You might have seen a few crowdfunding campaigns do extremely well on some of the more popular platforms out there, but are wondering how to launch a campaign on your own website, like the Star Citizens project. Look no further!
In this tutorial, we’re going to go through one way to set up a crowdfunding campaign on your own website, relatively quickly. Aside from following the steps we’ve outlined, you can also always create a website to host a campaign by hiring a web designer, forming a relationship with a technical cofounder, or outsourcing the development.
Step 1: Choose a name and development platform.
You might think that you’ve come up with a great name for a new product or project, but unless you’ve checked whether or not that domain is already claimed, it’s useless! I use 1and1.com for all of my domain purchases, though you can also use GoDaddy or Google’s new domain purchasing service.
There are two main ways that you can quickly develop a crowdfuding page. First, you could use Tilt Open, which we are going to be focusing on in this tutorial. Tilt Open will handle the payment processing for any donations/pledges, the website hosting, and includes customization features and 3rd party integration. You can use Tilt Open to accept pre-orders, donations, pool money for a group experience, and more. You can also create subscription-billed rewards or accept bitcoin.
You could also set up a rewards-based or donation-based crowdfunding page using the WordPress development platform and one of the crowdfunding themes we’ve outlined here, however, it will require a bit more knowledge to set up the website.
Step 2: Set up the website theme
Once you have your domain, I recommend going with Tilt Open to set up the crowdfunding page. The credit card processing is 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction and there are two free options to set up the page. If you want more control over the CSS or stylesheets for the page and to use your own domain name, Tilt will take a 2.5% fee of funds raised. You can see the comparison below.
Once you’ve decided which option you’d like to use and have registered, you’ll be able to customize the text, video, call-to-action buttons, bank information, rewards, fundraising duration, and the look and feel of the project or promo codes, depending on which level of campaign you will be running. The platform also has 3d party integrations like Google Analytics, Mailchimp, and more.
I would recommend checking out some of the other successful campaigns that have been hosted on the Tilt open platform like Soylent, which raised over $3,000,000 from over 20,000 supporters. I’d also study some of the more successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns out there to get a feel for what they did right and what types of emotions are evoked by their video and campaign text
Step 3: Create a Marketing Strategy
Unfortunately, since you’ll be running your own private crowdfunding campaign, whether or not you successfully hit your goal will come down to your own efforts and hard work. On the bright side, if you use your own domain and take advantage of the white label functionality that Tilt Open offers, then you’ll be able to enjoy the longterm benefits of any of the marketing that you do leading up to and throughout the crowdfunding campaign.
Our crowdfunding course will give you a bit of a primer on what you need to know going into the campaign with regards to crafting the most effective pitch. We’ll also talk a little bit about marketing. I also would look into some our tips to promote your Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaign, as many of these points apply to the launch of a privately hosted crowdfunding campaign.
Finally, I think that PR outreach is a must-have element of almost every type of new product launch. Don’t forget these few key guidelines for creating an effective PR plan.
Conclusion
There are pros and cons to launching a crowdfunding campaign on your own website. Of all of the methods I’ve seen so far, Tilt Open provides a great solution, particularly if you have little to no coding experience. If you are familiar with setting up websites, I think that it would be relatively easy to set up a campaign page using WordPress.
