3 Ways to Increase Student/Family Participation In Your Crowdfunding Campaign

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One of the ways to ensure that your campaign reaches your targeted goal is to do everything within your organization’s power to increase participation. 

At FansRaise, we are consistently monitoring the “health” of your campaigns. One of the factors that directly impacts how well a campaign performs is the percentage of participants that jump in and engage with the platform itself.

We came up with (3) ways to make sure that your group has success using the FansRaise platform for your upcoming crowdfunding campaign:

 

Structure the roll-out and launch

Get your group off to the fastest start possible by creating a structured launch.

A structured launch looks like:

  • Sitting down your membership and presenting the campaign plan (after a rehearsal, meeting, etc)
  • Setting FIRM expectations about member participation (“We are looking for each member to develop at least 5 Donors through the course of this campaign…”)
  • Establishing a TIME LINE that presents both a firm launch date (the date that the first system-generated “Supporter Requests” are emailed), as well as a window of time to allow the member participants to get started with adding contacts (“Download the app right now from your App Store, and register via email, and then take the next 4 days to add your 20 contacts. We are publicly launching on <>…”)

 

FansRaise.

 

Have your ensemble directors/caption heads/student leadership talk about it early/often

Delivering the campaign via your music boosters is fine, but the way to unlock unbelievable results is to use the influence that your educational faculty carries.

Think about it – your students or members take their artistic and performance direction from your teaching faculty. They take risks and step outside of their comfort zone frequently.

Having your educators reinforce the importance of the campaign, and holding the members responsible is vital to success. Our dashboards make it easy to see which members are responding and engaging with the campaign (you can add additional administrators within your Org account in the “Settings” so they can see the dashboards).

Also, don’t underestimate the importance of “positive peer pressure” from your groups student leaders! Section leaders, Captains, Drum Majors, and other upperclassmen can be positive role models and can help keep kids engaged. Remember, if it seems like the “cool kids” are doing it, it becomes the cool thing to do!

 

Ask parents to support, but not necessarily take over

The parents of your members (assuming that they are school-aged) may just assume that they should “take over” the logging-in and adding contacts process, but we encourage groups to allow students to take the primary ownership and responsibility of the campaign.

Why is that important? Won’t parents have more access to a wider array of email addresses to help fuel the campaign?

While it’s true that parents have more access to more emails, the most important part of the campaign is the ownership and responsibility created when the members drive the effort. 

Parents should  be aware of the campaign and how it works, and should probably have the Christmas card list, soccer team roster, class contact list or any other group list available to you at the ready. The programs that do very well with FansRaise tend to put the responsibility directly ON the member, as they stand to benefit from the fruits of the campaign labor.

Encouraging parents to jump into the fray might sound like a good idea, but in the long run it will not necessarily help your campaign reach goal. HOWEVER – parents certainly can and should reinforce the campaign’s accountability at home.

 

If your organization is ready for your largest fundraiser of the year, get started today by creating a user account and then enrolling your Organization on the FansRaise platform:

FansRaise.

 

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