Crowdfunding is an excellent way to get attention and funding for your project. But it isn’t something you put up and walk away from. The more you put in the more return you will see. There are many ways you can maximums the amount of interest it gathers and we are here to teach you the tricks! Let’s look at things you can do on day one in less than an hour.
1. Complete your Twitter account set up and follow as many people that would be interested in your area as you can find. Twitter makes this easy but if you are having trouble, go here and search on relevant terms and follow who comes up. Make sure you put a link to your project into your twitter profile and get rid of that egg with a picture of you or your company, preferably both. People fund people and they want to see people. Make sure you follow and tweet your campaign to @MedStartr and me @alexbfair and see these as examples as well. We will amplify your messages. Use Tweedeck or Hootsuite to manage multiple accounts.
2. Facebook is a great source of traffic too, so do the same there. Here is our page as an example: www.facebook.com/medstartr. Also be welcome to post your project there. Since Facebook is your personal crowd, they will be the first ones to show their support. We recommend you ask for help there but make it clear you are asking for their early support the first day. Use your short story blurb discussed below.
3. Make sure your linked in for you and your team members shows your company as your primary activity and you as a fundable person. Once there, join up to 50 relevant groups for your project. Don’t post your project to them the first day but join the conversation a little. Just like any social situation, do the small talk first, establish the conversation, and then people will listen to you. If you are already an active community member, then go ahead and tell people what you are doing and ASK for their support. Join us there here too: Alex, MedStartr Ventures, and the MedStartr LinkedIn Community.
4. Write your Short Story Blurb as a teaser – You should have a pretty good start at this in your project just below the video. Now take this and package it up and keep it somewhere you can get to it easily. Use it to send to anyone you are asking for help from. We recommend opening a note, doc, or spreadsheet to track all your content. To do this right you will be reusing the same stuff in many places, so start that now.
Pro tip: Spreadsheets have the advantage of being useful for autogenerating messages easily.
5. Click ALL the social media buttons on your project (under the video) and you should get pretty good versions with a link to your project too. Tell enough of your story to intrigue people and get them to click. You can use this on linked in, Facebook, emails and the like.
6. Relax – You can do this. We will be here with you every day with advice like this and it will work. You or someone on your team (Go Intern!) should only spend an hour or two a day on promotion. Once set up you can outsource some of the effort but to be authentic you need to be involved managing it, so it is better to keep it in house, in our view.
Crowdfunding is not a trivial task but like any project, if you take it one step at a time, you can get amazing results and move your idea forward faster than any other method.