by nomlinz » Wed Jul 31, 2019 3:44 pm
Building a crowd is always one of the most difficult and time consuming parts of the pre-launch part of a crowdfunding campaign. But yes, it is oh-so-necessary!
Here are some low-budget strategies to start building your community from the ground up.
Friends, family and personal contacts
Getting a detailed list of anyone who you’ve ever met or somehow connected to you is a great first start for doing this.
So, let’s talk about how to create and organize a list of contacts.
Doing so will help you build an audience of who to communicate with.
There are people:
- Who are discovering you through your product
- Who you know or who are your friends and family and you’re connected to.
People in the second group might not have any idea you’re working on this but you have some connection with them. This segment is what we’re focusing on right now. We’ll split them into different tiers:
Tier 1: someone who you know pretty well and you’ve had contact with in the last 2 years. If you reach out they’ll say “oh yes, of course I know who this person is”.
Tier 2: someone who is an acquaintance. Someone you’ve met at some point in your life and have not contacted so often. Maybe a business colleague with. Someone who you’ve met through a mutual friend or someone you’ve just met once.
Tier 3: people who you haven’t met yet. People you’ve connected with through LinkedIn or friends you’ve made through Facebook.
The reason why we split them into different categories is because you’ll be speaking to those people differently according to your relationship with them. You’ll be speaking to them very differently depending on if you have a shared history or if you’ve just met a few times.
Export your Gmail address book
- Go to contacts in Gmail
- Click “export”
- Select “all my contacts”
- Select “CSV” format
- Export your Facebook friends email list
- Create Yahoo email (only purpose is to export list, we’re not using the email at all)
- Click “Contacts”
- Click “Import from Facebook”
- Click “Continue”
- Go to “Contacts” app on Mac
- Click “Add Account”
- Add “Yahoo” account
- Select all contacts
- Click “Export as vcard” (do this about 500 contacts at a time since there are file size limits)
- Upload to vCard to CSV converter
- Copy the first name and email into the same Google Sheets as the Gmail contacts
Once you have all your contacts in one big sheet, you’ll start deleting rows of those who you don’t know or who you don’t want to talk to about your project. The other rows that are leftover manually sort them into different tiers so you’ll know how to communicate with them about your campaign.
Boost on-the-ground tactics
Expand your reach by investing your time into other on-the-ground tactics.
- Sell on the street to passers-by
- Go door-to-door, asking for recommendations
- Host a party at the house of a potential customer
- Attend conferences specific to your industry
- Speak at local MeetUps or public library events
- Submit your project to the local newspaper
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
Spend your time finding people, talking to people and building relationships. That’s the only way to get your idea, project and brand out there.
With these low-budget strategies above you have the opportunity to be directly connected with people.
There’s a higher chance that you’ll be communicating with these people 1-on-1 through phone calls, direct email, face to face conversations or even Facebook Messenger chatting.
This is highly valuable since you’ll be able to get customer feedback and insight even before you launch your crowdfunding campaign. You’ll be able to get answers to any questions you might be unsure of and even get answers to questions you never knew you had.
Talking to so many people and practicing your project pitch day in and day out will also help you nail down your pitch for when it does come time to create your crowdfunding campaign page.
Best of luck out there everyone!
Hi! I run the popular blog Crush Crowdfunding and have helped people successfully raise over $7 million on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Get the proven step-by-step system to launch a successful crowdfunding campaign:
http://bit.ly/crushcfhandbook
