In last week’s blog post, we shared some advice for promoting your crowdfunding project. This week, we’re continuing our series on crowdfunding education with tips for expressing your message and offering rewards:
1. Crafting a compelling message
- Communicate your passion – it’s contagious! Backers want to connect with you personally, so it’s a good idea to narrate your video yourself. This helps build understanding and interpersonal trust.
- Use your project’s text descriptions to teach, inform and interest your readers about your work. Tell them who you are, what you do, and why it’s important.
- Keep it short, sweet, and accessible. Write for a general audience, explaining any scientific concepts and avoiding jargon when possible.
- Clearly explain what you will do with your funding, and why that work is meaningful.
- The pictures you feature are crucial to your project’s success. Choose visually beautiful images to draw people in and encourage them to share with their social networks.
2. Offering incredible rewards across a wide range of price-points
- Rewards help backers feel truly connected to the research by offering them mementos and tokens of appreciation in exchange for their support.
- Rewards should be fun, tangible and provide value in exchange for the contribution.
- Offer rewards for support starting at $1 (so anybody can participate), and increase the wow factor of the rewards as the funding level increases. Having a really unique or buzzworthy high-tier reward will help market your project.
- Make rewards unique whenever possible. Handwrite, sign, customize and personalize rewards to make backers feel that their support is being appreciated in a thoughtful way.
- Enticing rewards will range broadly based on the price-point.
- At lower donation levels, offer rewards that will be easy for you to distribute. Examples include weekly email updates or acknowledgments on your website.
- As price increases, appealing rewards can include frame or signed photographs of the work, acknowledgment in resulting publications, and even naming a species or taking a trip into the field with the scientist.
Got more tips? Comment and let us know!