Making a successful crowdfunding campaign is challenging, but gives great satisfaction. You read a lot of abstract advice about the appealing idea of raising capital online simply by telling engaging stories and creating an emotional connection with people on the other side of the screen, but the truth is that crowdfunding is more strategy than poetry.

A crowdfunding campaign is made up of communication, interaction, trust, yes, but also and perhaps most importantly of planning, data analysis, marketing actions and sales skills .

So let's take a practical and concrete look at the 10 essential tips for a successful crowdfunding campaign. Here they are in brief:

1. Check feasibility and choose the right type of crowdfunding
2. Doing careful preliminary planning (business plan, goals, targets)
3. Preparing a budget
4. Building marketing and sales processes
5. Designing a multichannel communication strategy
6. Produce professional marketing materials
7. Devising differentiated rewards
8. Doing precrowd
9. Monitor, adapt, interact during the campaign
10. Complete post-campaign fulfillments and maintain contact with investors.

1: Check feasibility and choose the right type of crowdfunding

Not all projects, all companies, and all business models are suitable for crowdfunding, and not all types of crowdfunding are suitable for the same project, company, or business model.

To evaluate whether crowdfunding is the right choice and to figure out which type of raising to choose, one needs to consider:

• The stage of maturity of the company
• The type of product/service offered and its stage of development
• The resources available (economic, technological, human, time)
• The goals of capital raising
• The breadth and type of the target audience of potential investors
• The medium-term growth plan.

To make a reasoned and effective analysis, we recommend testing our Crowdometer and reading our article on how to tell if a project is suitable for crowdfunding. You can also find a lot of other content in our blog that can help you choose the type of capital raising best suited to your company's needs.

Defining the type of crowdfunding is crucial because it will also influence the choice of platform and strategies to be adopted. 

The role of the platform in the success of a crowdfunding campaign is very marginal, but it is still important to analyze the different options available to you, evaluating:

• Types of crowdfunding 
• Mode of selection
• Costs and fees
• Geographic areas of operation
• Services offered
• User experience
• Success rate.

2: Doing careful preliminary planning

A successful crowdfunding campaign is never born out of improvisation. A meticulous and strategic approach lays the foundation for achieving goals and minimizes the risks of failure. This is why we always remember that you cannot do crowdfunding in your spare time; rather, you must consider it a business project like any other.

The preliminary planning phase involves defining the campaign's fundraising goal, the target audience of potential investors to target, and the use of the capital raised. It is essential, even before thinking about raising capital, to have a deep understanding of what you want to accomplish and the path to get there.

The documentation for the crowdfunding campaign.

The importance of planning is first and foremost reflected in the need to prepare the offering document, to integrate the crowdfunding campaign into the company's business plan, and to produce a special business plan dedicated to communication for the campaign and the submission of the project to a platform for selection.

The documentation must clearly articulate:

• The idea/product/service: Convincingly present the uniqueness of the proposal, the added value it offers, and the specific problem it intends to solve.
• The team: Describe the skills, previous experience and roles of the people involved in the project.
• Market: Analyze the target market context, positioning relative to competitors, and potential audience.
• Financial transparency: Detailing how the funds raised will be used is a crucial element in building trust and credibility. 

Goal setting

In parallel, it is necessary to define objectives, which must be specific, measurable, attainable and time-bound.

1. Economic goal: The minimum economic goal must be realistic. It must correspond to the minimum amount needed to sustain production, deliver promised rewards, cover platform fees, and cover marketing expenses.

Setting an unattainable goal may discourage potential supporters from the outset, while a goal that is too low may not be sufficient or may make the project appear unambitious. Setting the goal is therefore a strategic act: it must balance the actual needs of the project with a realistic estimate of collection capacity, based on a preliminary analysis of one's network and target market.

It is also useful to set a minimum and a maximum goal and to divide the path into intermediate stages, which will unlock differentiated marketing strategies and growth plans.

