What are the most successful perks/rewards for my crowdfunding campaign?

Perk Soft Toy Bear

We get asked a lot about perks and rewards and how important they are for crowdfunding success? Do I really need to offer perks? Won’t it stop people being philanthropic?

Our answer to these? Perks help. A LOT.

The reason for this is that perks give people a way of participating in your campaign. They tap into selfish motivations as well as benevolent motivations. And they let you access your supporters’ spending purse, not just their philanthropic purse — you can guess which of these is bigger.

So what perks should you offer? 

Well perks tend to fall into three categories:

  1. Pre-release products or services: ‘Selling’ products and services via crowdfunding is probably the most common type of perk. Whether it’s tickets to your eventmembershipsCDsbee-hives or even crepes, forward selling products and services is a great way to get people involved in your project.
  2. Unique experiences: Most social cause organisations don’t realise it, but they are nearly always an amazing repository of wonderfully special, unique experiences. It could be dinners on a rooftop gardenworkshops on a farmtickets to an opening party, or even locating a tattoo on a founder.
  3. Special recognition: An oldie, but a goodie. Getting their name on or sponsoring a part of a project is still popular among some crowds. The key here is being creative on what can be sponsored. Edgar’s Mission had barns, rocks, rakes, posts, shelters and even a mountain.

 

So, how do I come up with perks for my campaign?

This might sound obvious, but the easiest way to come up with perks is to co-design them with potential donors. Edgar’s Mission ran a workshop with some of its key volunteers prior to its campaign to come up with their perks. Spacecubed did the same with their members. It’s best to have a hypothesis on your perks as a starting point, as well as the levels you need perks at (normally $25, $50, $100, $250, $1000, $2500, $5000)

 

Some other considerations

  • Perks which are directly connected to your campaign, which let people participate in your campaign/project are far better than unconnected perks (eg. Amazon gift cards,
  • Having an early bird offer on your perks is a great way to build momentum. Spacecubed – a co-working space in Perth – released a very limited number of highly discounted memberships in the first 24 hours of their campaign
  • Some perks (like drugs, illegal stuff, raffles) are not allowed. Make sure you check our terms to stay on the right side of the rules.

5 steps to writing an awesome non-profit crowdfunding pitch

Girl Writing

Every day we get a whole heap of crowdfunding pitches from non-profits and social enterprises, which vary from the very good to the very crap. We’ve seen it all, from the three-line-’people-will-get-it’ pitch to the boring-10-page-grant-application pitch (hint, both miss the point).

To make it easier for you, we’ve broken down crowdfunding pitches (and any non-profit pitch, really) into these 5 steps and given you an example from a real campaign:

1. Context – Set the scene Zoom right out and set the scene for your audience. Many of them will already know this, but it moves their brain into the right frame to introduce what you’re doing. In 2010-11 Australia had 54 396 applications for refugee status, mostly from conflict-torn areas,
2. Issue – Explain what the problem is in the current context 

 

Normally there’s something broken in the current context or there’s an opportunity – whichever it is, tell people what the issue is, before you tell them how you’re going to solve (or take advantage of) it.

But we take forever to process their applications – more than five years in some cases. This means five years in limbo with nothing meaningful to do, and five years of vulnerability, without family and friend support networks.
3. Solution – What are you doing to solve the issue? 

 

This is where you talk about what you’re going to do. Keep it simple and specific. Avoid non-profit buzzwords that no-one really understands (seriously, don’t do it).

We are building a rooftop garden for these refugees to volunteer at.
4. Impact – How will what you do change the world? 

 

Here’s where you talk about how what you’re doing will make a difference.

Our rooftop garden will grow more than food; it will grow opportunities. Opportunities for refugees to participate in familiar activities and grow traditional foods. Opportunities for meaningful activities during periods of uncertainty. Opportunities to increase self worth.
5. Ask – How much do you need and what are you going to spend it on? 

 

And always end with an ask. Be clear on how much you want to raise and what you’re going to spend it on.

We need $15,000 to build the garden and we’ve got some awesome perks for those who help us raise the funds.

And that’s it. You can use this same flow for your pitch video too. Simple.

How to increase your donation page conversion by 1500%

Girl looking at ipad

We’re obsessed with conversion metrics at Chuffed. Seriously, we A/B test everything. Colours/sizes/positions of buttons, call to actions, payment flows – they’re all constantly being improved and a result we’ve increased conversion 15 fold. That’s not a typo. And we don’t mean 15%.

Here’s how we did it and how you can apply it to your own donation page:

1. Don’t make people create an account before they donate

You know that thing when you click ‘Donate’ and you get redirected to a ‘Create an account with us’ page.

If you’re doing it, stop. Right now.

Ok, confession time: when we first started, we copied every other crowdfunding site and made account creation compulsory before you could donate. Big mistake. When we redesigned the site in October 2013, we completely removed the account creation step and conversion dramatically improved.

Turns out that this new flow:

Donate -> Enter your payment details -> Thanks for donating

Works several times better than this flow:

Donate -> Create an account -> Enter your payment details -> Thanks for donating

(Actually most crowdfunding sites use this flow, which is even worse):

Donate -> Confirm donation -> Create an account -> Enter your payment details -> Thanks for donating

Oh, and we still create accounts for people, we just do it while their donation’s being processed.

2. Make the donation button red

Ok, so there’s nothing magical about red, what’s important here is that your donation button should stand out from the rest of the page. If people are looking for it, don’t make it hard for them to find it. The easiest way to do this is with colour contrasts – make most of the page a dull colour, and make the donate button a bright colour.

We tried a range of colours on our page and we found that red increased conversions by about 50% from our original green.

3. Be transparent – tell donors where their money’s going

I sometimes think we’ve been so smashed around about administration costs in the NFP sector that we’ve taken to talking in obscurities about where money is going to be spent.

One study* that we came across said that only 4% of charity websites actually tell people what their donations would be spent on.

We strongly believe that telling people at the point of donation what percentage of their money is going where actually helps conversion. We believe in it so much that instead of hiding fees seven levels down on our website or in some obscure section of our Terms & Conditions, we decided to make it clear on the payment page what goes to the charity and what (if anything) goes to us.

Here’s a shot of what it looks like:

A final note

Every page is different and it’s difficult to know exactly what’s going to increase conversion on your page, so it’s absolutely critical to guess, test and update (and then do it over again). We use Visual Website Optimizer to do all our A/B testing but there’s other great tools like Optimizely and Google Content Experiments that have relatively cheap plans.

*Source: Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities, Jacob Nielsen