Professional Crowdfunding Toolkit for Indie Publishers and Studios

Professional crowdfunding profiles tailored to your brand.

Crowdfundr hosts many game-changing professional crowdfunding options for studios, publishers, schools, and other creative businesses to manage campaigns for multiple projects. Yes, you can run different types of campaigns on Crowdfundr, and you can run more than one at a time! This guide will aid in customizing your organization profile, managing your creator’s campaigns, building online stores, organizing fulfillment, and so much more.

And this isn’t just for businesses! Are you an indie creator who likes advanced features? Crowdfundr Professional is open to you too! No restrictions, no limits and no extra cost.

• Customizing your profile and campaigns with your logo and branding
• Managing multiple campaigns simultaneously
• Using series-based campaigns for related projects
• Setting up a storefront
• Professional crowdfunding at live events

Customizing your profile

Supporters must recognize you in professional crowdfunding. Crowdfundr is designed to showcase your brand. Your logo in the header, your colours, your fonts. The goal is a seamless transition between your website and your campaigns.

Organization Theme

To customize your profile theme, you’ll need:

• Logo in PNG format
• Brand RGB or HEX colour codes
• Blurb written for your profile
• Website homepage and desired navigation links (such as your ‘About’ and ‘Contact’ pages)
• Copyright message (Tip: if you have one on your current website, simply copy and paste)
• Brand fonts (Note: Crowdfundr uses Google Fonts; if your font does not appear, do a quick web search for a similar Google Font).

For technical help customizing your theme, see the ConnectionPoint Help Centre.

Organization Profile Bio

Write a profile for your organization or creator brand and consider these components:

• Welcome/Hello
• Who are you, and where are you located?
• Mission statement/motto/values
• What makes you and your projects unique? Why will people love them?
• What else would you like supporters to know?

Don’t make this too long – one or sentences for each part are plenty, interspersed with pictures and videos as you like. This editor works the same as the campaign story editor – see this article for more information.

Branded Emails and Custom Messaging

Notification emails sent from the Crowdfundr platform are branded with the header theme and organization logo uploaded to the profile.

For example:

Account Integration

Coordinate your subscribers and track where they came from by integrating Mailchimp, Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel.

You’ll find these options in your organization profile’s Integrations menu: 

Verification

Contact us at Crowdfundr to get your organization verified.

Verifying gives your organization added benefits:

• Up to 10,000 contact imports per campaign
• Invite your teammates in bulk
• Editable rewards – even after they have been claimed.

Plus, verifying is an added level of trust for your supporters because they’ll know Crowdfundr confirmed you are who you say you are.

Organization Staff

Professional crowdfunding is best with help! Invite members to your organization profile’s Staff page to help manage campaigns. These can be employees, volunteers, collaborators, clients, or whoever you wish to give permission to create and edit campaigns on behalf of the organization.

Organization team members can be entirely different from campaign team members. Campaign team members who are NOT on the organization team will not have any permission on the organization profile.

All organization team members have access to every campaign under the organization’s umbrella – per their permissions, regardless of their role on each campaign team. Organization Staff role status trumps any role that the user has on the campaign itself.

And each organization can only have one owner. 

Here are the roles and permissions your staff members can have—for more details, see this article in the Help Centre. 

SO… what does this mean?

• Want to give someone editing and marketing permissions to one campaign only but hide all organization details? Make them at least Editor level on the campaign team only (see page 13).
• Want to give your financial team permission to view all transactions for every campaign? Make them a Manager on the organization team. There is no need to give permission for each campaign. 
• Want to give someone marketing and promotional capabilities to all campaigns but do NOT want them to be able to see transaction information for any campaign? Make them an Editor on the organization team. If you also don’t want them to make edits on the campaigns, make them a promoter on the organization team instead.

Managing Multiple Campaigns

Professional crowdfunding can involve as many different campaigns (in any type or layout) as you’d like!

Whether it is multiple projects under the same brand, different projects for your creators, or a team of collaborators working together to promote a big idea, the art of managing multiple crowdfunding campaigns at once comes down to two things: planning and delegating.

Strategizing for each campaign is still necessary, and you can find help for this in our Campaign Strategy Toolkit. 

Planning

Planning is fundamental for making sure no ball is dropped on any part of the campaign cluster your organization is managing. To help with this, we’ve created a spreadsheet that you may use as-is or alter to fit your needs: 

Campaign Teams & Tasks

Each campaign can have a different team assigned to it; its team members do NOT have to be on the organization team. So, a user on a campaign team cannot change your organization details and personal information, and users do not have permissions for any other campaign under your organization (unless they’re added to those teams as well).

