Difference between revisions of "Platform guides"

Revision as of 13:59, 29 December 2014

Crowdfunding Platforms are created in a clear and straight way, to provide a great overview of the project and to facilitate the supporting progress. Taking these facts in account, most of the Crowdfunding or Crowdsourcing Platforms in Urbanism are structured clearly to catch user’s attention at the first glance. The manual how to pledge or create a homepage is also very easy to understand. What you need for creating a new project is a short description and expressive pictures to convince potential sponsors. In the following article we describe the process of supporting and creating projects on Crowdfunding Platforms in Urbanism. At the end a few advices for launching an awesome project-site are mentioned. These aspects are tightly connected with the marketing principle Aida, which raises the question: Is Crowdfunding just all about Marketing or is it also possible in a traditional way?

Pledging

1. Visit a Crowdfunding Platform and choose your favorite project, you want to support.

2. Next to the project description you will find a big empty box, where you can enter the pledge amount.

3. To pledge to a project, just click the yellow “Pledge” button on any live project page.

4. At the end you will be asked about the payment options. The most common two payment options are PayPal (choose this if you want to pay from your PayPal account or a debit or credit card) and GoCardless (choose this if you want to pay direct from your bank account using online Direct Debit).

5. After this you have to authorize the payment but it will only be charged if, and only if, the project hits its funding target. If your chosen project doesn‘t succeed, you won‘t be charged anything.

If you would like your name and image or logo to appear in the project‘s Funders tab next to your name, you can fill in the form to register your details. It`s also possible to pledge to a project with service, materials, tools or labour service. You can make cash donations or offer in-kind contributions, like materials, employee expertise, or services. It‘s a powerful way of engaging with the community - and your contribution will be recognised on the project page.

Creating

If you want to create a new project, first think about what you want to do, what your ambitions are and how you can achieve your goal. Make some scribbles, mindmaps and try to make your ideas and thoughts visible. It’s important to write down who your ideal customer is and who your ideal funder will be. Create characters based on real data about customer demographics and online behaviour, along with educated guesses about their personal histories, motivations, and potential concerns. After that concept step try to answer the following questions while you write out your personas:

What are the biggest problems they are trying to solve?

What do they need most?

What information are they typically searching for?

What trends are influencing their business or personal success?

When you finish your own mental effort, share it with the public on the internet. You need a strong profile that will encourage people to sign up to join your project. Don't use a mass of text, weird definitions or explanations. Especially for projects in Urbanism it`s really important to catch the attention via pictures, videos, animations and so on. At the end of the day you want people to trust you enough to hand over their money - so invest in your idea. It´s also recommended to offer something for free, for example a goodie, in order to encourage people. After launching your profile at the platform, try to update your supporters with friendly mails and breaking news about the status of the project. Keep in touch with the people and don`t forget to hang on promoting your idea. You need the money and you have to attract more and more funders for the crowd to reach your aim. ^[1]

Marketing or Traditional way

But why is such a big expense important? Is that all only about money?

Not at all. Projects have to reach out to the community for support, the things that get built are much more likely to be valued by people. It‘s a process that binds people together and gives them a stronger sense of ownership over their area. It`s impossible to “buy” such kind of emotions or situation, but what we can do is supporting with money for the final realisation. The progress to inspire people around the world for your idea is for free. To get their support for your project it`s recommended to use authentic methodes, like Aida.

Aida

In accordance to Jayson DeMers, Contributor, the following article of the forbes magazine defines what the Aida Principle is made for, how it works and how effective it could be used.^[2]

A = Attention I = Interest D = Desire A = Action

If you follow AIDA in a piece that you write, you guide consumers along the experience funnel. You start by grabbing their attention, and getting them engaged, curious, or excited enough to keep reading. Then you build their interest in what you have to offer, to the point that they start to relate this potential product, service, or information to their own lives. At this point, you begin to stir their desire. The goal is to get them to want to purchase a product, have an experience, or make a big step in their lives. Finally, you push them over the tipping point so that they actually take whatever action it is that you highlighted. The overview above probably sounds pretty familiar. In fact, it’s the experience that most of us are hoping to create when we sit down to craft specific pieces of content for business purposes. AIDA offers a coherent framework for writers to follow, and increases the chances of getting the desired response.

A = Attention

The first hurdle for any piece of writing is to capture the reader’s attention. To get their attention, you first have to start with a concept that’s deeply relevant and timely to the audience that you’re trying to reach.

Who is reading this piece?Gender, location, family status, employment, income, interests, etc. What is their most pressing problem relating to the topic that I’m writing about? What kind of solution is this piece offering to their problem? What are powerful words or concepts that would immediately create resonance?

