In May, 2015, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund what would later become MagneTree Books. The very next day my brother and business partner got on a plane to Nepal- he was an International Aid worker and was on his way to help after the devastating earthquake. Our campaign was being run by a new mom, baby still in arms, and a relief worker, typing e-mails in between aftershocks. Crazy doesn’t begin to describe that month in our lives, and you’ll be astonished how crazy a crowdfunding campaign can be even without new babies and earthquakes.
Thankfully, we had planned our campaign carefully and meticulously for months and although it wasn’t a smooth ride, we made it. These are our tips on how to make sure you make it too:
(We consulted this guide, but only implemented what we could)
Prepping Campaign Materials
1. Shape Your Brand: Before you begin shaping your campaign, you need to shape your identity. People often say you aren’t selling your product, you’re selling yourself. We support people who we feel a connection with, and deciding what you stand for as a company will trickle down into everything. Our brand has developed much deeper since those early campaign days but from the start we knew we stood for family, imagination, creativity and fun.
2. Community: The whole point of crowdfunding is to involve your community in the creation of your product, project or business – on a global scale. Just like it take a village to raise a child, it takes a village to create something amazing. We created a small village in the form of a focus group (closed and private Facebook group). We invited 100 young moms (our target market) who were friends and family, and we offered a free book in exchange for their ideas and feedback. This incredible group helped us choose our company name, our logo design, our illustrator, and much, much more. We weren’t just testing our ideas, we were building a community of supporters who would help us expand our reach more than we could imagine.
3. The Video: Your video is an integral part of your campaign- don’t skip it and don’t overlook its impact on your campaign visitors. This is your chance to tell your story, above all else. You can do a DIY iPhone montage video, a cheap & fast instructional video from Fiverr, or a professionally shot & edited video. Either way, it’s your story that matters. We are hard-wired to be interested in stories. Your supporters want to know what brought you to this point and where you’ll go from here with their help.
Pre-Launch Publicity & Media Planning
4. Blogger Outreach: Ordinary efforts do not yield extraordinary results- they yield no results actually. So if you’re going to do an outreach (and you absolutely should) then do something amazing that will force people to pay attention. We made a list of 60 of the top mommy bloggers and sent them each a personalized video. The video consisted of a personalized intro plus our campaign video. Here's a sample (we made the video unlisted so only someone with the link can watch it). Note: DO NOT let anyone publish anything about your campaign until you are live. Try to have all your media go out within the first 2 days of going live. Here’s the text we used for the e-mail subject and body:
Subject: Unique Idea for Your Blog
Body:
“Hey {Blogger},
We love what you do at {Blog Name}, and we have a special message with your name on it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ0nmHdSx_M
If we managed to get you smiling, check out the media kit for more info, and let us know if you're interested in becoming a MagneTree Ambassador.
Talk to you soon,
Josie & Ronny
p.s. please don't share the video with anyone! We’re saving it for our launch 🙂
5. Media Kit & Ambassador Program: like we mentioned in the video, we created a media kit for bloggers. Keep in mind that (influential) bloggers will typically have their content planned for a month or two. While you are providing them with content, you are also asking them for a favor. Make it easy for them to say yes; include your campaign URL (make this a bitly link so you can track clicks), promo pics, a sample blog post, a press release, and sample posts/quotes for their social media channels. If you want to do an ambassador program like we did, include a ‘badge’ graphic for them to put on their blog and create an Ambassador page on your site where you can link to their blog. (If your site is not up yet just let the bloggers know they will be linked to when it’s up.) Here’s our media kit.
6. Prep Media for Launch Date: Notice our ‘p.s’ note in the e-mail example above? It’s incredibly important that you gain as much momentum for the first 2-3 days of your campaign. Having a big boost in people visiting your campaign and supporting it will alert the Kickstarter staff that there’s something they should pay attention to. While setting up your campaign you'll be able to get a “preview link”. This link will eventually take people to your live campaign after you launch it. This means that if you want to share the link to your campaign with your bloggers or the media, you can have that all ready and set to go once you launch. All you do is grab your preview link, turn it into a custom bitly URL, and include that bitly link in your Press Kit to bloggers & local media and in your press release. Remember to make sure everyone knows not to release this info before your launch (if you're doing a press release, you have to write at the top “embargoed until Oct 8th…” as opposed to “for immediate release”).
