Quick Tips and Wish-I-Hads

A “top 10+” of obvious, inobvious, and useful suggestions from variously successful and nonsuccessful campaigns.

• Spam Control: Set up an email address and possibly a facebook page for the campaign. You’re going to get a massive flood of useful and useless email, best if it goes to one place.
• Map Your Campaign: Plan each week’s strategy in terms of how you’re going to sell yourself and your project. Unroll stretch goals a few at a time, get a new banner ad, “signal boost” from a similar campaign…stage it out.
• Shipping Cost, International Shipping Cost: Don’t forget to factor that shipping fee into your pledge points! You’re already losing 10% from each sale, don’t cost yourself more. And overseas shipping is pricey. Consider setting up a separate pledge point for internationals.
• Round Two: Indiegogo is good for “cleanup” fundraising and round-twos. If you have a large expensive project, consider breaking it up into chunks and funding those (lower fees on IGG if you meet your goal). Or launch the project on Kickstarter and come back a few months later on IGG for a little extra.
• Communicate! But not too much!: A campaign with no updates/emails seems dead. Sending a note every day seems spammy. One or two notes a week feels like a happy medium, and people know when you’re sending a note just to seem more active.
• You can change the story, but not the rewards: Keep the fine details about what’s in the Complete Package in the body of the story, not in the “rewards” bar. It keeps the Rewards bar short and easy to skim, and you can change things and add them as you need to. This is not necessarily the most honest thing to do, but at least it can be done…
• Letting Go: “We did as much research as we could before launching, but at a point, you have to stop looking at it and push that green ‘Launch’ button.” (Thanks, Jeff!)

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