Innovative Funding
Alternatives
Crowdfunding and more
Brian Pichman, Director of Strategic Innovation, Evolve Project
@Bpichman

What would you DO IF YOU HAD….

What YOU and TEAM Must Have
Be A Risk Taker
Have Passion and Motivation

This is me

What can you ask of people?
• Donations of Physical Products
• Donations of Money
• Connections
• Perhaps the most valuable of all.

Communicate Your Needs
Who to Ask
• Patrons
• Local Businesses
• Global or Large Companies
• Friends of the Library
• Local Colleges and Schools
How to Ask
• Directly
• Phone Conversations
• Face to Face Conversations
• Indirectly
• Reaching out through other
mediums
• Internet (Social Media)
• Referrals (People)

Don’t Be Afraid to
Work Up The Organizational Chart

Win-Win Negotiation

Just Ask

Types of Funding
• “Friends, Family, and Fools”
• Provide initial seed money (usually in hopes of receiving investments later on)
• Angel Investors / Angel Alliances
• Like friends and family, but are accredited and are investing their own money.
Angel Investors group around the same industry and do a lot of analyzing your
business and strategy
• Venture Capitalists
• Like Angel Investors, but are investing other people’s money. Often they are
more involved and act as members of the board.
• Pebble Alliance
• Membership driven funding group that commit to a certain amount of
funding each year.
• Crowdfunding…

Crowdsourcing / Crowdfunding
Crowdsourcing
• Getting needed services, ideas,
or content by getting
contributions from a large group
of people
• usually from an online community
rather than the traditional
“companies / employees” path
Crowdfunding
• Form of funding a project or
venture by raising monetary
contributions from a large group
of people.
• Usually through connections
• Newly driven through an online
system

Platforms
• Citizinvestor: crowdfunding platform for municipalities and has a
library section
• Dragon Innovation: combines crowdfunding with manufacturing
support
• Selfstarter: an open source solution to crowdfunding platform. Allows
you to brand your own campaign page.
• Kickstarter, Indiegogo: popular crowdfunding platforms

Setting Up Crowdfunding Campaign
• What You Can Do:
• You must have a clear project in mind (music, film, tangible product, software
product).
• In other words, there must be an end result product.
• What You Can’t Do:
• Raise money for causes (5ks, etc)
• If you are doing a software project, some platforms require the project must be run
by developers
• Cannot be used to build websites or apps for social networking, e-commerce, or
business
• Create an Amazon Payments Account
• This is different than your Amazon account that lets you shop.

When To Crowdfund
• Crowdfunding IS NOT free
• There are costs involved that you need to do BEFORE launching your
campaign to get successfully funded
• Prototyping
• Marketing
• Business Plan Development
• There is a tremendous amount of effort behind the scenes including PR,
marketing, and advertising.
• We will spend most of the session talking about those pieces!

Case Study
http://momentlens.co/momentist/2014/04/09/how-we-raised-450k-on-kickstarter/

Dan Shapiro
http://www.danshapiro.com/blog/
“If you plan to make this product regardless of the results of your campaign then
just run pre-orders on your own website and use the time as a way to build initial
customer demand. The positive is you can focus all of your efforts to driving your
own website traffic, while using advertising to optimize the funnel.”

The Art of Asking
• Amanda Palmer
• http://www.ted.com/talks/amanda_palmer_the_art_of_asking
“Don't make people pay for music, says Amanda Palmer: Let them. In a
passionate talk that begins in her days as a street performer (drop a
dollar in the hat for the Eight-Foot Bride!), she examines the new
relationship between artist and fan.” – TED Talks

What You Need Built Before Putting It
Together
• A Business Plan
• Description (Executive Summary)
• You will need to highlight your key players for your start-up idea
• Discuss the risks and challenges
• Use your financial plan to determine how much money you need – and back up why you
need it in the descriptions.
• A Completed Website
• You want to include the web pages that include your brand, your product idea, and/or any
blogs you are running. Your websites should be around well before you launch your
campaign.
• A few months recommended
• A “Brand”
• Noticeable graphics and logo
• Social Media Presence / Network
• Link your social media accounts to all pages
• Link your video you created. This is huge in selling your idea
• Projects with videos succeed at a much higher rate than those without (50% vs. 30%).