Creating & Launching the Campaign
7. Creating Your Campaign: Here are some commonly shared tips:
- Include a small reward of $1 to $5
- Include the cost of shipping & fulfillment of rewards in your reward cost structure. *Many* have failed to do this and have taken a serious financial loss due to shipping costs.
- Set a realistic fulfillment date and expect to run into problems. The Kickstarter community and those who support campaigns often know that fulfillment is almost always behind schedule. But you will run into people who may be buying as a birthday or Christmas gift. Try to estimate on the side of longer rather than shorter production time.
- Include a lot of pics in the description and try to carry the same branding and design throughout.
8. Launching Your Campaign: At the last minute we decided to throw a launch party for the campaign. We invited friends, family, bloggers and media. This turned out to be a little costly so plan carefully and use any free resources you have. Use a public space or a friend’s home, ask close friends to participate (potluck style), or try getting a local small business to sponsor food/drink. We gave a speech, screened our video, and had a computer station with a few laptops & ipads where people could support us on the spot.
I think that's enough prep!
Post-Launch Publicity – Spreading the Campaign
Not much to do at this point but sit back, relax, and watch your support pour in, right? Nope. Nobody said crowdfunding was easy!
*A note before starting to plan this phase: you are going to ask people (some of whom you may not have spoken to in years) for what you perceive as help or a handout. Nobody understands how uncomfortable this is more than me. I am the shyest person you’ll meet and I don’t make a habit out of asking for help. Here’s the thing, you’re not hurting anybody by sharing your passion. I can’t tell you how many people have (surprisingly!) told us that we’ve inspired them with our campaign and our product. People want to know about it, they want to be a part of it, and they’re rooting for you. Those who are supporting you believe in what you’re doing, they’re not funding sympathy. And besides, it is quite possible that the people you aren’t in contact with regularly might actually benefit from your product too!
9. Contact Every. Single. Person. You Know: Try to write personal emails as much as possible but for the rest, batch them. In order to email all of our contacts on gmail (we’ve collected many over the years), we used “yet another mail merge” which is a chrome extension that allows you to list all your contacts in excel and then send an email which personalizes it to each name and sends it out in batches (100 a day). If you don't have that many contacts, do it manually.
10. Facebook Messages: I can tell you right now this is a lot of work, but it works. I messaged every single friend of mine (and my husband’s!). I changed it up a bit every now and then or else facebook would put a hold on my account so I actually typed out a lot of those messages and made them personal. Here’s an example of a message we sent to someone who wasn’t a close friend or family (we all have those on facebook, right?):
Hey Mike,
How’s it going? Long time no speak. I just wanted to share this project that my wife recently launched: bit.ly/magnetreebooks
If you like it, we would really appreciate any support through backing the project or sharing it.
Thank you!!
11. Paid Promo: You're going get a lot of promo companies saying that they can help you get backers or help you get your press release out. Don't believe them! We used a couple and didn't really see any return from it. The good ones are very expensive. The best use of our money was Facebook ads (making a post on your page, and then boosting it) since they're pretty cheap and they actually work. The best thing we did was a contest where people had to share our campaign and we gave out prizes (2 free books and one set of photo magnets). We boosted that on Facebook for about $40 and we got a ton of new supporters from outside our circles of reach.
12. Kickstarter Staff Pick: this was something that we caught onto a bit too late and so we did not make staff pick. But it’s simple, contact your backers and ask them to nominate you for a staff pick. You can also post this request on your social channels but do it early in the campaign and keep asking new backers for nominations. Being a staff pick will bump up your presence so complete strangers and the Kickstarter community at large will see your campaign and possibly back it.
Lastly, make sure to send thank you messages every time someone backs you (asking them to share while you're at it), and do regular updates. Remember, you’re building a community. You need to involve them in your progress, setbacks and adventures along the way.
Here's a free Kickstarter 2 Month Planner and Complete To-Do list for you.
Josie Elfassy-Isakow is an Author and Co-Founder of MagneTree Books. Together with her brother, Josie has created a unique line of Personalized Storybooks which focus on bringing families closer together. Josie lives in Toronto, Canada with husband and toddler (CEO Lenny Isakow) where she is building her business from her kitchen table.