mistakes made in my crowdfunding campaign

Thanks so much to those who have supported the Indiegogo campaign for Chocolatour during its four-week run. We raised approximately $8,000 on and offline during the 30-day campaign. That was enough to do a small print run and cover the production costs for the book. Gratefully, donations continued to trickle in via the Chocolatour site from people who missed the Indiegogo campaign or preferred to send cheques.

As there has been tremendous interest in crowdfunding from the writing and creative community at large, I thought I’d sum up the experience by sharing the mistakes I made during my own campaign, so that you don’t make the same mistakes if you launch your own campaign. The 2 previous posts on this blog shared why I chose to crowdfund my project and tips I learned from the crowdfunding process.

Mistakes I made in my crowdfunding campaign for Chocolatour:

• I set my goal too high. Setting a more realistic goal would have been smarter. I was reaching for the stars at $15,000. It was what I hope for, as I could have printed a sizeable print run of 500 copies using my printer of choice, and had enough left to pay my editor and designer and some some promotional events. Had I set my goal at $10,000 I have no doubt I could have reached it. Statistics have proven that more people will support a campaign that is likely to achieve its goal. As well, had I reached my goal, Indiegogo would have refunded 5% of the fees they charged me.
• I should have studied the algorithm that determines the “gogofactor” on Indiegogo. These parameters determine whether IG will promote your campaign or not. I didn’t know about this until just 2 days before the end of my campaign (my mistake for not reading the site’s Help pages thoroughly.) It says that they will promote campaigns that have a lot of activity. If I’d asked my entire network to each tweet or share the link in the beginning of my campaign and make comments on the site, it would have created an algorithm that would have got me noticed by Indiegogo.
• My video was too long. The video itself was only about 4 minutes, but then we added a slideshow with  music, and a few wrap-up comments and the next thing I knew we were at 8 minutes! Gratefully, enough people took the time to watch it or made donations without watching the video, but with people’s shortage of time and short attention spans these days, shorter is better. We should have done the slideshow as a separate video. Not as part of the pitch video.
• I should have become known on the Indiegogo site before I launched my own campaign. I had supported a few Kickstarter projects before I launched my own campaign as they seemed worthy of my support and I was trying to learn the ropes. I then realized KS doesn’t accept Canadian projects, so I had to turn to Indiegogo and was unknown there. I think that your overall activity on the Indiegogo site also affects your algorithm.

I think that these four faux-pas were the reason my campaign did not reach the goal I was reaching for.

I hope this information has helped you understand the process. I’d been told my at least one person that the idea of crowdfunding is so foreign to them. But it is definitely a concept that is catching on and becoming much more mainstream.

I was also asked if I would do it again. I’m not sure. It was highly stressful and consumed an entire month of my time. And initially, I thought that it is only  polite to reach out for help one time. But the concept has really taken on in the past few years and I just may do it again for the second volume of the book unless I find an alternate source of funding to help me bring Volume II of Chocolatour to fruition.

If you have any tips to share about crowdfunding, please do so here. We’re all learning from one another. And we’re all here to help one another.