Start with a Strategy
• Who – Know Your Target Audience
• They are, after all, giving you their earned money
• Why – What is the Driving Force behind your idea
• What is your “Brand”
• What is your “Pitch”
• Who is on your Team

Strategy – the “who”
Users
• People who will use your end
product
Consumers
• People who will buy your end
product

Strategy - Branding

• Branding Your
Idea/Project/Library
• What “value add” do
you provide?

Strategy – Branding
• Come up with a cool catch phrase, acronym, or other way to describe your
project or library.
• Give your project a quick and easy name
• Promote your brand across Social Media
• We will get to that later!
• Freebies
• Everyone loves give-a-ways.
• Buttons and Stickers are inexpensive
• T-Shirts/Posters are a bit more costly
• Get people wondering
• What is Project X? Give people [patrons, companies, etc] small snippets of what is
going on

Strategy – Your Pitch
• Short (15 seconds-30 seconds)
• Provide Teasers (ROIs)
• Include a strong mission statement
• We have over 20,000 users and I want to bring in your technology to our library to encourage
learning/engagement/collaboration.
• We point you in the “right” direction with all of your computer needs.
• Changing the way people see libraries by encouraging collaboration, fostering innovation,
enabling discovery, and cultivating experiences in library spaces. Libraries should be creating
stories and not just providing them.
• Honesty
• Be honest to who you are speaking with; don’t try to cover up anything.
• Empower Yourself
• Be proud and excited about what you are doing and trying to accomplish

Social Media is about
• Networking
• Meeting new people who you won’t ordinarily meet (outside of the people
you know personally)
• Sharing of ideas and concerns
• Collaboration and engagement
• A strong network is needed to run a successful business or start-up
• You need people who support and love what you do. Your closely nit group of
friends/family isn’t enough

Expanding Your Circle of Influence
• We all have a circle of influence. My friends / colleagues who like the
work I do
• They have a circle of influence
• Those people are the ones who like the work my colleague does
• Chances are, I don’t know most of them
• That group of people also has a circle of influence of people who trust them
• Chances are, I don’t know any of them
^--This is your audience, the people you need to introduce your
BRAND to.

Social Media – Hard Work
• You need to be vigilant and active on social media
• People expect quick responses
• You need to do A LOT of statistical tracking, monitoring, and
constantly revisiting your social media strategy.

So Why Do I Need This?
• You need advisors and supporters
• Advisors will provide input
• Supports will share what you say
• Link your “brand” to your “website”
• You need a responsive following of users for:
• Yourself
• Your Ideas
• Your Products

LinkedIn is especially popular among college graduates and internet users in higher income
households
Facebook also has high levels of engagement among its users: 63% of Facebook users visit the
site at least once a day, with 40% doing so multiple times throughout the day

Twitter
Twitter Users are
Influencers
140 Character Messages –
Make Them Count

Twitter Tips
• When starting a tweet to a specific user, and you want everyone to see, DO NOT start with
“@bpichman, can we have more cat photos”. Instead:
• “.@bpichman, stop with the cat photos!”
• Retweet, Retweet, and Retweet
• But don’t only fill your feed with Retweets
• Follow Friday
• Do this. Identify your most active users, and let the world know. People will do the same for you.
• Hashtag as often as you can, but #don’tbeannoying #aboutit #becauseitmakesyoulookweird
• But if you are talking about #startups or #libraries or #coolideas people who follow those hashtags will see
your tweet

Analytics
• Followerwonk.com

Analytics
• Set up monitoring for your website, brand names, etc
• Commun.it

Followers / Unfollows
• You want to follow users that share interests and are engaging on
twitter.
• JustUnfollow.Com to help monitor who follows and who unfollows.

