Running a crowdfunding campaign

Emerging Writers Festival (video below)  

When the Emerging Writers Festival (EWF) wanted to go on the road and present the EWF Digital Writers: taking your words online conference to a new audience in Brisbane, they decided to try crowdfunding to pay their way north.

Running across the weekend of Saturday 15 October and Sunday 16 October, 2011 the event was aimed at equipping writers with ideas and inspiration about sharing their work with audiences online.

So making it happen via the support of the online community may have seemed a natural fit, but how easy was it?

Here, EWF director, Lisa Dempster looks at how the Emerging Writers' Festival ran their successful crowdfunding campaign on Pozible.com.au. (1)

Making it Pozible
The project we put up on Pozible was our Digital Writers' Conference. The main decisions that needed to be made before we launched our project were: how long to run the campaign for, what dollar amount we were asking for and what rewards we would offer.

How long and how much?
We wanted to keep the campaign fairly short so chose three weeks. We needed to set our target at an amount that would enable us to get to Brisbane but wanted to keep it as low as possible in order to have the highest chance of success. (With Pozible, if you don't reach your crowdfunding target you don't get any of the money raised.) We set the funding target at $4,000, which was the minimum we needed to run events in Brisbane and also cover the fees we would need to pay Pozible for using their site.

Prizes
The rewards - the ‘prizes’ donors would receive for their donation - needed to be literary and writerly in nature. We were proud of what we came up with: postcards from Brisbane, written by our festival artists; receiving LEGO poetry in the mail; rare EWF tshirts, invitations to join our artist’s party and mentoring opportunities. We also built a ticket to Digital Writers into the rewards, and hoped that the majority of people donating would be doing so to pre-purchase their tickets.

Programme
Prior to putting our project up, I programmed the conference and confirmed the writers involved. All the writers invited were keen to participate, even knowing that it might not go ahead, and I was able to add an impressive list of festival guests to the conference program.

Video
Finally, we made a video for our campaign, which several festival guests contributed to, and chose an image to use with our marketing for the campaign. We were ready.

Launch
We launched our campaign on a Monday, 29 August 2011, and put into effect a social media campaign that included twitter, Facebook, email and our e-newsletter. There was instant attention for the project, and it was exciting to watch the first few donations come in. We were also asked about the project by many websites and organisations, who ran interviews or information about our campaign. Things were looking rosy.

Social Media strategy
The social media campaign was driven mostly on twitter, where our largest audience is. Using the hashtag #ewfbris, I trialled several ways to action donations. A few successful calls to arms included: asking people to forgo their morning coffee and donate the dollars instead; noting that a $5 donation is enough to get their avatar and website listed on our Pozible wall; and requesting that anyone who couldn’t donate instead promote the campaign. I also thanked donors by name, RTed donating and promoting tweeps and participated in discussions about crowdfunding.

After the first week, donations tapered off. We had expected this but it was hard to see it happening. We kept up our campaign, aware that when using social media there is a tipping point between creating a buzz and being annoying. I did not want to cross that point. Even with our large online presence and strong community, our campaign limped along.

Challenges
What were the problems? One issue was reaching a Brisbane audience. Our networks are mostly in Victoria still, and we were trying to attract a Queensland crowd. In this regard our partner organisations Queensland Writers Centre and If:Book Australia helped a lot, but the Digital Writers ticket reward option was being purchased less than we had hoped.

I think there was also a hesitation to buy tickets using Pozible, and a lack of understanding about how the site worked; people felt confused or uncomfortable about what they were getting through the crowdfunding site. (This was confirmed later, when we sold more tickets to Digital Writers using Trybooking than we had previously using Pozible.)

Another issue was, I think, that our campaign lacked urgency. Many previously successful arts crowdfunding projects, particularly New Matilda and TiNA, had been based on the premise of ‘fund us or lose us’.

When our campaign reached its final week it looked like the end of our Brisbane dreams: at four days away from the end of our Pozible campaign we were still 40% away from our target.

Crunch time
On Thursday 15 September, I sent out a newsletter a final call to arms for our subscribers. On Friday, three days from our campaign's end, I blogged:

Today we at the EWF are considering the very real possibility that our campaign will not be funded. There is still time to kick in to our Pozible campaign – every dollar makes a difference. We would love to see a sudden surge of support to bring this thing home!

The core message of these final posts were in line with our whole campaign: all donations big and small make a difference, and if you can’t donate then please promote!

Amazingly, pledges started coming in again – some big, some small, some from people who had already donated. We received a large donation from a festival partner, Avid Reader, which kicked the total up impressively.

On Friday I sat in literal speechlessness, watching as we became a trending topic on Twitter and the donations flooded in. I was basically just hitting refresh on Pozible and Twitter, astounded, as were many others involved with EWF – staff, board and supporters – with the outpouring of support we were receiving.

Celebrations
At 4.30pm, the celebrations began: our community had rallied. We had reached our target, raising 101% with two days to go.

The most surprising part of running the campaign was where our support came from. We had hoped to reach a Brisbane audience, as that’s where we were going, but ultimately it was our local Melbourne audience who made it happen.

The Emerging Writers' Festival community is small but supportive and I was overwhelmed that they believe in what we do strongly enough to fund us to go and introduce our programming to a whole new bunch of people up north. Amazing.

I’m not sure how useful it is to give advice about how to run a successful crowdfunding campaign, as I suspect each project is unique. Make a great video, create appealing awards, use social media wisely: there are plenty of instructions out there about how to engage, inspire and activate your networks.

Ultimately, though, I think that each campaign takes on a trajectory of its own. So my advice would be to research the principles that underpin successful crowdfunding, then throw it out and run the campaign to reflect the personality of your organisation.

And no matter how it’s going, see your campaign through till the end – it’s not over ‘til it’s over!