As mentioned in my last article – crowd funding can be tough, but if you follow some simple ideas and build a solid platform for your campaign you can achieve success. One other simple way of reaching audiences far and wide is…. STAR POWER!
In the modern age, no celebrity has a private life and no personal information is sacred. We’ve recently had Kourtney Kardashian pose naked whilst up the duff, Joey Barton gives his pointless opinion on anything football and Ricky Gervais has recently used his social media following to campaign against trophy hunting! Social media has brought all of this pointless news to every laptop, tablet and mobile phone in the modern world. So… why not take advantage of that?
As I’ve said before: when running a crowd funding campaign – audience is key! Who are they? What websites do they use? Who do they follow on social media? Some simple research and no matter what your crowd funding project you can probably find a handful of celebs or brands who have good-sized followings of the type of people who may just like your idea and throw in a fiver! When they have a new product or project they are endorsing they spam you – why not spam them back!
Here at FOCUS SHIFT FILMS our Save our Male Voice Choirs crowd funding campaign has been going pretty well. In just 13 days there’s £1710 in the pot and another £900 promised from various people. It’s a decent number considering the project follows the story of a small choir, from a small Welsh town trying to reach a small audience. That figure has come about from hard graft of sorts – but nothing too taxing or complicated. We’ve just been smart with our Facebook posts and tweets.
Identify what the key elements of your campaign are and what audiences you could find. If it’s a zombie horror film – then you could look to communicate with the stars of The Walking Dead, or fans of 28 Days Later. They may like your idea and be willing to part with a few pounds. Our campaign is very clearly about choirs and Wales. So… we’ve opened dialogue with as many choirs as possible across Wales and further afield with regular engagement between their pages and the one we’ve created for the stars of our show – Blaenavon Male Voice Choir. The choir’s page now likes, comments and shares with as many other choirs as they can so they become as visible as possible on Facebook, building their own audience taken from other choirs. BMVC now has 592 likes, which is a quick rise from zero six weeks ago!
Now that we’ve brought that audience into the BMVC we can start to share photos, videos and posts that all carry the link to the crowd funding campaign hosted at www.gofundme.com/saveourchoirs. And whenever we post as BMVC we tag in several other key choirs that have large followings themselves. We do the same thing for Welsh communities around the world and Welsh media outlets such as BBC Wales – all get tagged so that the BMVC page shares their audience and reaches people who didn’t even know the BMVC page existed!
With Facebook it’s easy to tag other pages, share content and build an online presence through open communication and engagement. The more you do it – but be careful not to spam too much, too often – the more people you reach. A few interesting, engaging posts with the right pages tagged and at the right times of day can generate plenty of traffic. But use your common sense – if it’s 4am and no one is awake – you’re not going to reach anyone! By the time your audience climb out of bed you’ve probably slipped way down their news feed!
Facebook is all about clever tagging and public engagement, but twitter… that is where star power really comes into play! Identify celebrities with good-sized followings that may just be interested in your campaign or idea and get to them! However, constant spamming isn’t the way. Monitor your star and stalk them quietly for a little while – look at what they post, when and how. Make sure you are online when they are likely to be, then tweet them just after they have tweeted themselves – that way you know they are active, online and may just see what you’ve sent them. A retweet off Katy Perry – twitter’s most followed account – could get your idea in front of her 69 million plus followers! If you had £1 off each of those you’d never need to work or ask for funding ever again!
Ok – I hear you – your zombie horror film isn’t really a Katy Perry style story! So who does your story work with? Who’s audience do you need to get to? FOCUS SHIFT FILMS have been hammering Welsh celebrities and personalities, choral singers and musicians hoping for retweets and favourites on Twitter. Cerys Matthews has retweeted and even BBC weather lady Sian Lloyd pitched in. Rob Brydon has over 1.72 million followers and he retweeted.
Celebrities are real people too! Sometimes! And just like you and me they wander around with their mobile phone in their hand sifting through the spam, nonsense and rubbish that floats consistently through our social media feeds. So… why not get stuck into them and give them something to retweet, like, share or comment on. You never know – they may like to donate, get involved or follow your progress! They could open you up to a huge audience… or it may be small, but just the right audience for your project.
FSF’s Save our Male Voice Choirs campaign is the perfect project for a Welsh celebrity with clout to throw their weight behind. Maybe someone who fancies themselves as a bit of an activist and isn’t afraid to rally for what they believe in. Hollywood actor Michael Sheen? But he wouldn’t retweet the link, send a ‘Good Luck’ message and donate to the campaign would he? Uh… yeah… he did!
They’re out there. Go get them!
Daniel J. Harris and FOCUS SHIFT FILMS have just launched their crowd funding campaign on Go Fund Me. Click here to see the campaign page.
https://youtu.be/8HTiU_hrLms?list=PL18yMRIfoszFLSgML6ddazw180SXMvMz5
