CROWDFUNDING TOOLKIT

Preparing for the Show Get Organized Organize your and your team’s tasks with Trello, which is a free tool, helping organize things effectively. Your success will depend 90% on your preparation.

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www.trello.com The preparation period highly depends on your funding goal, your expertise, and your network. But on average consider starting 3-4 months before and begin building relationships with various organizations that would be interested in your cause or project. Start building your team. When you have 10 people who know 10 more, who then know 10 more, suddenly you have 1,000 hot prospects. If you start with just yourself or a friend, it can still be done, but you will struggle more.

Preparing for the Show Create a Landing Page You need to build an email database and make your communications mainly via email, because in this way you will have time to continuously gain the trust of your customer.

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www.launchrock.com Landing page – a simple page where you should offer something in return for an email, e.g. enter your email to download this ebook for free or to subscribe to updates. The tip is that the ebook doesn't have to be yours, you can find something related in internet. Get a FREE landing page with this tool.

Preparing for the Show Collect Leads from Twitter

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This program takes Twitter from a social media site to a warm leads mining operation. You enter the criteria that fits your buying persona, and Socedo finds profiles that fit. You page through the leads, approve, reject, or hold for later, and Socedo reaches out with a DM you set up.

www.socedo.com The coolest thing is that the program responds to the lead's response, which makes it seem more personal and a lot less like conversing with a bot. Qualified leads are sent to sales. It's a great way to keep your sales pipeline full and your salespeople busy.

Preparing for the Show Schedule your Emails

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Create email templates for three category contacts based on your relationships: cold, warm, hot. You should be busy with other stuff, so you don't need to remember to send emails to your database all the time, better to schedule them using a Gmail plugin Boomerang.

www.boomeranggmail.com People mostly ask for too many things (“Back us! Tweet! Like us on Facebook! Email friends!), which often results in people doing nothing at all. First tell your story (no mention about money), then get expand little by little. Don't forget to remain personal when sending your emails.

Raising Awareness

Raising Awareness Use Re-Targeted Advertisements Re-targeting is a powerful tool for showing your ad to people who visited your landing page, but left it without the desired action.

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www.perfectaudience.co www.adroll.com These services will allow you to catch people who have visited your website along the internet. You can also you Facebook’s re-targeting tools to show your ad to people who visited you in Facebook.

Raising Awareness Raise Awareness Everywhere Use the following websites to generate a huge amount of traffic:

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www.40billion.com www.Gadgetflow.com Buy a tweet to 150,000 people for 10$ at 40billion.com. If your product is cool enough, one of the best options is to be listed in the gadgetflow.com website. Pricing starts from $99 and will bring you great traffic.

Raising Awareness Launch Thunderclap Campaign Use Thunderclap to make a coordinated social media effort:

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www.thunderclap.it It's a tool that allows a single message to be mass-shared, flash mob-style, so it rises above the noise of your social networks. Launch a Thunderclap campaign a week in advance of your campaign. This will allow you to send out a social media message about your campaign on your launch day to over 100,000 people. If you are able to sign up enough people, Thunderclap can become a great tool to amplify your reach even further.

Raising Awareness Find the Right Blog

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Start looking for those crowdfunding projects which are similar to yours. Then, copy the images and drag and drop the image file into the search bar at images.google.com. You'll be shown every website that has ever posted that image. Filter out blogs listed on the results page to see which might be relevant to your project.

images.google.com You probably know someone, who knows someone, who knows the owner of that blog. Without introduction your chances to be heard could be quite low. They get pitched every day by strangers who don't care about them and only want publicity. Find out ways to be helpful to them and make relationships.

Raising Awareness Create a Facebook Event Nowadays it is hard to get onto your friends' newsfeed as you are competing with tons of other information. It is far easier to get your friends' attention by creating a virtual Facebook event and inviting all your friends to it.

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Create a Facebook event 4 weeks before your launch. To ease your job, use the “Invite all” extension for chrome, to invite all of your friends with a single click. Don't forget to include links that direct to your landing page. In your text description put at least 4 of the same links (those are

Raising Awareness Create a Facebook Event Event Notification to All:

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Change the time of your event periodically. Does this surprise you? Well, when you change the time, everybody who joined your event receives a notification. This way, you don't allow them to forget about you. Do you think it will make them nervous? Well for some, maybe, but for most of them it will be a perfect reminder. Change the time of your event once every couple of days in the first three weeks and per day in the last week.

Attacking the Press

Attacking the Press Find Articles of Needed Authors

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Write down the topics that are somehow associated to your product. Categorize them according to their importance. Define the Keywords that are relevant to your topic from various angles.

http://press.customerdevlabs.com/ Find articles from your field. To do it in an organized way, go to this website above. Search for a keyword and download all the articles in a CSV file.

Attacking the Press Build Journalists' Contact List

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Open Google docs and categorize journalists in it according their specialty, liked topics, interests etc. Sort them according to their name, journal, fields of interests, means of contact. Use Oscraper to collect the results easily.

www.oscraper.com Hint for a search: Try searching the following ways on Google: џ “[first name]@[website they write for].com” e.g. "[email protected]" џ “[first initial][last name]@[domain].com” e.g. "[email protected]" џ “[first name].[last name]@[domain].com” e.g. "[email protected]”

Attacking the Press You can also try to find the contact information of journalists in the following websites: www.crunchbase.com — a comprehensive database

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www.followerwonk.com — a tool that let’s you search people’s Twitter bio’s, www.muckrack.com — where you can find the right person to pitch by searching keywords, company names, competitors, beats, outlets, media types and more, www.grouphigh.com — is a media database that provides information on reporters including: location, email, phone numbers, social media profiles and areas of focus, www.buzzsumo.com— a tool that finds journalists and bloggers and creates alerts for future posts, Some of these tools are very expensive, but they all provide about 2 weeks free trials. Negotiate with them to give you a trial and export everything you need.