Scheduling Posts
• Schedule posts with articles during peak times
• Klout.Com – Will also post to LinkedIn

Facebook
• Facebook users are engaging
• When developing a Company or Personal Page and you are paying for
advertising, focus on getting more “Likes”
• Those people who like your page can constantly be marketed too, versus
paying for a status update or a link to your website.
• Create content that people want to share

Facebook Tips
• Be part of as many groups as you can that match your
• Target Market
• Interests
• Collaborative Goals
And be active in those groups – communicate, like, and share.
• Have some humor. People like jokes and will share things they find
amusing
• Therefore linking back to you

LinkedIn
• A great place to write longer articles and have them shared in your
network:
One of my post was not successful.
If someone where to like my post, I would
expand my social influence to the next circle
(So those people’s connections)
If one of their connections engaged my update
I would expand to the third circle. That is my
goal

LinkedIn Tips
• Like and share posts
• Be part of groups and be an active member
• If you are doing a project that requires some coding, talk about that the
current roadblock and see if you can get others to help when your stumped.
• Write recommendations and endorse others.
• Be sure to have both your personal profile completely filled and your
company profile accurate and complete.

Recommended Strategies
• Use twitter to push out updates on Facebook.
• https://support.twitter.com/articles/31113-using-twitter-with-facebook
• However, LinkedIn does not let Twitter push to LinkedIn. Use LinkedIn
to share articles and longer bits of information
• http://twitterfeed.com/; have your blog posts update to LinkedIn,
Twitter and Facebook

Building Your Image
• Essentially, use of social media allows you to build your image and
brand more.
• Start doing this now; create accounts and start contributing to the
conversation. People will look you up online, and want to see what
have you done.
• This is great for SEO. When people search for your idea to decide
whether or not to fund, you want your positive interaction to show.
• People simply will not want to help fund your idea if you don’t have
an online presence.

Social Media Wins
• On Social Media, customer service is everything

Social Media Fails

So How To Manage Social Media?
• You want to provide timely updates
• You want to share stories
• You want to contribute conversations and handle comments,
complaints and questions, in a positive manner.

Scheduling Posts
• You should schedule updates about you/library/project so your
followers may remain informed, and share those updates with others.
• Use graphics and videos!
• Commun.it is recommended– free limited, but worth paying for the
plan.
• HootSuite is good – but they have been limiting the free version more
and more.

Setting Your Goals
• You want a solid following of users on your social media accounts
before launching anything.
• Let your followers know about your brand, what you do, what you are
going to be doing, and get them excited for launch date of your
campaign
• Encourage them to RT

Controlling Your Image
• Brandyourself.com

Research

Compare Similar Campaigns
• How much were they trying to raise
• How much did they raise
• How many people supported the campaign
• Identify the types of videos, messages, frequency of updates, types of
perks, etc.
• Reach out to the owners of the campaign
• Learn what worked and what didn’t
• Challenges and how they overcame the challenges
• Any useful online groups

Fact Check
• As you build your plan, check with friends and family. If you are
unable to build enthusiasm from your closest network, you need to
work on the pitch.
• Identify stakeholders

Develop Your Story
• After you research your market and similar campaigns, bring it all
together in “your story”

Components of a good story
• Clear
• Easy to understand
• Build trust with your future investors
• Pictures and Videos
• References
• Cite recent successes
• Highlight your team and/or major stake holders
• Incorporate parts of your business plan into the story

Visualize Your Story
• Use strong images to show your goals/message
• Campaigns with videos raise 114% more money that campaigns
without videos

Your Campaign Video
• They is super, super, super, important.
• Should not be more than 3 minutes.
• This will be the greatest expense and one of the most time consuming processes
• Consider
• Music
• Film (background scenery matters)
• Some awesome photos to overlay your message
• Editing
• Conveying Your Message
• What are you asking for and why?
• You want to drive traffic to your crowdfunding page and website.
• Share the video prior to launching your campaign; gage excitement. If its not
getting traction it is not ready.

