Look Inside Crowdfunding Campaign – 1 week in
One week in to our crowdfunding campaign for Shiona Penrake’s next short film, Look Inside, and we have raised just over £850 (or around $1200). Our target is £7,560 with £560 going to Phundee upon completion.
We are getting plenty of support and encouragement, which is great – but truth be told that’s not the hard part! Clearly we still need more people to opt for Rewards, or Exclusives, as they’re referred to on Phundee.
During this second week, both writer/director and producer are working pretty much full time on social, getting the word out, following up and doing their best to be a little bit pushy but not a pest.
A few things we’ve been doing:
Email follow-ups
Naturally enough you worry that your nudge email may come across as a nuisance, especially if you don’t know that person so well, but really there is no other option. Approaching people with lots of ifs and maybes and pleases doesn’t exactly shout confidence – no one is going to contribute even £5 to a project that sounds iffy.
So every email we write we eliminate as many words like if, maybe, but and however, so we strike a consistently confident tone, without ever sounding cocky or flippant. That’s our aim anyway.
Phone calls
We try to keep these to closer friends and family. Once you look at anyone outside that bracket, it gets trickier. That said, if we have a day when no money comes in, we may have to make more use of the phone.
Tweets
We load up tweets to Hootsuite and publish regularly, around 3 a day. Upon review, we think we should step this up to 4 or 5 a day. For a short film, it’s difficult to keep coming up with new things to say, so we’ve just had to recognize that some of our tweets will be a tad trivial at times, but if ‘content really is king’ that surely can’t hurt.
Direct messages on Twitter
Selective use of direct tweets with a call to action.
Banners
We’ve designed really simple banners – copy over a one block colour – that contain a headline, followed by text underneath and a link to the crowdfunding campaign. Some of the banners we’ve designed have featured copy headline over image.
Video updates
Shiona put out a thank you video – personally thanking everyone who has contributed so far – and posted on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Linkedin.
Facebook page updates
We style these updates to be a little more relaxed than updates on Twitter, with a bit more info about we’re doing.
Facebook messenger
Next best thing to a phone call is messenger - so we're chatting to friends and contact whenever we can.
Facebook advertising
We are also about to launch some Facebook advertising targeted at key influencers who have an abiding interest in film or simply the Arts, in the hope they will be motivated to pick up a Reward and recommend our film to their followers.
We post on Linkedin and message directly on Linkedin. But so far it’s not a platform that engages with this kind of activity, we’re finding. Even links to finished short films seem to elicit very little engagement on Li. Probably doesn’t look professional enough to most people on there.
At the very least it’s been a learning experience, especially for Shiona, who is relatively new to marketing.
Please check out our campaign on Phundee, even if it’s just to watch our video all the way through. Thanks so much.
