Giving Tuesday will be upon us before we know it, so organizations everywhere are (or should be) starting to plan their campaigns to solicit support from the vast ocean known as the Internet. Hopefully, instead of shooting arrows in the dark, your organization will take a more intentional, strategic approach to executing your crowdfunding campaign.  Here are some pointers:

1. Conduct a social media audit. Make sure that you already have a robust, interactive social networking community. All of your platforms – website, blog, email marketing, social sites, crowdfunding portal – should be up to date and coordinated. If they’re not, then stall your campaign and make it happen before proceeding to step #2.
2. Build an inner circle. Formulate the team that’s going to drive and manage the campaign. Ideally, it would consist of a mix of board, staff, and volunteers who have robust and interactive social networks. The inner circle will devote the time and brainpower to build the theme for the campaign, develop scripts and content, and recruit ambassadors to push the campaign out to the public.
3. Seed your campaign. Successful campaigns raise 30% of the funds in the first 10 days.  Ideally, you’ll have a good portion of this amount raised before the campaign even starts.  Try to identify a major donor who is willing to provide matching funding to support your campaign. Announce the matching gift in the 2^nd trimester of the campaign, to offset the inevitable lull that is common at this phase.
4. Develop the campaign messaging. The ideal campaign is six weeks in duration, with roughly 8-12 unique touch points throughout. Be concise in your messaging. Appeals should be short, (three or four sentences should do), include a compelling or inspiring picture, and encompass a human-interest story related to the cause.  All of the appeals should end with “please click here to make a donation to help us achieve our goal of $$$$$.”
5. Work your contacts. The inner/outer circles should not only re-post/forward the campaigns to their networks, but also make personal, one- on-one appeals (by phone, email, in person, or online) to solicit gifts and other ambassadors (using the scripts that were developed at the beginning of the campaign). This is tedious, cut and paste work.  If your inner and outer circles aren’t willing to schedule time to get it done, the campaign will be a flop. Or it won’t raise as much as it would otherwise.
6. Invest in expertise. If you have Ice Bucket Challenge aspirations and want your campaign to go viral, it’s wise to bring in an social networking expert (before the beginning of the entire process) to provide professional guidance on content development, messaging, and search engine optimization.
7. Stay in touch. Thank your donors right away. Keep in touch with them on the platform in which they originally engaged you.  Make sure they’re periodically tagged in your posts. Research their giving habits.  For those with the potential for higher giving or deeper involvement, schedule meetings so you can ask them a whole lot of questions.

Have questions, challenges or ideas about your crowdfunding campaign? Book a free consultation so we can talk about it.