Step 2: Market research

A successful crowdfunding campaign gives your organisation a remarkable head start. Plan ahead properly. As you’ll understand instinctively, a crowdfunding campaign is not something that you can put up overnight. Every successful campaign requires planning, images, a good video and a follow-up plan. So before you do anything, sit down and plan.

Remember it takes time. Three of the four successful project creators that Shopify interviewed reported quitting their previous jobs so that they can put together the campaign page on a full-time basis. None of them took fewer than a month working full-time on their campaign before they launched. So, spend time creating your ‘case for support’, possibly a video, your visual assets, and all the documentation and writing. Don’t forget also to spend time deliberating your rewards and your timeline. 

Marketing research really is finding out if your idea is right for crowdfunding. For a crowdfunding campaign to be successful, you typically need a large number of people to be highly invested in the solution that you’re offering. A funder is a person giving you their money. Think of it from their perspective. They’re funding the project knowing that the earliest they’ll see it happen is in several months. They have to really want your project to happen. There needs to be a lot of desire to support your specific cause.

Here are the most important questions for online research that you need to answer at this stage, that all influences how much a potential backer will desire your product:

• Does a project like yours already exist?
• What makes your project unique?
• Are the witnesses of similar projects hungry for an even better solution?
• Are there enough possible funders to fund your project?
• Who is the target audience, what do they look like/want/read/care about?

Truly understanding your target market is the only way to have a high degree of confidence in your answers above. It’s crucial that you do understand your potential target audience because you’ll be tailoring your entire campaign around them.

This video from Crowdfunding guru Salvador Briggman explains the difference between crowdfunding for a nonprofit project and peer to peer crowdfunding. Think about what would work best for your cause before you start your crowdfunding.