The Essentials of a Great Campaign Story
It’s very important to communicate your crowdfunding campaign story in a simple, yet visually appealing manner.
Let’s start by looking at how you describe your campaign.
How are you telling your story?
Telling a good story is at the very core of what makes for successful crowdfunding (not unrelated to the first principles of marketing and branding!). Take the story of your idea, business or project and translate it in a way that’s designed to compel, inspire and promote action.
1. Look to your own personal experiences.
- Demonstrating and building personal connection is huge in crowdfunding success.
- What facts appeal to our emotions, which are secondary…and which detract?
- Pull readers into important story elements in an impactful way and avoid being vague when describing key story elements.
2. How will your campaign solve a problem?
Pitch how it will produce a solution or avert a potential negative impact. You should be able to communicate the essence of your product and what it does in a sentence or two.
3. Slow down and talk in laymen’s terms
When describing your product or concept, remember that not everyone may be familiar with your industry or product.
4. Include effective calls to action.
Without them, your potential supporter won’t know where to go or what to do.
Designing Your Campaign Page
Any medium can be used to tell a story, whether it be a blog, social media, emails or a video. But when it comes to crowdfunding, your campaign page is your #1 place to tell your story and a place to combine different mediums into one ‘showcase’.
People only get one first impression of your campaign page. So how do you make it stand out?
What to Avoid:
- Too much text! Create a balance between text and images. Avoid large sections of texts and keep paragraphs to 3-4 lines.
- Poor design and media/images. Image quality does matter. Use strong visually appealing images and video that gives your campaign a unique personality and conveys its qualities. Avoid generic stock imagery. Make it real by adding your personality or brand to it.
- Poorly written and constructed reward levels. Readers need to quickly and easily find what they want. Keep your description less than 8 lines. Don’t be repetitive and place the best features at the top.
- Avoid putting unnecessary content on your page. Remember you can also link to your own blog/website or do a campaign update where things get lengthy and require more detail.
What to Do:
- Put your best selling points at the top, showing how your campaign solves a problem and will make an impact.
- Put Features at the top AFTER your selling points, highlighting how it stands out from the crowd.
- Include a Video. Campaigns with videos are 2.5 times likely to succeed.
- Include Info Graphics to convey statistics and concepts.
- Include strong Images that have been edited properly.
- Include details/images of you and your team. Let backers know who you are. Trust is important!
- Use landscape images as tall images take up too much space. Keep it roughly 3:1.
- Include eye-catching headers/titles.
Story Structure Matters!
The structure of your campaign story is important. Here is a suggested order, from top to bottom:
- Intro – WHAT, WHY, WHO in brief
- Credibility – Brief mention or graphic of endorsements, media, partners
- Features – Use infographics, animated gifts, or videos if its technical or hard to explain in simple terms
- Rewards – Also great to add a graphics or rewards menu here
- Budget – How will the funds be used
- WHO and or WHY – in more detail
- Challenges and Risks – Anything that needs to be addressed, to show you’ve covered your bases
- FAQs – Research what questions potential customers will ask and add them here
- Simple Call to Action – To Pledge and Share
Need more ideas? Why not check out other successful campaigns similar to yours and study how they tell their story and design their campaign pages.
The Story Doesn’t End Here…
Once your campaign has started, successful campaigns continue to engage with backers and tell their story as it unfolds. You can create personalised dialogue with campaign updates, social media and emails that continue to stick to the basics of strong storytelling and design.
To recap, although telling a great story and designing a great campaign page requires a bit of initial energy and resources, it’s essential for campaign success.
