How To Personalize Crowdfunding Rewards When You Have No Time
It’s practically my catchphrase at this point in crowdfunding consultation meetings and workshops to insist on incorporating personalization into at least two of your reward tiers. Personalization of rewards creates connections between the crowdfunder and the audience to keep them on the hook until the project is released, it incentivizes more than one person to select the same incentive level because they know it’ll be unique (and better yet, unique to THEM), and it also turns your audience into marketing liaisons when it matters most; while you’re still actively campaigning.
All of this can be true at the same time as another thing, though: you’re an incredibly busy person, and crowdfunding is already a massively time-consuming process. I’m here to tell you that despite these seemingly contradicting truths, you can have it all! You shouldn’t be crowdfunding alone in any case, but regardless, you have a lot of options for incorporating personalized offers to bolster your success rate without completely losing your mind.
But first… yes, you should be delivering these kinds of rewards before the campaign ends
The best digital, personalized incentives are ones that go out right away. You might think… “but Bri, you told me never run a flexible funding campaign! What if I fail to raise my goal? Am I just… giving it away for free?”
Honestly… kinda? It’s a calculated risk, but the odds are in your favor if you deliver these rewards in good faith ahead of money being collected. On the one hand, sure, you could withhold ALL rewards until the payout is guaranteed… but then you’re left generating most of your own hype during the campaign, and you’ll have a harder time harnessing the excitement of one supporter to nudge their friends/network when you can still actually raise money. Personalized incentives (in this case, personalized offers at tiers under $100 in particular) are specifically designed to generate hype and FOMO during the act of campaigning, because when people love a thing you’ve made them that’s just for them, they’re more likely to show it off, which means it’s more likely their networks, who likely have some overlapping taste, get curious and peep what all the fuss is about, thus spreading your message more organically.
Consider variety over personalization
I might be contradicting myself a smidge here, but in some cases, literally personalizing a reward isn’t actually necessary. What you’re trying to avoid is the digital poster trap.
Digital poster trap (a common crowdfunding mistake): offering a single JPEG as a reward that, likely, is also your key art/primary project image, thus flooding social media with the same picture over and over again, leading to all of it blurring together for audiences and lowering the overall efficacy of the image forever.
If it’s not realistic to offer personalization for a particular offer (say, a social media shout out/graphic), then consider variety instead! People still get a unique thing (provided you slap their name on there, easy enough if you’re making your variety of posts in advance, which you absolutely should be doing), your feeds are filled with more than just a single graphic when promoting your work, and you aren’t having to customize each piece of art you’re sending out during your wildly successful crowdfunding campaign!
I’d say make between 5–10 varieties of your graphic templates (with a spot to customize the name) for campaigns raising $20k and under is perfect, with perhaps 15–20 varieties for campaigns raising above that. You can make these months in advance and simply rotate through them to send out to your supporters within minutes of their pledge.
Bonus tip: stop offering signed copies of things, especially digital signed copies of things (like your poster graphic, or a headshot, etc) if you aren’t a major celebrity. If you aren’t regularly recognized in public outside of a convention specific to your past work/genre… no one is going to pay for that (and they are highly unlikely to pay extra because of the autograph). Autographs are less valuable than they used to be, period, in an age of selfies and Cameo. They’re especially less valuable in digital form.
Make in bulk, personalize later
Personalization doesn’t always mean customized to a particular person, it simply means that it’s just for that person. So, say you have a digital doodle reward (aka a doodle you deliver digitally, versus a physical copy, even if the doodle itself was done long-hand). Do you actually need to wait for someone to contribute to the campaign to doodle something random? Of course not! Doodle as you prep the rest of your campaign, compiling a stack of individual drawings, and then add people’s names as they purchase that reward level.