NOTE: Each campaign can have only one Owner but unlimited Managers, Editors, Promoters, and Members.

Assign team members as appropriate, but make sure they have permission to do the tasks you set them!

Use these two tools to communicate with and assign tasks to your campaign team members:

Communication Center

• Unique to each campaign
• Message some or all of your team at once
• Schedule communications
• Private platform messaging

Task Center

• Unique to each campaign
• View automated tasks designed by our crowdfunding strategists
• Create and assign custom tasks to users
• Creating tasks

Custom email messages

There are 2 emails to which you can add a custom message for each campaign:

1. Launch notification for imported contacts.
   Once your campaign is launched, all uploaded contacts will receive this email. Customize the message with why the contact should click the link and support your campaign. Include what makes this project unique!
   
   View this article for help importing contacts and customizing the message.
   
2. A confirmation message to supporters who have contributed. Thank your supporters in a way that’s unique to your organization. Make it seem like you are speaking directly to each person, voicing what their contribution means to your organization or campaign.
   
   View this article for how to insert your custom message.

Campaign checklist

With new campaigns starting throughout the year, it becomes easy to miss key steps in their creation. Also, if you have multiple collaborators, you may want to maintain some consistency across campaigns. We’ve created a checklist you can use to help you with efficient campaign creation; use it yourself or pass it along to collaborators, colleagues, clients, etc. Don’t forget to add any items your organization specifically needs.

How to utilize a series campaign

One of the layouts Crowdfundr offers is a Series-based campaign. This is a two-tiered campaign with as many sub-campaigns as you need, all with goals and funds added to a main campaign. This is used in many ways:

• Multi-step projects with large monetary goals can be broken down into smaller goals (success tip – smaller goals are easier to raise!) as long as you can fulfill your commitments using those smaller goals.
• Releasing a series with a similar overall story (e.g. comic, novel, TV/Web series, etc.) subsequently over a period of time
• Events – selling tickets for different days/activities
• You have different collaborators/influencers who want to run their own campaigns to raise money for the same project

Stores

Build and maintain a storefront for your organization. If you are looking for a simpler way to offer your creations year-round without buying into complicated online shopping platforms, this is a wonderful option. Two storefront layouts are available:

Social storefront

• Picture/video gallery and social sharing bar are included
• No stats (goal, deadline, amount raised, # of supporters) appear
• Good for when the majority of supporters will reach this page via shared links from social media, emails, etc.

Simple storefront

• No media gallery or social sharing bar
• No stats (goal, deadline, amount raised, # of supporters) appear
• Pictures and/or videos (videos from YouTube or Vimeo only) may still be embedded in the ‘Story’ section
• Good for a smooth transition between your website and campaign (via link or widget)

Fulfillment

You can find all orders from your supporters in the ‘Order items’ section on the Transaction page or the sidebar menu.
You can download this information in two ways:

• In a line-by-line list – good for gathering totals of each reward type for printing/manufacturing
• Separated by order – see which rewards were ordered together; good for your boxing/shipping prep

*For full fulfillment information, see our Fulfillment toolkit*

Live events

Tabling at trade shows, conferences, etc.

Another live option is to table at a trade show, conference, or convention to network and showcase your
creations. There are two main ways to market your crowdfunding campaign into these events:

1. Offline donations
   You may collect cash/cheques toward your campaign and enter them as offline donations into your
   campaign page and have those contributions count towards your goal. Reward items can be added to an offline contribution after you have created the transaction. Click the expand button to view that option.
   At this time, only one reward per offline transaction can be added. If a supporter desires more than one reward, create one offline contribution per reward.
   
2. QR Codes & Text-to-give options
   Each campaign has a QR code available to print onto signs and banners for supporters to scan and link directly to your campaign. Text-to-Give allows your supporters to text a number and receive the
   campaign link (great for video screen ads).

Creator-led events (festivals, open mic nights, ticketed shows, etc.)

Creators love to show off their projects – that is, after all, why we’re here! Have you thought about a live
event to showcase your work, but were afraid a lack of turnout would put you too far in the red? How
about crowdfunding your tickets?

Tickets are a reward item on Crowdfundr, and you can create an AON campaign with tickets as the reward
and use that assurance that you will have the attendance you need to go ahead. Most venues require
pricing for certain amounts of guests, so budget for your event properly and plan out ticket costs/attendee numbers needed.

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We’re here to help!

Our Discord channel is a place to connect with other creators and the Crowdfundr team to ask questions, seek advice, and share strategies. But if you don’t do Discord or wish to schedule a demo, feel free to email us at support@crowdfundr.com.

Ready to go?