Crowdfunding – Incentivise your supporters to SHARE

How to make your crowdfunding campaign become the buzz of social media by incentivising your crowd.

The phenomenal growth in the crowdfunding market over the past 5 years has been sparked by the widespread use of the internet and social media.  Most campaign creators have heard of some of the campaigns that have gone viral and are dreaming that their campaign will be the next one to hit the big time.

Will it be a Flow Hive, the Australian campaign that raised over AS$16m with over 38,000 backers? Or will it turn out like the US Kickstarter campaign, Pebble Watch, which attracted over 78,000 backers and raised over US$ 20m?

At our crowdfunding platform ReadyFundGo, the question on all our campaign creators’ lips is “how can I engage the crowd and make my campaign go viral?”

Whilst Facebook may have exceeded 1 billion users a month and over 40% of the world’s population – around 3.6 billion people – are online, this in itself is likely to have little bearing on your campaign.

Putting up a campaign on any crowdfunding platform and sitting back waiting for backers to arrive will have little impact. You need to take a pro-active approach and engage with your customers and target audience.

One of the beauties of crowdfunding is however that you do not need to do it all on your own – you can get the crowd to get active on your behalf.

So, what do you do when you have 52 Twitter followers and 84 Facebook likes?

Whilst the answer will vary from campaign to campaign. This depends on the members of the community you are looking to attract and engage; one part of your answer will likely be social media.

There are numerous social media tactics available from advertising on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and more. However, one social media tactic that is not cost prohibitive for the majority of campaign creators is incentivising your supporters to SHARE.

ReadyFundGo offers a new sharing functionality for campaign creators to help incentivise and track your SHARERS.  When one of your supporter’s shares a link to your campaign page on social media or via email,  the number of shares are recorded and tracked in your dashboard (and theirs).

By making the data on sharing easily visible to you,  you’re able to incentivise your supporters to share your message to as many of their social media connections.

With the right incentive, this can soon build an exponential effect.

Just think if you have 100 supporters. If only 10 of these supporters share with their 100 supporters and another 10% of these supporters share with their 100 supporters, this is how quickly the audience builds:

100 = your social media followers
10 x 100 = 1,000 10 of your followers share with 100 of their followers
100 x 100 = 10,000 10% of these 1,000 share with 100 followers each
1,000 x 100 = 100,000 10% of these 10,000 share with 100 followers
10,000 x 100 = 1,000,000 10% of these 100,00 share 100 more times

In 5 rounds 1 million people are reached!

Getting others to share your idea rests on your ability to create strong messaging and excitement.

If you are a campaign creator, it is time to put your thinking hat on and generate a creative and innovate campaign and prize that your supporters and the people you would like to engage with and will love.

The key to success here is to offer unique prizes that incentivise supporters to keep sharing.

It is very easy to get started and then set a little time aside every few days to proactively manage the competition.


All you have to do is follow these simple steps to generate excitement around your crowdfunding campaign:

  1. Think of a prize and how you will set up your competition. Do supporters have to have at least 1,000 shares registered to qualify for the prize? When will the deadline be?  Will you incentivise pledgers only or all followers?
  2. Create a campaign, with an email or webpage showing how users can share and the prizes they will received.  Provide users with images and copy to help the sharing messaging stand out.
  3. Send out your sharing campaign across your own social media and email user base, directly contacting those that you think will be high influencers.
  4.  Announce the winner and deliver your prize.

Steps to track shares of your campaign page:

  1. Login to your ReadyFundGo account
  2. Click on the MANAGE button of your campaign
  3. Click on the SHARE button to view who is sharing and their results

The important thing to note is that each user participating must generate and share trackable links to participate. Trackable links are available when a user is logged into ReadyFundGo.

These links can be grabbed on the ‘thank you’ checkout page or from your ‘campaign page’ share tools above your campaign video.  All user can in turn track their own shares in their account dashboard.

GOOD LUCK – LET’S GET SHARING


If you'd like to see more of our essential tips for managing and promoting your crowdfunding project, you can grab our Guide To Crowdfunding here.

Share this post

Related stories

About ReadyFundGo

ReadyFundGo is a crowdfunding platform and community of social entrepreneurs, business owners, change makers and innovators who have a great idea they want to get off the ground or grow. If you are interested in the world of innovation and ideas, or want to find strategies for raising funds for your own project or expansion, ReadyFundGo can help. To begin your own crowdfunding campaign, start your draft here.