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4 Myths of Crowdfunding and PR

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It’s never been easier — or harder — to raise funds for a good cause.

Easier because the tools exist for literally anyone to pull together a campaign.

Harder because it requires skills and thinking patterns that don’t come naturally to everyone.In other words, like most things, it looks easier than it is.

Here are 4 common myths around crowd funding and PR and some actionable tips you need to know before you embark on any campaign.

1. A mass of people will magically form around my good cause
Um. No. Okay maybe but really, no.

It is not unusual for a mythology to spring up around a campaign. And it usually goes like this: we just set up a Kickstarter page and the money started rolling in.

In reality, most campaigns don’t hit their goals.

The ones that do usually have a fleshed out strategy which include tactics to increase traction from a broader audience.

Helpful tips:

  • Identify supporters who can get you to at least 20 per cent of your goal before you ever get out the door. A fast ramp up showing momentum helps.
  • Be prepared for a lull in the campaign in the middle.
  • Shorter campaigns (like 30 or 40 days if a high ticket item) do better than long drawn out crowd sourced fund raisers of a year or so.
  • Urgency drives donations so if you do have campaigns that have a longer arc, you need to build in incentives that become scarce at certain points of the campaign so as to drive people to give now
  • Rewards for donation types and levels matter. They need to define your supporters as true insiders and rock stars. Nothing less will do.

2. If we hire somebody, we don’t have to do anything
Hey there champ. Shhhhh. Listen. Do you hear what your campaign is trying to tell you? Chances are you can’t over the crickets.

If you are crowd funding your campaign, mobilizing your existing supporters is super duper helpful. That usually means engaging your existing supporters to help engage new ones.

Helpful tips:
Build your “ladder of engagement.” Design your supporter experience so that they come in on a relatively low rung where something, not much, but some action is required of them. Then move them to something requiring a bit more commitment or skill.

Keep moving them up while at the same time rewarding them as they move up.

It takes thought and care to create a ladder that works both for the organization and its supporters. But it is absolutely critical to the success of most successful cause-based organizations that are making waves today.

The ladder of engagement is critical to your success too.

3. If it doesn’t work, we’ll just go out and get corporate sponsorship
By the time you realize your campaign isn’t catching on, it might not be a sponsor-worthy event.Here’s why:

    • Sponsors like to be part of something that has momentum more than they like bailing out something that really isn’t working in the first place
    • More often than not, sponsors like to co-create in some meaningful way (or at least have a say in some big part of it) whatever it is they are going to support.

Helpful Tips:
If you are going to try and re-jig something existing for corporate sponsorship, take a step back and think through what you could do or offer that will make it worthy of and exciting for that sponsor.

They have business objectives to meet. Your job is to help them see how they could meet those objectives through your rejigged event.

4. Lots of high profile PR will translate to dollars:
Boy, we wish that one were true. Sometimes it happens that way. But usually not.

Seeing something on the news elicits compassion for causes but rarely donations.

Causes where someone is in immediate peril, like say an elderly woman who was swindled out of her apartment and life savings, yes, those get heavily supported when covered by the news.

But a cause where an innocent victim isn’t in immediate peril through no fault of their own? Not so much.

Helpful Tips:

  • Play on the “us” and know who “they” are, the bad guys, or at least, the people who aren’t like you.
  • Wear your values on your sleeve and everywhere else you can think of and invite other “us’s” to break away from “them” and find community with you.
  • Mine your cause for urgency and scarcity. People donate now because there are consequences for this cause or effort not moving ahead now.
  • Map your content to your sales funnel and use it to pull people up the rungs on your ladder of engagement.

It all has to work together. Just throwing some PR at the problem won’t solve it.

Yeah, I know. There’s a lot to do.

And you were hoping to find a blog post about how just pushing a button or hiring a social media expert would bring in bucket loads of cash.

The bad news is, it doesn’t work that way.

But while it might not work the way you had envisioned or hoped, you can pull all of these tools together to mobilize hundreds, thousands or even millions of people.

It starts with the people you already have on side. And you.

Susan McLennan

Susan McLennan

Founder at ReImaginePR
Susan McLennan helps brands become better storytellers both through the media and through direct and digital communications. She is an award-winning communicator with a background in television production who has secured media coverage through some of the top media outlets in the world and created content that has won hearts and changed minds locally, nationally and internationally.
Susan McLennan

@SusanMcLennan