Attacking the Press Find Contacts from Fiverr Fiverr is one of the best platforms to outsource some of your activities, but it is also a great place to find the contacts of journalists who love to write about Kickstarter, Indiegogo etc.

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Use this gig to get very influential contacts very cheap:

www.fiverr.com/crowdfundingtip

Attacking the Press Choose the Right Contact Time Combine all your media and press releases at once to build momentum. It is similar to a dose of penicillin; a small dose has no effect, while you need a certain amount to have results.

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Download Streak:

www.streak.com Streak will notify you when the writer has opened your emails (or ignored it) or if the writer hasn't seen it yet (and you should try again, but from a different angle).

Attacking the Press Submit your Press Release Submit your press release in PR Log.

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PR Log is an online press release distribution and press release submission service.

www.prlog.org Most of the services are free. You can also use abnewswire.com and prleap.com for press release distribution. Pricing is $40 and $99 accordingly. Besides awareness, you’ll get number of back-links and enhance your SEO.

Structuring the Page

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There are many rules on how your video should be, but taking into account the success rates, we offer the following: џ Introduction: Just a few words, џ Problem: Why the problem is important, Why other analogues cannot solve it, џ Solution: Why you decided to solve it, What will it affect to, What is the solution, џ Team: Who are your team members, are they capable to do that, are they willing to do that, џ Technology: How are you gonna solve the problem, what technology will be utilized, џ Outcomes: What will be the final result, what it will look like, џ Call to Action: Join us to make it a reality, Try to make backers part of your team. Do not ask for "help" with "donations". Rather ask your community to join your team and be part of what you are doing. You're contributing and they're contributing and together you will make something spectacular.

Structuring the Page Video Music should Inspire It is highly recommended that you use a background music in your video. It will inspire visitors and give a spirit to your video.

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www.audiojungle.net You can search for inspirational background music at this sites as well, you definitely will find the right one: www.marmosetmusic.com www.royaltyfreemusic.com www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music

Before you Start

Be Personal. People fund people — not ideas...

Structuring the Page Do not Put Links in your Description It is very, very important not to make your visitors go away from your page and be lost forever.

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Authors make a huge mistake when putting many links in their project description pages for the sponsors to see how awesome they are. Do not do that! They will drive them away and they will not come back. It is better to embed all the images and videos within your project page, using the available tools!

Before you Start Keep it 31 Days The most successful projects run from 30-40 days. People are not fond of waiting.

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Longer campaigns do not mean more money. If you collect 15-20% of your funding in the first 5 days, your chances will be quite high. If you decide to make it within 30 days, write 31 days, as the registration day is not counted and the system will show 29 days.

Started, What’s next...

Started, What’s next... Shorten your Campaign URL Shorten your URL by using the bit.ly website, as you don't need these long, long, links of your URL to copy and paste all the time. Shorten your URL with custom keywords with this service.

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www.bit.do You can also you bit.ly and goo.gl for the sam epurposes, but with bit.do you will get custom URL. If you add a + to the end of any bit.ly URL in your browser and press Enter, you can see statistics about that link.

Started, What’s next... Share your Updates When asking backers to help you spread the word, use this tool to share your campaign with your custom message:

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www.hrefshare.com A tool that enables you to pre-load a Facebook or Twitter share so in your updates you can give backers a single button to click to share something interesting about the project. For many campaigns it turned out to be more effective than just asking people to share.

Started, What’s next... Use Referral Contest Creating a contest for your crowdfunding campaign is a great way to incentivize potential backers to become involved with your project early on: https://www.rafflecopter.com/

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Using the software, you can create and launch giveaway promotions & sweepstakes across your website, blog, and Facebook page. PunchTab is another online giveaway software that lets you incentivize users to take actions in exchange for prizes: http://www.punchtab.com/ PromoSimple offers similar functionality as the two above solutions. You can design the entry form, enforce age and location restrictions, accept Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest & Twitter entries, etc. https://promosimple.com/

Started, What’s next... Say “Thank You” with Tags We need benefits everywhere. Hence, when you are saying thanks to someone who has contributed to your campaign (do it especially for big backers), don't forget to Tag him/her on Facebook and mention the URL of your campaign page.

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It is a great way to generate some traffic by notifying the friends of backers and directing them to your page.

Started, What’s next... Pin Your Message Everywhere

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When sharing content, use Sniply to attach a message to the page itself. You can include a link back to your own website, Kickstarter campaign, Eventbrite page, Shopify cart, Amazon product and more!

www.snip.ly Snip.ly will allow you to share great articles from famous magazines like Forbes, Mashable, New York Times etc. with your personal message and button with a link - that will drive visitors wherever you wish to. It’s free and will provide you with an opportunity to have customized advertisement on whatever you share. Get “57 Secrets of Crowdfunding” strategy to learn more.

Finally