You can add people’s names two ways:
- Keep all the original doodles and long-hand writing people’s names on them before snapping a photo and sending it off. This looks nicer/more integrated, but requires you to keep all the physical drawings and ensure the person who has all the physical drawings is able to personalize and send to supporters, rather than allowing this to be delegated to a more available teammate
- Taking photos of each individual doodle, uploading them to a folder accessible by your team, and then adding text of the supporter’s name in Canva, Photoshop, or another photo-editing program that allows adding text to image files
Make an online quiz
Though the era of Buzzfeed quizzes is largely over, people still get a kick out of a digital quiz that nets them a custom, semi-personalized result. This way, you’re pre-programming a single interaction that, based on supporter action, nets different results, even if there are only 5 possible outcomes.
Examples might include:
- A Would You Survive A Zombie Apocalypse? quiz for a zombie web series. Results could be: DEFINITELY; YES, BUT YOU’RE FOREVER CHANGED; IF CIRCUMSTANCES ARE JUST RIGHT; PROBABLY NOT; DEAD DAY ONE
- A What Should You Be For Halloween? quiz for a Halloween rom com web series, with results limited to things the characters in the show might dress as.
- A Which Character Are You? quiz for an ensemble project (this also serves as a fun preview of your cast/characters for audiences)
Make it short, ensure there’s a shareable results page so folks can show off what they got, and consider how to program this so folks can’t just give out the quiz link to friends without their friends purchasing the incentive themselves. There are plenty of different websites out there to help here, probably at least a few where password-protected quizzes are possible. If this seems like fun, do some research and experiment with different options!
Choose a personalization style that fits your workflow
Obviously I’m assuming most digital incentives are graphics of some kind, because graphics are inherently more eye-catching than text (great for marketing/brand awareness) and are generally popular choices for crowdfunders.
HOWEVER. There are a lot of ways you can offer personalized rewards that don’t require a visual element, major or otherwise! Perhaps you’re a slowpoke at Photoshop, but you’re a speed typist with an endless imagination. In that case, try offering writing-related incentives. For a zombie web series campaign, I once wrote personalized zombie apocalypse death notices where my supporters died heroically (and hilariously) in battle. If you’re a whiz at musical improv, stick to basic filmed jingles or verses.
Again, all of this stuff can be done in bulk ahead of time with limited actual personalization required unless the spirit moves you. Whenever you have a free hour or two leading up to your launch, crank out a few fun, related pieces of content, and then assign them to supporters at random once you’re live.
Limit availability
Though best used for incentives you drop weeks 2–4 (always hold back at least 2 cool incentives for post-launch reveal), one simple way of managing your workflow for highly personalized incentives is simply limiting how many you do. It helps ensure you aren’t churning out infinite content during a time where your attention is split, and it also makes the reward a first-come, first-serve situation. Limited supply makes it feel even more special!
Plus, if you get enough demand that you sell out early, you can always list the same clearly popular reward anew… but for an increased price, to accomodate for additional work (and acknowledge it’s something people really want, and acknowledge the success of folks who got in early).
Delegate
Some people are really quick at certain tasks. If you have a teammate who’s a quick sketcher with a flexible schedule, or a whiz at Photoshop, or able to swap basic personalization elements in Canva throughout the day… delegate the task of personalization!
I have worked a desk job with access to the computer and the internet for most of my career, and I’m a quick typist, so for me, the act of personalizing a crowdfunding reward, provided I’ve made the template ahead of time (and of course I always do), is super easy. I check my campaign throughout my day while waiting for an email to come through or after finishing a work task, quickly whip up whatever is owed to the latest supporters, and pretty much maintain Crowdfunding Inbox Zero throughout.
In fact, you can hire me specifically for campaign admin management if managing the timely creation and distribution of basic digital incentives is something you need help with!
What are other ways you’ve found for managing your crowdfunding workflow while still making the experience fun for your audience? Let me know in the comments!
Bri Castellini is an independent filmmaker, a romance author, and, regrettably, a podcaster. She’s known for the 2017 short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 160k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcasts Burn, Noticed and Breaking Out of Breaking In, covering the USA television show Burn Notice and practical filmmaking advice, respectively. She can lick her elbow (not clickbait). Full work history and ways to hire her as a consultant can be found on her website BriCastellini.com
