by herringtj » Fri Mar 20, 2015 3:44 pm
Our campaign just hit 100% this morning! With a week to spare! I got a lot of great advice from this forum and CrowdCrux. So I'm very grateful for having discovered it.
Biggest things I learned:
Get started months ahead of time building social network. Even though we've hit our goal, I did not do this and I feel I've paid for this when I think about how much might have been raised had I done things right.
Find as many avenues as you can to get the project in front of new eyes. To date, our project video was played about 800 times and we got 144 backers. I'm sure the project was viewed by many more people who didn't play the video. A very small percentage of people who see your campaign will pledge so get it in front of as many people as possible.
Get backers in early. No matter what. Have as many people as possible lined up to pledge on day 1. I'm not talking about getting big pledges in early (which I thought would help more). I'm talking get a lot of backers. So even if someone doesn't know how much they can pledge, get them to pledge something (even $1) to start and inform them that they don't get charged until the campaign is over and that they can modify their pledge any time before the campaign ends.
Again, I stress.... start the ball rolling on all of this before you launch. As early as you can.