2. Qualitative objectives: Noneconomic goals may include visibility, market validation, community building, customer and partner acquisition, and positioning.

The identification of the target audience

Finally, an essential element of preliminary planning is the identification of the target audience. Drawing a profile of the ideal investor persona allows you to understand their demographics, interests, motivations, and the channels they frequent so that you can calibrate your communication and define effective rewards.

The basic starting point for target identification is the principle of the company's customer or potential customer as an ideal investor.

From this principle, one can divide the target audience into 3 categories, with the understanding that it is the second one that forms the strong core of a crowdfunding campaign: 

• Friends, family members, acquaintances
• Clients and potential clients
• Collaborators, partners, suppliers, other stakeholders.

A solid business plan and clarity of goals and target audience are not only tools for convincing platform and investors, but also represent a crucial internal compass for the team. During the hectic phases of the campaign and subsequent project implementation, having a well-defined reference plan enables consistent communication, managing supporters' expectations, making informed decisions in the face of unforeseen events, and staying the course toward established goals, strengthening overall credibility.

3: Prepare a budget

Running a crowdfunding campaign is not free. We repeat this often, because underestimating costs is one of the main causes of sinking campaigns. Knowing how much it costs to do crowdfunding is the basis for preparing a rational and realistic budget that can sustain the entire arc of the project and make the operation make sense from the point of view of economic benefit.

When talking about crowdfunding costs, all of the following items need to be considered:

• Production, logistics and shipping/reward costs 
• Platform fees and bank fees
• Advertising costs (ads, influencers, PR, material production)
• Software, other tools, and any outside consulting
• Taxes.

It may be useful to assume different scenarios: optimistic, realistic, cautious.

4: Building marketing and sales processes

Running a successful crowdfunding campaign requires an organized structure, regardless of the size of the company and team.

In order to make communication actions efficient and achieve results in terms of conversion, it is necessary to build marketing and sales processes that are defined at every stage. Each target user must be taken through a funnel: lead generation, nurturing, conversion, follow-up. This requires the design of a step-by-step path, in which user actions generate predefined reactions that guide him or her to the next stage. Each stage may have to be repeated several times to lead the user to conversion, making it essential to have contact management and funnel monitoring tools in place to properly curate each contact and not miss any opportunities.

Examples:

• CRM (HubSpot, Mautic, Mailchimp): to segment, contact and manage leads
• Optimized landing pages (WordPress, Unbounce)
• Automation and tracking software (Google Analytics, Make, Zapier)
• Contact collection forms (Typeform, Jotform).

While it is the marketing activities that attract target users to the early stages of the journey, it is up to the sales department to guide them to the destination: phone contact, video call and operational support are crucial to close any investment. A user left to his own devices is almost always a lost user.

5: Design a multichannel communication strategy.

Communication for crowdfunding is the main lever for generating interest and trust and gaining contacts. An effective strategy involves presiding over multiple channels and using different tools, in an integrated way, to reach target audiences and create interaction:

• Social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok)
• Email marketing 
• Content marketing: blogs, podcasts, webinars
• Online and offline events where possible
• Paid advertising (Meta Ads, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads)
• Media (press releases, interviews)

For each phase of the campaign, a weekly editorial plan must be created and content distributed across each of the chosen channels, alternating between informational content about the project and crowdfunding, emotional posts, progress updates, calls to action, and interactive content. All while maintaining consistency of tone and style.

A well-orchestrated multichannel strategy, in which different channels work in synergy, allows you to reach the right people, with the right message, at the right time, maximizing your overall impact. For example, advertising can generate traffic and leads, email marketing can nurture these leads and drive them to conversion, social media can maintain engagement and encourage sharing, and traditional media outlets can provide external validation and credibility.

A successful communication strategy for crowdfunding goes beyond simply publishing posts and sending emails; it requires actively creating moments that stimulate sharing and interaction. Publicly celebrating milestones, thanking early supporters in a special way, launching creative contests, or cleverly inserting oneself into current trends are all tactics that transform the campaign from a one-sided plea for money to a participatory and engaging event that people are naturally inclined to share with their networks, amplifying its organic reach and potential virality.