Creating the Campaign Video
• Inspiration
• Your video should be inspiring and get people excited about your product
• Describe the Who and Why
• Who are you. Why are you awesome?
• http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action Simon Sinek
• What is your product
• Be clear and concise. People don’t want to read lengthy paragraphs about what your product
is.
• Show the ways someone might use your product/service
• How did you get here?
• Give people your story, how you worked about coming to this idea, the needs you saw, the
challenges you faced and the obstacles you overcame.
• Don’t forget to ask
• Your end goal is to get people to back your product. Backing your product means:
• You have proven customer demand
• You have the funds to finish or improve your product AND CAN match the demand
• Don’t forget to say thank you

• Pebble Watch – Funded 20 Million by 78k Backers
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-time-awesome-
smartwatch-no-compromises/description
• Movie
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1423546688/what-we-do-in-the-
shadows-the-american-release/description

Identifying Your Contributors
“You only have one mom. Who else will contribute” – Julie Babb
• Friends / Family
• Your Community/Industry/Contacts
• And Their Communities
• People who need or want the product
• People who admire your goals and are inspired

Potential Investor Groups
• Community
• Friends, family, neighbors, fans, followers, and your professional suppliers an
customers.
• Let them know you are seeking starting funds, and why they should invest in you
• Likeminded Crowd
• Find similar organizations (like the ones similar crowdfunded groups were part of)
and see who is interested. They would already share similar passions as you and align
them with your idea.
• Angel/Venture Capitalist
• Sometimes harder to find and you may loose “control” of your business, but having a
chunk of investment ready or to use during your campaign is extremely helpful

Areas to Out Reach
• We already spoke about Social Media – Build Curiosity and Links
• Twitter – Reach out to influencers, use hashtags to track your progress.
• Facebook – Use strong and appealing visuals, get people to share
• LinkedIn – Business Driven, join relevant groups in area of interest.
• Find influencers (bloggers, journalists, brand advocates)
• What about “offline”

“Offline” Marketing
• Events, Conferences, Meet-Ups
• Prepare your elevator pitch and share this at these network events
• Collect Contact information and QUICKLY follow-up with what you discussed
and what you are offering

Undercover Work
• Reach back out and recruit former Campaign Ownersto be part of the
campaign
• Or ask if they have contacts who would like to be involved
• Be active in at least two online forums/groups |
that share your interests.
• Become part of their community
• Invite them to your campaign’s community

Emailing
• Start building an email database and separate how close they are to you in
different groups.
• If it turns out “mom and dad” won’t fund your project, how would you convince a
stranger too?
• Announce your campaign prior to launch, and get those folks ready to be the first to
help crowdfund.
• Email marketing produces 20% more dollars than any other form of
marketing (according to Indiegogo)
• Therefore, ensure your contacts are up-to-date, make mailings personal,
and most important plan these emails before, during, and after the
campaign (frequency, type of update, etc)
• Mailchimp.Com is a great service!

Goals
• You should have contacted at least 50:
• Bloggers, Journalists, Industry Influencers on Social Media
• Try to develop a relationship with at least two organizations that can
be involved in the project. These will already have a community (a
strong one) that you can tap into.

Math Behind All This Networking
• 1/3 of funding will quickly come from your friends and family
• The next 1/3 would come through their connections
• The final 1/3 occurs once your idea/project gains traction and word
gets out about your successes thus far.

Build A Press Page
• As you prepare to start rolling out your campaign, make sure you have
a well developed “press page” and ensure you have media specialists
ready to share your project/campaign. Continue to drive those
groups to visit your press page.

