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Activists.
Activists are those avid supporters who want to do substantial and significant work for the campaign. For Planetary Resources, we created an army of core supporters we called our vanguards. To get this moving, a few months before the campaign, we sent an email to our list of 25,000 names. The email teased:

Hi there—

Everyone on the Planetary Team knows
the moment
. The moment when we knew our calling was to break boundaries and push humanity to the stars! For many of us, that moment was sparked by a mentor, volunteer or educator, often at a science center or museum.

Because of this, educating and inspiring the next generation has been a guiding force for everything we do. This month, we're partnering with a major science organization to create a revolutionary way to make space accessible, interactive and fun. But to make it happen, we NEED YOUR HELP. We're building a team. A select team. We're turning to you, our supporters, to look for a couple hundred members. Only a small number will be selected. We're calling this group the
Planetary Vanguards
. While
we can't share all the details, we can tell you that the
Planetary Vanguards
are going to be an important, driving force behind making space accessible in a BIG way! Interested in joining the
Planetary Vanguards
? Here's what you need to do:

1. Fill out the application here. This will allow us to narrow our search for the right people to be a part of the Planetary Vanguards.

2. We'll reach out to you to confirm your interest and verify your contact information. Please note: for some, nondisclosure agreements may be required.

3. We'll invite you to an exclusive, interactive Google Hangout with our cochairman and cofounder Peter H. Diamandis to bring you into the fold and provide you with a confidential briefing.

End of Planetary Transmission.

Chris Lewicki

President & Chief Asteroid Miner

As you can see, we kept the details, names, and dates of the campaign a secret. Thousands of responses poured into our database. We asked them to fill out a questionnaire estimating how much time they could volunteer each week and how big an email list, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter following they had. We filtered these down to about five hundred names, then invited each to an exclusive Google Hangout for a “confidential briefing.” Part of this was about engaging our fans, but equally important was that we tested the idea of a crowdfunded telescope on them.

In the months prior to launch, we gave our vanguards assignments, held private meetings, and used them as test subjects for the different strategies we were considering. Then when Chris Lewicki, Eric Anderson, and I launched the campaign with a live event in Seattle, more than fifty of our vanguards showed up in person, some even flying in from Europe. All of them were ready to help. They
weren't getting paid. They had traveled on their own dime to be a part of something important.

How critical were these core supporters? Of the 10,000 or so unique clicks we received on the first day of the campaign, almost 50 percent were attributable to the vanguards.

The lesson? Find your most enthusiastic fans and put them to work. They love helping, and their contribution can be invaluable.

10. SUPER-CREDIBLE LAUNCH, EARLY DONOR ENGAGEMENT, AND MEDIA OUTREACH

How you announce your campaign is critically important. The first few days after you launch is when you'll gain the most traction and raise the most money. To come out of the gate with sizzle, there are three key things to remember.

Launching with super-credibility.
As we discussed in chapter 5, when you launch above the line of super-credibility, people instantly accept your project as real and believe in their hearts that it is going to work. The key is bringing together as many credible sources as possible and aligning their efforts with yours. Credibility comes from the quality of your video, who is in your video, endorsements on your crowdfunding website, and, if you can muster a launch-day press conference, who is at your press conference.

Super-credibility also comes from the early success of your campaign. People love to back a winner. The better you do out of the gate, the more people will want to support you. This is where the next element comes in: early donor engagement.

Early donor engagement.
In an earlier section, I explained that the $5,000 and $10,000 reward levels were as important as the low-priced options. Here's why. In the weeks prior to the ARKYD campaign launch, Eric Anderson, Chris Lewick, and I reached out to our
personal networks for help. The day before the campaign went live, we each sent out a couple of dozen emails of the following type:

Hi Larry,

Tomorrow, Wednesday, May 29, I'm launching one of the biggest and most exciting online projects of my life. No exaggeration. I'd love your support. It's called “ARKYD: A Space Telescope for Everyone.” We are crowdfunding an orbiting space observatory (The ARKYD). We're using crowdfunding to generate global awareness and to increase the observation time we can donate to science centers and K-12 schools. This project is about making space accessible!

How this Crowdfunding Campaign performs during the first couple of hours (i.e., pledges received) determines A LOT about its overall success. For this reason, I'm reaching out personally to my close friends—asking for you to consider pledging and passing this along to friends.

There are two levels ($10K and $5K) for you to consider. Both allow you to donate significant telescope time to any school, museum, or university you desire. You can read all the details on campaign page when it launches—it's fair to say that we've put all the top benefits (a lot of them) into these top two levels . . . We'll even name an asteroid we discover after you!

Here's the campaign for your viewing—take a look! But keep it to yourself:
www.kickstarter.com/projects/1458134548/1966069095?token=2ab031d1

I will email you a link to the Campaign Page as soon as it goes live. Let me know. Thanks!

Peter

When we launched, the public saw us raise $200,000 in the first four hours. This much momentum helped us establish early credibility
and created enough visibility to send the campaign viral. With such a solid funding base, we were unquestionably going to make our target. The only question was when and how much?

Hype.
Create meaningful hype. People need a compelling reason to participate in the campaign, and particularly in the launch. In the case of ARKYD, we began teasing our community weeks before the launch, drumming up excitement with “something big is coming” hints. We then used our resources and those of our affiliate partners to promote a live press conference at Seattle's Museum of Flight. We organized ahead of time, ensuring that four hundred enthusiastic fans (from the Seattle area) showed up at the event. For people tuning in via live stream, we offered exclusive perks—a T-shirt—to those pledged while the announcement was going on (about an hour).