6: Produce professional marketing materials

It is not true that "amateurish is beautiful." If you are talking about asking people for money, you have to be professional, not amateurish: only then can you inspire trust and be credible.

The visual and textual materials with which the company promotes itself and its crowdfunding campaign are its calling card. Poor quality images and videos, text full of errors or syntactical inconsistencies, landing pages lacking structure or with old layouts convey unreliability and incompetence.

While it is true that storytelling skills are critical to capturing and keeping the interest of the audience, it is equally true that no good story will ever be listened to if it is poorly packaged.

To avoid having to improvise, it is best to prepare in advance:

• Pitch
• Video presentation of the team and the multi-part project
• Landing page
• Coordinated graphics for each channel
• Informative and persuasive texts
• FAQ.

Relying on experienced graphic designers, videomakers and copywriters is the best choice. When this is not possible, it is necessary to stick to simple materials that are easy to produce on your own, so as to avoid the amateur effect and gross error.

7: Devise differentiated rewards

Rewards are the prizes offered to those who participate in a crowdfunding campaign and are a key lever-we explain in detail why in our article on how to use rewards to find investors. This applies not only to reward crowdfunding, but also to equity and lending.

Rewards must be perceived as adding value to justify the contribution and must be differentiated and limited to induce a sense of urgency to participate in the campaign and a sense of exclusivity for those who participate.

The concept of a “reward matrix” involves adopting a tiered strategy, offering a range of contribution options, from small amounts to larger sums, each associated with a reward of proportionate value. Reward offerings also need to be time-based, rewarding early birds and differentiating the value of rewards for those who invest in each phase of the campaign.

8: Doing precrowd: building the investor base before launching

This is perhaps the most important advice for a successful crowdfunding campaign. Launching a crowdfunding campaign “cold,” without a pre-existing audience, is a major cause of failure. Precrowd consists of gathering contacts, informing and persuading early interested parties, and creating an initial hard core of supporters before launching the campaign.

To do this, you put into practice the marketing strategies already planned for the campaign to do lead generation and qualify contacts, but you also activate your personal and professional network.

The goal of the pre-launch phase is to obtain pre-commitment, that is, a concrete expression of interest in supporting the campaign once it is launched. Having a large group of supporters ready to contribute in the very first hours and days after launch is critical to stimulate others to participate as well and facilitate subsequent marketing activities.

9: Monitor, optimize and interact during the campaign

Even after doing an excellent precrowd, once the campaign is launched one cannot simply sit back and wait for the results. You have to keep working to get the most out of it and to deal with the physiological downturn or stall that comes about halfway through the campaign.

Here's how:

• Monitor the Most relevant KPIs
• Adjust communication if something is not working 
• Introducing new rewards and stretch goals
• Regularly update the public on the progress of the campaign
• Respond quickly to questions, comments, and appointment requests
• Organize moments of direct interaction with the community (webinars, polls, contests, etc.).

10: Manage post-campaign fulfillment and maintain contact with the community

True success is measured after the campaign is over. After reaching the goal, it is time to consolidate the results, maintain the trust of supporters, and lay the foundation for future growth from the tangible and intangible assets gained. This includes:

• Thanking and updating supporters
• Take care of the paperwork (e.g., registration of new members for equity crowdfunding, implementation of amortization plan for lending crowdfunding, reporting and accountability activities) 
• Delivering rewards in a timely manner
• Staying in touch with the community through a group, a newsletter, a privileged channel
• Turn supporters into customers, partners, or ambassadors
• Analyze the results (qualitative and quantitative) and document the entire process to reuse this data for the benefit of future projects.

These "10 commandments" of crowdfunding are the indispensable guide to making a successful crowdfunding campaign: following them does not guarantee infallibility, but ignoring them guarantees high chances of failure.