Crowd-Funding Evaluation Part 3: Spreading the Word

Like I said in part one, when you’re running a crowd-funding campaign you wake up every morning wracking your brains for some new way of encouraging donations today. In this post I’m going to look at all the things we did to promote the campaign.

Here are the top three things that led to donations, as far as I can tell:

  1. Emails to everyone in my address book
  2. An average of at least one Facebook post a day
  3. Appearance on Midlands Today
And here’s everything else we did. I can’t positively say that many of these things led directly to donations, but if nothing else I’m sure they contributed to general awareness which is also important for any campaign.

I found some websites and Facebook groups for audio cassette enthusiasts and some others for fans of time travel fiction, but my attempts to infiltrate them weren’t successful.

Places we asked to mention the campaign or spread the word, but we couldn’t get them to answer our messages:

  • Several popular indie filmmakers’ websites
  • Certain regional screen agencies who shall remain nameless
  • Local radio

I was particularly disappointed that none of the filmmakers were able to give even a brief mention to the project, especially as I sent them free invites to “How to Make a Fantasy Action Movie…” – the idea being that they would watch it, see what a unique and valuable resource it is for indie filmmakers and encourage their readers to donate in order to see it too. I’m sure these people get far more requests to promote crowd-funding campaigns than they could ever grant, but I felt sure that “How to Make…” would give us the edge.

To end this post on a more positive note, I must mention the brilliant Mike Rhodes who seemed to work like a demon promoting the campaign on Twitter, Facebook and anywhere else he could. Cheers, Mike!

In the final part of this evaluation I’ll be looking at the rewards we offered and the crowd-funding platform we chose. That should probably have been the first part. Whoops.

Crowd-Funding Evaluation Part 3: Spreading the Word