Wednesday, April 4, 2018

How to Crowdfund

How to Crowdfund

How to Crowdfund


Much as with grant writing, you will need to step out of your comfortable researcher mindset if you wish to pursue crowdfunding. You will need to learn another set of skills: marketing.

Crowdfunding is a lot more liberating than grant writing. There are no rules you need to play by, no formats you need to adhere to, and no abstracts or methodologies. While this freedom sounds agreeable, it is surprisingly not your ally. Without a structure to guide you, it is easy to lose yourself in the blank canvas of your inexperience.

It is a misconception that crowdfunding is easy. Asking a crowd for money is easy. It’s as simple as writing a short statement and putting it online. Getting money from that crowd, however, is a whole other matter. Have you done basic market research? What is your value proposition? What platforms are you including in your social media strategy? Have you scheduled posts? What does your public interaction timeline look like? Do you understand the italic words in the last five sentences? As with all new experiences, your first crowdfunding campaign will be a challenge. Are you feeling that the challenge is not worth the reward? You shouldn’t. Even if your first attempt fails, the concepts and skills you will pick up along this journey are the foundations of effective communication skills.

We won’t go into the full details of how to set up, write for, and maintain interest in your crowdfunded project - entire books and guides have been written on the subject. We will, however, give you a quick overview of the key steps you should take, some best practices, and an idea of what exactly is required of you. This will allow you to determine if crowdfunding is an avenue you wish to pur sue or not.

For ease of reading, we will break down the crowdfunding process into three major stages: the precampaign tasks you need to complete before launching your funding call, the activities to be completed during the campaign itself, and the post-campaign follow-up.

STAGE 1: Pre-Campaign

Step 1: Title

Compared to a scientific paper, a grant title should contain less scientific jargon. For the purposes of crowdfunding, this rule is taken to its extreme: no jargon is allowed whatsoever. An easy way to judge the appropriateness of a crowd- funding title is to imagine it within the pages of a magazine. Two titles seen on Experiment.com: “Sydney Harbouring unknown coral treasures” and “Mathematical model to reduce maternal and infant mortality in Southeast Asia” are appropriate titles. “Sublethal effects of radioactive surface contaminated objects (SCOs) on mammals and ecological interactions” is less so. As with grant titles, try to encapsulate your main research question as concisely as possible.

Step 2: Abstract

A good crowdfunding abstract is extremely short, to the order of 4–7 sentences. It should follow the following simple structure:

Establish the background/problem (1–2 sentences)

Research question (1 sentence)

Objective(s) (1–2 sentences)

Significance (1–2 sentences)

Remember, a crowdfunding campaign is generally geared at generating preliminary data on a minimal budget for a larger project. If you find that you have too many research questions or objectives to fit into one sentence, you are possibly over-promising, and should consider reducing the scope of your project.

Read more >  How to Crowdfund

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