Three ingredients are critical to a good PledgeMe video: You, your project, and your passion.
Crowdfunding is about people, connection, and trust.
Your pledgers want to know what – and who – they are supporting.
Your video is a chance to introduce yourself, and show why people should give you their support.
It builds the all-important trust factor
Crowdfunding projects are often looking for thousands of dollars. Would you hand your money over to a complete stranger? Or do you usually need to feel some kind of way to put your money behind a cause?
Your supporters need to know who you are. They need to have a face with which to associate your campaign and project.
Being in your own crowdfunding video helps to build this trust.
It shows your passion
No-one is going to sell your passion like you are. You wouldn’t run a project on PledgeMe unless you were passionate about what you are doing.
And it’s your passion that will infect your supporters and make them believe in you.
Asking people to hand over money for something that doesn’t exist yet is daring.
It takes courage to ask a bunch of friends and strangers for help.
So I know you will also have the courage to step in front of that camera and tell your story.
But you don’t have to be on camera for the entire video
It’s good to intersperse with footage of your product or project.
Remember that a good crowdfunding video shows as well as tells.
Use moving images wherever possible. It helps keep people interested.
You can use voice over to tell your story, while you use footage or photos to show the audience what you’re talking about.
Here are some examples of our favourite PledgeMe videos, featuring their creators.
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.
