Know your audience for successful crowd-funding
Howard Lake | 7 July 2011 | News
It is absolutely vital to know your audience before you start to build a base for crowd-funding, delegates heard at the IoF National Convention on Tuesday.
Both Ed Whiting of wedidthis.org.uk and Tamasine Johnson of the National Trust stressed that knowing your audience is one of the most important things to get right before you launch.
wedidthis.org.uk launched in January this year as an online site where arts organisations can bring their audiences and supporters together to form a ‘critical mass’ of funders for projects. Whiting explained that projects have to be fully funded or they don’t succeed – an ‘all or nothing’ approach. Rewards are given to each funder, ranging from a signed programme to attending a rehearsal and meeting participants. Those projects that hit 25% of their target in the first week are likely to be successful, he said.
Earlier this year the National Trust launched My Farm, where people could pay £30 to sign up to become ‘farmers’ and have a say in running one of the Trust’s actual farms in Cambridge. Johnson admitted that it hadn’t attracted quite the number of ‘farmers’ the Trust had expected but said that valuable lessons had been learned.
First was that you really need to know your audience before you launch. And second that if you are going to build a community online, it will not run itself. “We should have realised that we needed to make more investment in keeping the community going,” she said.
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.