How I Set Up a Crowdfunding Campaign in 5 Days That Raised $35,000
In March 2021, I learned that a family member back home was planning to sell a plot of family land in Calabar, Nigeria. The land had been in our family for almost a century and I lobbied my family member to stop the sale, sharing my long-term plans to convert the house and land into a memorial (more on this in the video).
I promised to purchase the land from them to make sure it stayed in our family forever. But the pandemic year had left me totally broke and out of options.
Cut to me, launching a campaign to save my family’s land and fund a dream I’d never shared publicly before — turning the memoir of my family I’d been writing into a gallery exhibition and artist residency.
My campaign raised $35,000 with which I was able to secure the land and begin development of my project. And the most amazing part of this whole story? I launched the campaign in just 5 days.
Want to hear how I did it? Check out my campaign video below and keep reading to learn how you can do it, too!
If extreme fundraising were an Olympic sport, at this point, I would be a gold medalist. The first time I launched a crowdfunding campaign, I was a second year student at NYU Tisch Grad Film.
When none of my classmates signed up for my short film, I had to launch a last-minute campaign to hire an entire crew. Back then, I had zero email list, zero following, and zero budget — yet, using basic principles of communications, marketing, and fundraising, I was able to reach and exceed my goal and raise $15K for my short film.
From that experience, I developed a course teaching other people how to do exactly that. But my recent campaign turned everything I’d ever thought about fundraising completely on its head — namely that you have to spend 30–60 days planning before you can launch.
Maybe you’ve gotten tired of:
- Sending out application after application for grants, fellowships, and residencies that you never hear back from
- Working to save money for your project or business, until, just like me, you lost your job during the pandemic and don’t have any savings left
- Maxing out your credit cards and going into debt, your credit score in the toilet
- Researching in Google University, posting in Facebook groups, checking out freebies, and still not figuring out how to raise money
If that sounds like you, then it’s time to be proactive and launch a crowdfunding campaign. And once you understand what the key activities are, you’ll launch more confidently whether you take 5 days or 5 months to plan it.
So here’s a list of action steps that you can try THIS WEEK. (And if you’d like to skip the post and dive deeper, check out my free masterclass!)
Day 1: CHOOSE YOUR PLATFORM, CONNECT PAYMENT METHODS, AND WRITE YOUR CAMPAIGN COPY
Day 1, you’re going to choose your platform, connect your payment methods and spend a whole bunch of time copywriting. Because I was launching my campaign in March, which is Women’s History Month, And I came up with this bright idea five days before International Women’s Day, it made a lot of sense for me to choose iFundWomen, a funding platform that focuses on elevating women.
You’re going to want to do research on the funding platforms to ensure that they meet all the criteria that you need:
- Do you need flexible or fixed funding?
- Do you need a platform that offers rewards in exchange for donations, equity, or nothing in return?
- What about the payment platforms?
- What about the platform fees? Most of these platforms you can’t raise the money and not have to pay some fee to the platform itself.
- What about your timeline and access to funds? One of the major reasons I chose IFundWomen is because I had access to the funds immediately. I didn’t have to wait until the end of my campaign.
The next major task for day one, besides connecting my payment platforms (ie, Stripe and PayPal, was writing my pitch and my project narrative. The copywriting is the who, what, where, when, why and how of your project. Pro tip: write with the tone of a hero’s journey. That means from the perpective of a hero taking on this huge undertaking with the crowd swooping in to carry you toward the finish line.
Day 2: CREATE YOUR VISUAL IDENTITY
Day two, you create your visual identity. That’s your logo, color palette, fonts, and campaign graphics. So when you’re thinking about the minimum required elements you need to put a good foot forward that makes people sit up and take you seriously, your visual identity is a power move.
I enlisted the help of a graphic designer because I needed something really strong in a couple of days. (If you can’t, use tons of free templates for everything from your logo to campaign graphics on Canva.) I had an idea for the logo, which was to take the logo from my late mom’s old business card (see below) and transform it into my new logo for the Elizabeth’s Daughter project (also below).
You can see her sketches below, with a color palette, fonts, and the result, a very professional looking logo — all turned around in a couple of days.
Day 3: PHOTOS & PITCH VIDEO
Day three is all about your photos and your pitch video. Now there is a method to this madness. Now we’re going to incorporate your visual identity, the colors, energy, the mood that we’re trying to evoke into your campaign images. The images you want to focus on here are your hero shots, the showcase of your project and the rewards, as well as shooting and editing your pitch video.
A hero shot is exactly what it sounds like: a photo that makes you look like a hero, stoic, proud, confident, capable of doing anything. It either makes you, your product, good or service look like a hero. That is the energy that we want to evoke.
Your showcase is exactly what it sounds like, a visual representation of the project or business you are going to deliver. And of course, if you don’t have a prototype of something to showcase, create a visual representation of the final product that evokes the energy, the emotion, and the mood of the final film he’s going to deliver.
Next on day three, you want to shoot and edit your pitch video. Campaigns with pitch videos do far better than campaigns that just have a header image. I would consider this a non-negotiable if I were you, even if you only have five days to pull a campaign together.
Day 4: SET UP YOUR CAMPAIGN PAGE AND CHOOSE REWARDS
Now we’re on to setting up our campaign page and choosing the rewards.
All of the different elements you created come together here. Most of the elements are gonna be similar from platform to platform, but there will be a few differences. So there’s the pitch video, a header image, the project logo, graphics, and the rewards. From site to site, you’ll generally need to create the following sections:
- Title & Tagline
- Campaign Header Image
- Pitch Video
- Funding Type (Flexible or Fixed)
- Deadline & Schedule
- Pitch Video
- The Story
- Rewards
- Risks & Challenges
Don’t skip any of the sections or fail to explain the who, what, where, when, why, and how of your fundraiser, or people won’t have the information they need to feel confident supporting you. Use pictures to break up the page and create visual interest, so backers don’t get overwhelmed by text and skip reading it.
Day 5: WEBSITE + SOCIAL MEDIA + OUTREACH
By Day 5, you’ve set up your campaign page and chosen your rewards, so now it’s all about updating your website (if you have one), social media, and conducting outreach. Now this won’t necessarily be extensive because you only have one day, but essentially this means updating your web presences to reflect that you are launching a campaign and telling a few people what you’re planning, so that when you launch (on Day 6), they go to the donation page and give.
So, on Day 5, I updated my personal and business websites, updated my social media with links to my campaign page (if you’re not launched yet, some platforms will allow for a preview link that you can share with people). I also called, emailed, texted, WhatsApped, and DMed like 100 people I know (no lie) to let them know I was launching. Pro tip: use Mail Merge With Attachments to customize individual emails to your close friends.
I hope this outlines how it’s actually possible to launch a crowdfunding campaign in 5 days. Having now launched many campaigns for myself and clients, it feels like I’ve finally cracked the code on exactly why this worked.
If you want to dive deeper and go behind the scenes of my campaign, check out my free masterclass, How to Set Up Your Crowdfunding Campaign in 5 Days and my mini-course, Launch in 5 Days.
Iquo B. Essien is a writer, director, and business consultant with an MFA in film from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She teaches people how to tell their stories, market themselves, and raise money through her online courses and workshops. Follow her on Instagram. For weekly inspiration, join her mailing list, Creative IQ. (She rarely writes on LinkedIn. :-)
