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Who designs not to plan, plans to fail.

Launching a crowdfunding campaign with a non-existent or partial strategy is the principal fail factor of many fundraising campaigns.

A successful crowdfunding campaign is the result of meticulous planning. Success arises from a constant experimentation and learning path, during which the creator builds his own community, engages with it, and stimulates curiosity to test the feasibility of his own project.

All this, before the launch.

Of course, planning don't ensure the success of fundraising process, but, certainly reduces the change of waste resources - time, energy, money - by launching a campaign that will not will have sufficiently support from the crowd.

That is why is fundamental keep in mind some simple tips:

1. Define your goal

In a crowdfunding campaign, the main aim is collect financial resources, but this new way to collect money allows also to reach collateral goals such as market test, advertising, community engagement. Define your primary goal - funds you need - and the secondary goals you want to achieve.

Turn your idea into a project.

2. Track down your community

Define clearly your customer target, be focused. Map virtual space of aggregation and dialogue of your community, build a simple landing page, invite people to subscribe mailing list to inform potential supporter on your project and its advancements.

Set social to disseminate your project, share customized contents, record feedback and engage a constructive dialogue with your audience. The preparation phase of a campaign can last 4 to 6 months, depending on the complexity of the goal you plan to achieve.

Dissemination on social media is crucial in crowdfunding, after all the natural framework of this tool is the web. A large number of followers is not itself indicative of success, the latter is related to conversion rate of the community. That is, the process that you will activate to turn interest in economic contribution.

If the community is not active and loyal to the project, hardly will support the launch of the campaign. A well structured social media strategy will allow to reach and acquire new profiled users who are potentially interested in the project so that you can reach your goal as quickly.

3. Budgeting, between strategy and harmony

Often crowdfunding is considered a cost-free way to raise funds. Nothing of more wrong, crowdfunding is a new tool to raise money and increase your community, with its own logic. A fundamental step to increase probability of success is a good budgeting activity, both respect funds you need, and the costs needed to invest in the launch and preparation of the campaign. Marketing pre-launch plan is the first investment you will consider. On average, the 10% of your funding goal will be invested in marketing pre-launch activities. For example, if you would achieve 100k, at least 10k will are going to be used to social media communication. A second is related to the funding goal. The financial target must be able to cover not only the costs associated with the production, but also delivery costs, platform fees, legal and business consultancy and all the costs associated with the campaign. Furthermore, you will not set the expected goals, but those achievable. To enhance the contribution, you can use the stretch goal mechanism, setting ambitious and original levels that stimulate old and new crowdfunders to reach the goal to get the exclusive rewards that you specifically create. Even in this case, set realistic stretch goals that can really add utility for your community.

Remember to save a quota of your required budget for any unforeseen events.

4. Validation, independent reviews

A crowdfunding campaign enable an organisation to test ahed of time the appeal of a new product or service on the market. Pre-selling mechanism allows crowdfunders to buy a product not launched yet. However, in reality, supporters are investing on the potential of a product, which will  be evaluated after receiving it, probably several months after the campaign expires.

Therefore, you can product reliability by asking for some independent reviews those will clarify functions and features of your proposal. Experts, bloggers, and influencers with whom you have already been in touch and which can support in terms of visibility your campaign.

ARE YOU READY TO START PLANNING YOUR SUCCESSFUL CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN?

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