fine-tune your project idea.
• Define your audience.
• Build your network.

Before you publish your crowd funding campaign on a platform and start trying to promote it to potential backers, there’s a lot of preparation that you must do to help ensure a successful campaign. How much prep work will be necessary, and how long these tasks will take, will depend on a variety of factors, including the skills and resources at your disposal, the scope of your project idea, your target audience, and your ultimate goals for the campaign.

For most project creators, the key steps involved in the preparation of a successful, reward-based crowd funding campaign include:

• Defining and fine-tuning your project idea
• Pinpointing your target audience
• Performing research in regard to your project’s viability and the opportunities for funding the project offered by various crowd funding platforms
• Choosing an appropriate crowd funding platform
• Creating your campaign’s rewards (if applicable)
• Developing a time line and schedule for the campaign, and a separate time line for the project itself
• Building or expanding your network
• Creating an overall marketing message
• Preparing the content for your crowd funding campaign, including the production of a promotional video
• Preplanning the promotional efforts for your campaign, including how social ...