Crowdfunding: Campaign Research

After you complete your platform research, the next step involves locating and reach out to campaign owners who ran campaigns similar in some way to the one you want to launch. Ask them if they would be willing to discuss their campaign experience. In most cases, campaign research should take you about another week or so to do effectively.

You may want to begin by sending the campaign owners a brief introduction email, saying you saw their campaign and were impressed. Add that you are thinking about launching a similar campaign. Many platforms include a link for you to contact the owner or founder. Ask if they can spare a few minutes for you to pick their brain about their experience. If they agree to speak to you, here is a list of information you should try to glean from the discussion:

• Is there any topic-specific advice they could share?
• Did they find any social group (e.g., LinkedIn or Facebook) that yielded good interest from members?
• Did they use any online forums or websites that proved successful?
• How about blogs or bloggers that were receptive to guest posts?
• Ask them for a list of journals or publications that were interested in hearing about their campaign.
• What was their biggest challenge?
• If they used Kickstarter or another platform with built-in analytics, see if they are willing to share their campaign analytics with you so you can see who visited the campaign in detail. You will want to see where they came from, what page they sat on, how long they sat on it when they donated, and how they backed the project.
• If they had to do it all over again, what would they have done differently?
• Finally, see if they will provide you the list of their backers.

As a follow-up, you can enter the campaign name into a Google search engine to find:

• A list of activities they used to promote their campaign.
• Posts they used to promote their campaign.
• The websites they used to promote their campaign.

To help you with your research download a copy of our free Crowdfunding Campaign Research Form

To learn what was said on Twitter about their campaign, you can use the Twitter advances search feature to see tweets that discussed their campaign.

What did you learn from talking to similar campaign owners and founders to help you make your upcoming campaign better?