Useful Resources: Preparing your crowdfunding campaign page

Setting up your crowdfunding campaign page

Here’s a step-by-step guide to preparing your crowdfunding campaign page, with lots of useful resources to get you started on setting up a successful project.

STEP 1: Choose your crowdfunding platform

There are a range of different crowdfunding platforms to choose from (eg Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, Crowdfunder) – choose whichever will best suit your project. Make an account if you don’t have one already. While you’re there, back an existing campaign or two (even just for a low pledge of £1 / $1) – this will give you the opportunity to follow other creators’ work and see how they have set up their crowdfunding campaign pages and manage their campaigns.

STEP 2: Start a draft project

Starting a draft project page / campaign page will give you a ‘preview link’ to share with friends, advisors and collaborators when you’re ready for feedback – you’re going to need as many eyes as possible to look at your campaign to suggest improvements & additions BEFORE you launch.

STEP 3: Start to populate your crowdfunding campaign page

Here’s a list of the project basics you’ll need to set up a successful project page. You will need to generate all of the following:

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A project image
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A project pitch video
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A short project description
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A longer project pitch text
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Some images related to your rewards
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A list of rewards with prices
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To help you to get going on this, I have collected together lots of useful resources below. Explore the links to see what you’ll need and how to generate the different elements of your crowdfunding campaign page.

You might also find my other posts on Designing great crowdfunding rewards, Creative Crowdfunding Reward Ideas & Building a crowdfunding team useful at this stage too…

Making Your Video

Crowdfunder (2016) Bootcamp 2016: Making your video

Kickstarter (2016) Let’s Make Your Project Video

Writing Your Pitch

Chuffed.org (2017) Create Your Page [online] Available at: https://chuffed.org/how-it-works-crowdfunding/create-your-page

Here’s an excerpt from an excellent post by Chuffed.org giving useful worked examples of how best to write your project pitch & project description. Check out the whole article for lots more tips & information…

Examples of good and bad pitches from Chuffed.org – https://chuffed.org/how-it-works-crowdfunding/create-your-page/

Crowdfunder (2016) Bootcamp 2016: Telling your story

Kickstarter (2016) Creator Handbook: Telling your story

READ: www.kickstarter.com/help/handbook/your_story

Project Image

Kickstarter (2016) Creator Handbook: How to make a great project image

READ: https://www.kickstarter.com/help/images

General Pointers

It’s worth have a good look through the whole of Kickstarter’s Creator Handbook, which guides you through the process of getting started, telling your story, building rewards, promoting your project, communicating with backers and fulfilment (how you plan to deliver your rewards).

Kickstarter (2016) Creator Basics Playlist – (scroll through the playlist to find videos relevant to your type of project)

Example Projects

You’ll definitely find it useful to look at examples of successful & unsuccessful projects, and take time to carefully analyse what they have done well to attract a crowd to support their project. I’ve also made an easy to use Crowdfunding Project Analysis Toolkit that will help you focus your analysis – you can download it here!

If you get stuck, take a look at some example projects:

Have I missed something? Do you have a great crowdfunding resource that I should include here too? Or examples of great projects I should list as examples? Let me know in the comments below, or tweet me @RachelDobbs1 and I’ll include it in a future post!!

You can read more crowdfunding hints and tips here, and check out this post on Building your crowdfunding team for more ideas on how to get started.

New to crowdfunding?
Check out my quick start guide to crowdfunding!!

Rachel Dobbs is one half of LOW PROFILE, an artist and educator based in Plymouth, UK. Rachel works on a range of arts and education projects, has a long-term interest in creative approaches to community development and runs workshops, teaching & training sessions for a range of formal & informal groups including students, arts practitioners and communities – contact me for more details.