Behind the scenes, we worked our network. One common misunderstanding about crowdfunding is that most of your backers are strangers. The truth is that crowdfunding is often a combination of normal fund-raising strategies (seeking capital from your own network)
and
crowdfunding strategies (seeking anonymous public donors).

Engaging the media.
The major mistake most people make in crowdfunding is their assumption that simply posting your campaign on Indiegogo and Kickstarter is enough. It's not. You, not the platform, are responsible for driving traffic to your campaign page. And the more traffic you drive to your page, the more money you raise. It's that simple.

In addition to social media and direct outreach via email, affiliates, and advocates, another critical mechanism for driving traffic is digital media—online articles and blogs that link directly to your campaign page. Here are some ideas.

Approach those who know you.
If you or your company have been in the media before, create a list of those media outlets familiar with your track record. Contact them and prebrief them. Arm them with a press kit or link to images and content they can easily use.

Create a list of relevant bloggers and journalists.
Who are the bloggers who care about your area of interest? The Pebble Watch campaign did this masterfully. “We looked at every single blogger in the gadget blog space and charted how often they wrote about Kickstarter projects and created a list of eighty or so,” said Migicovsky. “Next we created a spreadsheet of the top sixty or seventy media journalists that we would look at contacting the moment that our Kickstarter project went live.”

Pebble chose Engadget as the exclusive launch media partner. They traded an in-depth news article about Pebble for the right to be the first to break the story. The partnership worked. News outlet after news outlet referenced the Engadget article and the campaign went viral.

11. WEEK-BY-WEEK EXECUTION PLAN—ENGAGE, ENGAGE, ENGAGE

It's critical to stay in touch with backers and would-be backers throughout the campaign. Start before the launch and keep going. According to research conducted by Indiegogo in 2012, projects with regular updates—blog posts, videos, and so forth—raise 218 percent more money than those without.
²⁸
Even better, given the enormous number of communication channels now available and the incredible ease of use, engaging your community has never been easier.

Why is engagement so important? First, backers care about their money. They want project status updates. These are your first customers, so keeping them enthusiastic should be a priority. This is especially true in a fixed-funding campaign, where their contribution is processed only after the fund-raising goal is reached. During the length of a campaign, disgruntled supporters can always lower or even cancel their pledge—keeping them engaged is critical.

Second, engaged backers invite their friends to the party. A huge portion of the capital raised via crowdfunding comes from referrals. And the best referrals come from people who have already contributed to the campaign and continue to be excited about its possibilities.

Third, over 10 percent of the funds raised in our ARKYD campaign came from upsells. This means that during the campaign, backers who had already contributed actually decided to donate more money for a better perk package. These upsells were largely driven by high-engagement activities. Let's take a closer look.

Promotions and contests.
People like to play, too. One of the more successful strategies we used for ARKYD was a design contest on
Freelancer.com
. We partnered with Matt Barrie by putting up a $7,000 prize for the best T-shirt design incorporating the ARKYD space telescope. We were expecting a couple of hundred submissions. Then Matt emailed his list—all eight million of them. Before we knew it, we had over 2,500 high-quality design submissions and an enormous amount of engagement. Plus, the winning T-shirt design became another perk, ultimately driving more sales.

As a side note: When designing promotions, make sure to align the contest with the campaign's ultimate mission. We ran a few contests in communities unfamiliar with crowdfunding and the Internet—they fizzled.

Live-streaming.
During the ARKYD launch, we hosted a series of live-streaming Q&As with our celebrities, in which I interviewed Rainn Wilson, Bill Nye, and Brent Spiner. These events helped make the campaign more transparent, promoted deeper engagement, drove people to our campaign page, and ultimately enormously increased our donations.

12. MAKE DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS AND FINAL TIPS

The details are in the data. As crowdfunding campaigns gain steam, smaller trends and larger patterns start to emerge. Knowing how to leverage this information can give your campaign a huge leg up. Here are a few patterns to look for.

Timing.
Timing is everything in crowdfunding. And there are two different timing sequences to pay attention to: market timing and launch timing.

Market timing means the world has to be ready for your solution. Why was the Pebble such a hit? Because the general public was hungry for affordable smartwatches. Be aware of development trends. Pay close attention to increased sales of similar products and do your homework. One of the best ways to test the market is to ask a hundred friends, family, colleagues, and—especially important—complete strangers what they think about your product/service/idea. Do this well before launch.

Launch timing means understanding that people follow schedules. Fewer folks are on their computers during the summer and on weekends. Take into account school holidays, religious practices, and even sports schedules when choosing the best time to launch. Internet traffic is higher earlier in the week. Launching on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday is terrible from a media standpoint, so if you can't launch on Monday through Thursday, then delay a few days. Don't risk losing early momentum to bad timing. Most crowdfunding ventures have peak activity at the very beginning and very end of the campaign and a lull in the middle. Plan accordingly.

Trend surfing.
You want to launch your campaign on a rising tide. Trends matter. Term popularity is important. Check out
Google.com/trends
. Trend surfing means riding the wave of a trending keyword just as it's becoming viral. Position yourself correctly and you'll surf the wave to its peak, using the term's popularity to drive traffic to your campaign. In our ARKYD launch, this was the idea behind the space selfie. We weren't sold on the idea until we searched for the term
selfie
on Google Trends. Based on the number of global searches we found the term was quickly rising in popularity, so we gave it a shot. That shot certainly paid off.