A crowdfunding video is essential in a successful fundraise. Campaigns with a video are up to 117% more likely to fund.
If you truly want to succeed, you need to put a little time, effort, and thought into your crowdfunding video.
Here are some tips to help you make a truly awesome one. We’re including some examples of some of our favourite campaign videos for inspiration.
1. Keep it short
An effective crowdfunding video will grab your audience’s attention in the first 15 seconds. You have a maximum of 3 minutes to effectively communicate the important points of your campaign to your audience.
The easiest way to do this is to remember your video is about your audience, not about you.
Make sure you’re not just filling the video with pretty things and inside-jokes. Fill it with information. Show AND tell. Be clear.
TIP: When you’re researching crowdfunding projects, make a mental note of the exact moment you want to stop watching a crowdfunding video. Ask yourself why you want to stop, and how can you avoid that mistake in your own video?
2. Be creative
Creativity is the key to holding attention. In the world of the Internet there are literally a million other things your potential supporter could be doing instead.
Imagine your viewer is time poor with a short attention span. The more interesting your video is, the more likely they are to watch it right to the end (where you actually ask for the money).
3. The quality of your video matters… to a point
Lighting and audio are two things you can’t afford to ignore. You need to be seen, and you need to be heard. A poor-quality video is one of the major contributors towards poor conversion.
Having a video, and showing you’ve put some thought and effort into it, shows commitment to your project. If you’re looking for thousands of dollars, the least you can do is to spend a couple of minutes explaining why to a camera.
But it doesn’t need to be a Hollywood production. It’s more important to show what supporting your project means to the person watching the video. As long as it’s clear, it’ll do the job.
It’s all relative. People will always notice a bad-quality video, but beyond a certain point, the message will mean more.
Ensure your audio is clear, and your video footage is well-lit and in focus. They’ll forgive you for the rest.
4. Own the content you use
If you are successful, you will be making money off this video. That means that you want to cover yourself copyright-wise.
A backing track really helps people focus on your video, but using a copyrighted song can have your video pulled by your host for violation. What a nightmare you didn’t need in the heat of a campaign!
That won’t happen if you use royalty-free music. You can find it for download at reasonable prices in various places online. Or check out the Free Music Archive.
Be careful of what’s in your video too. There’s a reason so many vloggers put a sticker over the Apple logo on their laptops – it’s technically a copyright violation. Don’t use clips from copyrighted work.
There’s a fine line between Fair Use and copyright violation, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry.
5. Script and storyboard your video
Plan your video. It will ensure that you cover all the points and get all the footage you need in the shortest possible amount of time.
A script means you can work out what you’re going to say (and test whether people like it) before you even pick up a camera. You can ask your friends and family for feedback on your ideas before you go to the effort of filming and editing it.
A storyboard means you can plan where you will be filming, and what footage you’ll need to get. This will save both you and your editor a whole lot of time when shooting the video and putting it together.
Takeaways
For most campaigns, a decent video makes a huge difference to their chances of succeeding.
If you take your idea and crowdfunding for it seriously, a video that reflects that will pay dividends.
Plan out your video before you make it – especially if you’re not sure what you’re doing. Write a script and make a little drawing of each shot you envision. This will help making and editing your video much easier.
About Kat Jenkins
In 2014, Kat quit her office job to try her hand at helping people crowdfund. She’d been a prolific pledger (she’s pledged to 80 PledgeMe campaigns to date) for a little while and was frustrated at seeing great ideas go unfunded.
Between 2014 and 2018, Kat worked on over 50 campaigns – including all three of PledgeMe’s equity rounds – before retiring to go learn about horticulture and native plants.
These days, Kat has a job she loves as a gardener at a rest home. She also maintains a weekly gardening and lifestyle blog, grows 5 varieties of garlic, and sells a cat-treat product – Kat’s Nip – grown in her garden.
In July, PledgeMe’s founder Anna got in touch, asking if Kat would be interested in ‘coming out of retirement’ for a very special project. That project – with Nisa Manufactory – quickly joined the ranks of PledgeMe’s biggest-ever project campaigns.
Kat has helped creators raise almost $300,000 through PledgeMe project campaigns over the years. And while looking at her records, she realised those PledgeMe campaigns had a 100% success rate (and 87% overall)!
It got Kat and Anna thinking. What if they dusted off Kat’s old website content, updated it, and put it on PledgeMe so every project creator could learn Kat’s secrets again?
And so we are running this series of blogs, which we hope you’ll find useful.
