I’m Melissa and I’m an IndieGoGo campaign owner here on the blog to write a series of posts about my first crowdfunding experience. This includes everything that I do, questions that arise and areas I wasn’t expecting, from pre-launch preparation to what happens after my campaign is over. My case is a special case because I also just so happen to work here at IndieGoGo! This means that I have a bit of an “inside scoop” on the campaigning process and will pass along everything I learn to you through this series. 

After the rush of going live subsides, there is still work to do; maybe the most important work that goes into a crowdfunding campaign is – telling people about it!

As soon as I published my campaign, I went to my social media accounts and posted accordingly about my campaign. I “Liked” my own campaign using the Facebook 'Like' button on my campaign page, and added a little explanation message to go along with the post:

I also used the “Tweet” button on my campaign page to post to Twitter. I added a little personalized message there, too:

Since the event had their own Twitter account and official hashtag, I made sure to include both of those things in my tweet, so that it would show up in the events activity log (the “@-reply” will show up in a special place in their account, letting them know that I mentioned them), and in searches for the hashtag.

After a few short minutes, I had my first few contributions, and saw that my friends were reposting my campaign to their own Facebook pages, and retweeting my tweet! It was really happening!

The next day, I posted about my campaign in the ‘Supermarket Street Sweep’ thread on the SF Fixed bike forum, a message board for cyclists in the Bay Area. I also posted to the Boston Fixed bike forum, in the “My Art” thread, as I was offering handmade art objects as perks.

It was truly awesome to see the immediate ripple effect of my online communications. In the Dashboard section of my campaign (analytics about my campaign that are visible only to me) I could see that my “visitors”,  “views”  and “referrals” numbers were skyrocketing! I loved that I could see the names of all my contributors and how they were sharing my campaign amongst themselves and their networks.