Menu
You have to make a plan for your campaign, from start to finish and then beyond the campaign, logistics, shipping, manufacturing, and fulfillment. We will just be touching the surface in this article, but if you want us to go more in depth let us know in the comment section.
Planning the campaign encompasses everything from length of campaign, launch date, closing date, budget for video, what kind of video suits you best (animation, narration with slides, real people, vlog style, etc.), and many other considerations that are outside the scope of this article. We will tell you some of the things we had to overcome to build our campaign.
The crowdfunding days where you could just record yourself talking about an idea you have, with no prototype or sample, no video of it working or people using it, are over. We’ve all seen those videos and wondered: what were they thinking? Unfortunately, the first few we recorded when we started were exactly like that.
No matter the style you’re going for, you should always have a script for the video. It doesn’t have to be any specific way, but it should be well organized and structured.
We had many ideas for a video and spent a lot of time discussing how it should be, from too simple to overly complicated, from too short to too long, too casual or too formal, it was hard deciding on what to do.
What we recommend you do is to go to the crowdfunding site of your choice, find other projects like yours (although they don’t have to be), find those that were successful and try to dissect their campaign. Find out why they were successful and implement those things to your own campaign. Similarly, find campaigns that were not successful, analyze them and find out why. Learn from them.
After many months, trials, and recordings of the campaign video, we finally found one video that we liked and decided to emulate the structure of their video. It was so clean, well-produced, and to the point.
Then, again, it was the matter of what to say in the video, that dreaded script was here again. But once we decided on what to say in the video, the order in which to say it and how to say it, the process was much smoother and cleaner. Although you don’t have to, we got some inexpensive studio equipment, lights, microphones, and we were off. I don’t think we spent more than $200 altogether.
Clean and Clear. That is all you have to know. You must create a clean campaign, no excess imagery or unnecessary text, and it must be clear as to what you are offering to your backers, which has value itself.
We followed a fairly simple structure for the Kickstarter campaign for Gravity Warfare. We looked at other board game campaigns, tried to find the ones that had a good structure and combine it with our own style, as well as how we wanted to convey the information we gave.
The structure was something like this:
What it is
What people say about it
How you play it
What you get from pledging
Pledge Levels
Add-ons
Stretch Goals
Reviews, Articles and Podcasts
Road to success (timeline after funded)
Shipping information
About us
Social Media
Contact
Whatever structure you choose, keep the information clean and clear. The simpler the information, the better informed your backers will be, the fewer problems they’ll have and the more time you’ll have to concentrate on the project.
When building your campaign, think about what motivates your visitors to back your project, what do they gain, and why should they help you. Remember, you’re asking people that don’t know you to give you money for something that doesn’t exist yet, and to trust that you will follow through. That’s a tough sell, and it’s something we all have to overcome with building that social presence, both virtually and literally, being known in the board gaming community and building trust.
So, you have the game in its almost-final stage, the campaign is ready to go, now what?