If you follow our guide here, thousands of people will visit your campaign page and learn about your cause. You want to make sure these potential donors fully understand what you are raising money for, who is the person or organization behind the campaign and how you would use the funds. In many cases, you get only one chance and often it lasts a few seconds before the visitor browses away.

First, be sure to share your page with a few friends and family to get their opinion and be open for criticism. This is the best time to get feedback and make changes. Be sure to ask them if the “story” is clear, show them some other examples on our platform and make changes as needed. That said, you also do not want to take each opinion as absolute and swing in different direction with each opinion you receive.

Second, Jewcer is the only platform in the world that offers free expert advice and feedback to every campaign on our platform. In order to get our experts’ feedback, submit your campaign once you have filled out all the required fields and feel your campaign is ready by clicking on the button at the bottom of the editing section.

1-3 days before your campaign goes live

The most successful campaign on Jewcer got a head-start by preparing a special list of people whom they are certain would donate to the campaign. These are close friends, family and specific past donors (in case of an organization). Prepare a list of such people who you are certain would donate, any amount, and contact them before you launch to tell them about your plan and to ask if you can count on their support. The key here is number of donors, not necessarily the total amount that would be donated. For example, you could create a list of people that you can count on for $10 donations (and make sure that you verify with them).

1-5 days after your campaign is live

You worked hard to get here, you are dying to tell the world about your campaign. We know your intuition is telling you to post about it everywhere you can think of, but that is also why most crowdfunding campaigns (outside Jewcer) fail. Your goal right now is to get as many donors on your page without it being visible to people that do not know you personally or your cause. Why? Because strangers are most likely to walk away anyway, and if they also come to your page and it has $6 donated out of $18,000, it makes it even easier on them to not even give you a chance to tell your story.

The most successful campaigns on Jewcer made sure they have more than 30-50 donors in the first 5 days without using any mass distribution method or any social network activity (you could message people directly, but don’t post publicly). Stay in this step until you have at least 30 donors. If you want to raise  $10,000-$15,000, you should keep doing it until you have 50 donors. If you want to raise any amount over $15,000, you should keep at it until you have 100 donors.

 After you have at least 30 donors (50 if you want to raise over $10,000)

Once you have reached at least 30 donors (50 if you want to raise $10,000-$15,000, and 100 if you want to raise over $15,000) with direct and private communication, it is time to make a big BANG about it:

• Contact all your donors, thank them and get them to share your campaign.
• Post about your campaign on social networks (facebook, twitter, etc.)
• Use any other means of telling the largest number of people (newsletter, blog, etc.)

You want to do this stage over the shortest period of time in order to get the biggest effect in social networks.

The people who donated to your campaign up to this point are your biggest fans and your greatest asset. Talk to them, thank them, get them to truly feel they are part of your project (not just its funders). In this stage, you want as many of them as possible to share and speak about your campaign. You can (somewhat) monitor how many people shared your campaign page by looking at your sharing panel on your campaign:

In this stage, you want to get those numbers up by having your donors share the campaign link. Be sure to:

• Be clear to your donors that you are looking for them to share.
• Thank your donors (for donating) and do not ask them to donate more (they will if they want to)

 After you are 50% of your way to your goal

“Influencers” are people, organizations or brands who could easily reach many people. Examples are celebrities, bloggers, magazines, etc.

Your success depends on reaching many people and telling them about your cause and campaign. Therefore, it would be very attractive to you to contact influencers and try to get them to share your campaign. The problem is that this ability to reach so many people, is their most valuable asset and they typically guard it. The principle to keep in mind is:

Influencers are not looking to get your campaign viral, they want to report something that is already viral.

Therefore, we recommend that you contact influencers when your campaign is over 50% funded with enough time to make it clear that you have a great chance of reaching your goal. In addition:

• Be sure to make a clear connection between your cause and what the influencer typically shares and speaks about.
• Make it easier on the influencer by providing them with content and links.

There are many ways to use funds in order to gain exposure for your campaign through direct and indirect marketing. Some of the successful campaigns used different amounts of funds, sometimes out of the funds they raised and sometimes coming in with marketing funds. We highly recommend using paid marketing, but only as supplemental to the actions described above. Moreover, what we have seen time and time again, is that paid marketing is far more successful if used alongside the process mentioned above.

If you are interested in exploring this option, please email us at help@jewcer.com so we could give you information about what options we recommend in your particular case.

By far, this is the biggest mistakes campaign manager could make. It either comes from being too excited to share the campaign with “the world” or from having difficulties reaching enough donors through personal communication. Either way, jumping too soon to publicly sharing the campaign often causes the momentum to “fall flat” and bring the campaign raising to a major slowdown.

The harsh reality is that unless your friends and family are not going to support your campaign (even with a $5 donation), strangers most definitely will not. Keep talking to people directly and figure out why they are not donating.

If you think that you are “asking for money” in your campaign, you are doing it all wrong and might fail.

Crowdfunding is not about asking for money. Crowdfunding is about giving people an opportunity to be part of something amazing.

You must talk to people and talk about your cause as something amazing (it really is) that you are doing and giving people an opportunity to be part in it.

The success of your campaign depends entirely on you. We “amplify” your actions and get you more exposure, but if you do not continuously work on your campaign, tell people about it, engage with donors and get people to talk about it, no one else will. Plan ahead and make sure you have time for this. The mistake that we often see is that people think that crowdfunding is “building a page, putting on facebook and it goes viral on its own”.

Much like with potential donors, you might only have one chance with influencers. A mistake we see (too often) is campaign managers who contact influencers and asking them to share their campaign too soon, before it has shown enough traction or success. We are all in-love with our own ideas and projects (while else would we be spending all this time on them?), and some influencers would love your idea for itself, but in general, they would only share it if it is really shown to already have some success and clearly has a chance of reaching and passing its goal.

We recommend you prepare your materials (in advance) and contact influencers after you passed the funding 50% mark with clearly enough time to reach your goal.