Crowdfunding- Experiences of a first timer.

So many people warned me about crowdfunding, “It will take over your life”, “ You will look silly if you don’t raise it”, “the majority of them fail”, “You should set your sights low then anything you get above that is a bonus”, “Most people don’t even know what crowdfunding is”. But I am a gluten for punishment and stand by “Don’t knock it until you have tried it” so in February of this year I started the path towards our first crowdfunding campaign. Six months later I can look back and assess its success.

This experience has taught me so much about marketing, about reaching out to people, raising funds and gaining support that I never expected to learn when I made that slightly hesitant decision to go for it in February. I was told planning was key to a successful campaign and enlisted the support of one of my mentor’s Kirsty Ranger on a consultant basis. I’m really glad I did this as I had no idea where to start and knew I would need someone chasing me to keep up momentum. We started planning together in March, when I was still out conducting research in Nepal. As we pulled together a timeline and started a ‘pre-crowdfunding’ campaign on Kirsty’s website Ideasquares. I started to realise how much time and effort this process was going to take and that I couldn’t do it alone.

On my return to the UK, I hurriedly recruited our first ever student intern, Sophie and warned her it wasn’t going to be an easy 8 week placement, I brilliantly timed it to clash with the University exam period! Luckily for us we also got the bonus support of Alex a volunteer student intern. These two ladies kept me sane and helped us go from strength to strength during the campaign. I know I could not have done it without them.

One thing I felt very strongly about was having fixed dates for the campaign, I knew this was a difficult time for my volunteers abut I also knew if we kept pushing the date back we would never launch, so we were going to go for it no matter how unprepared we felt.

We cobbled together a video (even though I am awful at holding it together on camera), which ended up looking amazingly professional thanks to the newly learnt video editing skills of Sophie. We put together a social media and blog day by day plan. We started to get all our photos and media together, making sure we kept to just a few images and used them everywhere. We started making a list of all the rewards we could offer, the list started to grow and grow but we wanted to make sure there was something for everyone.

We decided 28 days (the average length of a menstrual cycle) was the perfect length of time. Long enough to build up momentum but not too long that we would burn out by the end.

We ummmed and errrred about how much to go for. Should we set the bar low and try to keep momentum up to ‘over-fund’, should we go for £10,000 like we originally thought? Should we go for “keep-what-you earn” or “all-or-nothing”? After sleepless nights, I made the executive decision to go for “all-or-nothing”, having research it and talked to countless professionals and people with experience of running crowdfunding campaigns I could see the merits of both. In the end, my gut told me that human instinct makes you root for the under-dog, for someone who is really close but not quite there yet. We decided to go for £7000 as this was the minimum needed to take our project forward and nerve-rackingly chose “all-or-nothing”, it was a gamble which meant we could walk away with nothing!

I prepped all my ‘pre-crowdfunding’ supporters, 50 friends and family who had said they would definitely pledge as soon as the site went live. We started a count down- one week to go, 5 days to go, 48 hours to go, 24 hours to go. It was terrifying hitting the go-live button! What if I had made a terrible mistake? What if no one pledged?

Luckily for me, my 50 supporters kept their word and more and more people got behind us. In the first 24 hours we raised over £1500 it was incredible, what a confidence boost.

Unfortunately, things started to slow after the first couple of days. For those of you who are interested you can see our statistical graphs below thanks to Crowdfunder UK. We decided not to worry “we have plenty of time”. I started going to as many networking events as possible sometimes two a day, talking to anyone who would listen about the project. I started to get sick of the sound of my own voice “crowdfunding, crowdfunding, crowdfunding”. It was exhausting and didn’t seem to be getting us anywhere.

We had planned an event for menstrual hygiene day on 28th May, 10 days in. You can read about it here. We were so pleased to have some light relief and something else to talk about. It boosted our team’s moral, it reminded us why we were trying to raise the funds, it got us a whole host of new potential supporters and gave us something new to talk about. Although it didn’t have the boost in pledges we were hoping for.

One thing I was told by others was that you would get the majority of funds from people you know, then friends of friends but that you will also be able to make some big leaps by getting corporates behind you. Try as I might, we were not successful at this. Hours were spent on the phone with corporate social responsibility teams, with business people who might want us to come do a “Menstruation consultation” but we didn’t manage to engage any of them. Whether this was through a lack of forward planning, many of them need months to get donations of any size approved, or down to the fact menstruation is still such a taboo topic we will never know.

The arid dessert in the middle of the campaign was demoralising and terrifying, I was sure I had been “too greedy”, gone for too much and wasn’t doing enough- despite working 12+ hour days on the campaign, having two interns working two days a week in the middle of their exams and roping in my boyfriend as social media support. I was doing calculations to see if I could personally add to the campaign to push it over the target.

 However, in the last week, people really started to rally together, we started to get big donations from individuals that we didn’t have a direct connection with. By the last couple of days it was clear we were going to reach the target and we finally got to relax. I was in an all day-training course when we reached the target so didn’t even know we had done it until I came out and saw all the congratulations messages.

Once the campaign was over and I closed up the internships with Sophie and Alex, I took a well deserved break, holiday and some time to move house and office. Not having an internet connection for over a month really delayed me in finalising orders with all the suppliers and unfortunately put me behind on the expected delivery date of 3rd August for the rewards. Some of the rewards ended up costing a little more than we had budgeted due to smaller quantities. Physically writing out all the addresses (due to a malfunctioning printer which only works over wifi) and packing up the rewards took literally weeks. The last parcels are due to go out next week.

• Was it worth it? Yes and No. Monetary wise many people saw the campaign as No More Taboo getting £7000 to put straight into their charitable work. However, once you take off the fees (around £1000 including crowdfunder, VAT and all of the card processing), paying an intern, paying a consultant, buying and posting out all the rewards (over £250 in postage!) and the other marketing expenses of running a month long campaign. We only received around £3000 for our projects. Which doesn’t sound like a lot but is a much higher ratio than what most crowdfunding campaigns receive at the end. However, the reach of our campaign was fantastic we had over 3200 people go to our crowdfunding site. 219 people pledge to support us many of whom pledged for our products which is great market research, we got articles in several papers, radio slots, blogged and tweeted about and are able to move forward in a much stronger position than before, so yes it was worth it.
  

• Would I do it again? Yes, but not for a long time, it’s taken me 2 months to recover! Hopefully next time we will be much better prepared.
  

• Would I recommend it? The campaign was draining, life consuming and terrifying but I really do think it paid off in terms of getting to reach so many new people. My learning in so many areas was accelerated, my social media, PR and organisational skills have improved, I got to manage our first paid member of staff and connect with a whole new audience. I think it’s a great way to ‘jump-start’ an organisation but don’t consider it an ‘easy’ way to make money.