The Crowd-sourceress: Get Smart, Get Funded, and Kickstart Your Next Big Idea

by Alex Daly

After you work hard to get as much press around launch, find creative ways to go back to press with new, exciting stories by keeping a close eye on your backer report and on influencer involvement.

When we’re identifying potential influencers, we don’t just look for number of followers, especially since anyone can buy them. We look at how much influencers’ posts are shared, and we make sure they have an engaged following of people who are active in conversations—liking, commenting, replying, and retweeting.

Once we have a big database of possible influencers, about two weeks before launch, we start reaching out to them to tell them about our project and ask if they can post about the campaign on Launch Day. For those who write back and agree to help, we follow up to provide them with sample tweets for the launch. The goal of the sample tweet is twofold: it takes the burden off of the person to come up with their own tweet, and it gives you control of what is being shared.

On Facebook, you can also scale that valuable email list audience by building a “Lookalike Audience,” which essentially means you can reach additional audience members with qualities similar to your initial audience that Facebook finds. Facebook requires an email list of 100 addresses to build a Lookalike Audience,

Then, 24 hours to launch, we send a heart-felt message that expresses the importance and urgency of the project and once again stresses the need for their support. We also promise to follow up on Launch Day with the live campaign link and perhaps some sample tweets. We tend to add a note about our goal to reach 20 percent right away, letting them know that, according to Kickstarter, “78 percent of projects that raised more than 20 percent of their goal [are] successfully funded.” They will want to be a part of making this campaign a success with you! Check out the sample newsletters in the Resources section.

Get involved in industry conversations and threads related to your brand by posting on forums, retweeting and replying to tweets, and sharing relevant topics/articles inside your industry.

Follow what’s working. Don’t push social media too hard if it’s not getting conversions. If press is more successful, for example, focus on that.

Dear Kickstarter backers, Our entire team at We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live is absolutely ecstatic that we reached our goal today. Although we couldn’t be happier to have received this funding, what we are truly stunned by is the overwhelming amount of support we have received from Joan’s devoted fans—in the form of tweets, comments, messages, emails, phone calls, resumes… And now we feel the love for Joan everywhere. Everyone wants to be involved. And that is what our goal is: to involve each and every one of you in this process. We want to make everyone who has ever loved Joan and her work feel like they have the opportunity to connect with her in some small but incredibly meaningful way. (She is thrilled by the way about this campaign. She, like all of us, is constantly refreshing the Kickstarter page.)

Explain that your goal will get you to a certain point, but that you might have more to accomplish beyond that. You can let backers know that if you hit your goal, they can expect to see exciting new rewards or features as part of your stretch goals.

In January 2015, Indiegogo introduced InDemand, a program that allows campaign owners to keep funding after their campaign is over. It’s available for any successfully funded campaign, even those that originally ran on other platforms, such as Kickstarter.

Writing That Works: How to Communicate Effectively in Business by Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson.