Crowdfunding 101
Presented by Dana Ostomel, Firespring.org
June 21, 2017
Presented in collaboration with The Foundation Center New York
Crowdfunding has quickly become an essential tool in the fundraising toolbox. It allows organizations to leverage their networks to raise more money, faster, from a larger audience and is changing the face of nonprofit fundraising as donors welcome a more engaged approached to giving. Your organization can leverage crowdfunding to not only raise money, but achieve other goals as well—everything from being a hand-raiser tool to changing the culture of giving and engagement in your community.
Top 3 Takeaways:
1. Crowdfunding is about engagement, fun and ease—the marriage of marketing and processing that compels the audience to give and share. Crowdfunding platforms make it simple for you to create a focused, mission-specific campaign that is effective because it shows the need and allows supporters to belong to something bigger than themselves.
2. Crowdfunding campaigns do not take off by magic, or even by a couple of Facebook posts and email blasts. The success of your campaign will hinge on how prepared you are. It is critical to develop the team and tools to create a lot of noise about your campaign. Do not count on the internet to make your campaign viral; you make it viral. Line people up in advance to give and share when you want and prepare urgent calls to action that whip people up into a frenzy.
3. Deploy immediate appreciation as an engagement strategy—you want to put people in the mood to share with gratitude. As much as you want their capital, you really want their social capital because that gives you access to new potential donors. You need to create an army of evangelists that will recruit on your behalf, and to build that army. You need to make people feel like their support matters and keep them engaged with the progress of the campaign. Captivating these new advocates will allow you to easily ask them to share and invite their friends to support the campaign as well.