Here is an example for the last point: If you’re selling a skateboard to enthusiasts and you want to capture their attention, it’s important that you understand their internal language and approach. If your audience self identifies as “skater kids,” using that term in your headline or lead could capture their attention immediately.

I = Interest

Once you’ve hooked a reader, it’s time to really help them see how well you understand their problem. This links back to the idea of having a strong profile of who you’re targeting with your products or services before diving into the selling.

One common example in internet marketing is “embarrassing health problems.” It’s true that many people take to the internet to try to solve uncomfortable issues that they’d rather not discuss with a doctor. If you’re able to show that you understand the challenges of living with a particular condition, and specifically how that makes them feel, you’ll be able to start engaging them in a deeper way. It’s then time to build your argument or story. For example, you may have done research into the specifics of the condition and know of reputable medical studies that suggest little known treatments or successful cures. You may have personal experience that you can use to create more of a rapport with your reader.

The key here is to use information, persuasion techniques, and as much proof as you can find to hold the reader’s attention once you’ve captured it. By deepening the connection that you have with the prospect and crafting a piece that informs, educates, and entertains them around one of their most pressing problems, you’ll be well on your way to sparking an emotional reaction.

D = Desire

It’s about that moment of the shift, from intellectual curiosity to making the decision “I want that for myself.” That’s at the heart of desire. Specific features and benefits, case studies, customer testimonials, and use cases are all effective ways to back up your claims. Finally, by tapping into an emotion that the social media manager has felt – perhaps fear at being caught in such a situation or a desire to be in control of the outcome of such conversations – you’ll start to create a desire to have access to your product.

A = Action

Once you’ve stirred up enough desire to get your prospect thinking about taking action, it’s time to close the deal. This focuses primarily on using a powerful call to action. Calls to action are simple statements that let readers know what you want them to do next: buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, watch a video, or share your tweets for example. Everything you write should have a call to action – after all, you’re creating a piece of content for a specific reason. So let the reader know what that reason is! Also think about the design aspects of your calls to action: does your layout, button structure, and more support your prospect’s taking action? If it’s at all difficult to figure out how to take the next step, people often won’t. The idea here is simple. Anticipate and eliminate the risk that would stop people from doing what you want.

Conclusion

A great content strategy is one of the most important factors to help your business grow. If you’re ready to try a new strategy to help your content get read more often, keep prospects and readers hooked, and drive them toward action. After researching marketing and selling strategies we can say that if you want to set up a successful project, you have to do a lot of promotion before, during and after the announcing. Nowadays everything is according to emotions and desires of the customer. Crowdfunding works due to activating the costumer emotions. It could be said that a well-organized crowdfunding campaign is working due to the traditional marketing model known as AIDA principle. AIDA is a time-honored way to take someone from knowing nothing about your cause, to becoming a full supporter. To attract the attention the idea needs be transported in an easy to understand way. Concept images, illustrations and personal video messages with the ‘home made’ character are produced to present a personal matter, an idea, a utopia.It`s really difficult to reach their interests on a traditional way, so you have to spend a lot of time and intensive efforts in the project. If you are convinced of your idea – it`s done!

"Unfortunately, that’s a common misconception that often results in failed campaigns. Fact is, you have to have a community BEFORE you have an audience that will fund your project. Seth Godin, for example, recently funded his book, The Icarus Deception, through Kickstarter. He raised over $250,000 in 30 days. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? However, in a candid podcast, he shared that 96% of those funds came from his existing community. So… NOT from kickstarter itself, but rather from his regular readers and newsletter subscribers. That is our first important idea – much like Seth Godin – we have to build a community of people who trust us and who gave us their permission to connect. Community building takes considerable time and strictly speaking in digital terms, it means focusing on growing your e-mail newsletter subscription list, your Facebook audience, Twitter followers, blog subscribers and so on. We’ll talk more about community building in upcoming posts, but for now – I just need you to be aware of the fact that you need a community before you can execute a successful crowd-funding campaign."^[3]

Sheryl Conner talks at her forbes magazine article about crowdfunding campaigns, why people use crowdfunding and if it`s all about PR? http://www.forbes.com/sites/cherylsnappconner/2013/10/20/could-crowdfunding-replace-traditional-marketing/

References

1. ↑ Nathan Resnick, Steps to Launching a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign
   http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/236582
2. ↑ [Jason DeMers, Forbes Magazine, How to use the aida formula; http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2013/08/05/how-to-use-the-aida-formula-to-boost-your-content-marketing-strategy/]
3. ↑ [Community before Audience; http://ernestbarbaric.com/non-profit-guide-to-crowdfunding/]