Break - Recap
• Built out Brand/Pitch
• Social Media Presence and Online / Offline Network
• Circle of Influence
• Getting people ready to support your campaign prior to launch
• Lots of research of previous campaigns
• Lots more out reach and discussion

More Tools For Success
• Free Conference Call
• Meetin.gs
• Doodle
• assistant.to/
• Fuze Meeting (www.fuze.com)

Campaign Decisions
• Length Of Time
• 1-60 Days
• Use www.kicktraq.com to track similar campaigns, and how they got funded
and when
• Statistically, projects on kickstarter that last 30 days or less have some of the
highest success rates
• Amount to Raise
• This will take a considerable amount of research. Look up what similar people
have done.
• Identify your costs to produce or improve

Campaign Funding Goals
• Set Realistic Goals
• “Green Bar Effect”
• If you overshoot, and say you only need $20,000 and using the (1/3,1/3,1/3
rule you can reach this amount), but set your goal at $100,000 you will look
extremely silly if you only reach the $20,000.
• Green Bar Effect is when the crowd see things as a “hot” item, so if you set
your bar at $20,000, and you achieved the $20,000 early on people will be
more inclined to fund.

Perks
• A “Perk” is something given to a person based on pledge level.
• Can be a pre-release product/beta tester
• Can be swag
• Can be special “bragging rights”
• Naming rights, special recognition, or development roles that appeal to ego of many
backers
• Engaging your backers through rewards to make them go the extra mile
because you will make them feel valued and part of the “movement”
• Keep It Simple
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danprovost/neat-ice-kit
• From Moment
• “From a creator’s perspective, every new level significantly complicates your ability
to deliver. Creating swag sucks especially if you aren’t in the clothing business. Lots
of custom colors are never appreciated with new supplier relationships. And having
to create accessories to differentiate your levels, is a nightmare”

Organizing The “Meat And Potatoes” on your
campaign page
• How you layout the rest of your campaign page is crucial to success.
• Intro
• Show the who, what, and why
• Logos!
• Inspire others to help
• What makes you unique and amazing
• Features of your product
• Get more detailed and explain the specs
• Team
• People sell. Show them your awesome team. Personalize your mission.
• Timeline
• People want to know what you have done, how far along you are, and what you plan on doing in the future
• Backer Levels
• Explain the various backer levels

Pre-Launch
• Influencers, Friends, and Family
• Reach back out to them and remind them of your campaign. Re-share your
content, ensure they are ready to help promote you.
• Friends and Family
• Send updates every so often before you go live with campaign. Get them to
be the first backers.
• Through a launch party
• Press
• Ensure the press is ready! Follow up with your contacts.

At Launch
• Email Blast the potential contributors.
• Blog, Flyers, Call Publishers
• Be Personal
• Be direct with some of the people you know who will not only back your
product, but also share your campaign
• Social Media Blitz!
• Be On The Phones

During Campaign
• Continue Emailing your different lists and get their support (don’t be SPAM
though)
• Interacting with backers
• Backers want to see you are quick to respond to questions and messages. Again, they
are trusting you with their money. Give them more reasons to trust you.
• Campaign Updates
• First week – update daily
• Then slowly spread out the updates, pushing people to reach new goals, announcing
new updates, maybe more product demos.
• Use photos and videos to update your following
• Share these on your social media accounts
• Share your milestones with your backers. Gives your backers more of a reason to be
proud of the work you are doing, and how they helped you reach it.

At the end, people are trusting you with their money. Make sure they can
trust you and your product.

Good Kickstarters
• Potato Salad Guy
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zackdangerbrown/potato-
salad/description
• Exploding Kittens
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/elanlee/exploding-kittens/description
• Reading Rainbow
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/readingrainbow/bring-reading-
rainbow-back-for-every-child-everywh?ref=ending_soon
• Pebble Watch
• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-time-awesome-
smartwatch-no-compromises/description

Buy Used DVDs/Blu-Rays
• Speak to your local renting Video
Store
• Or Red Box Kiosk Owner

Card Catalog – Seed Library

Music
• Ask your local artist to…
• perform at your library
• teach others how to play
• Do a “Battle of the Bands Event”

Movie Night
• Check out Amazon for Movies
• Sometimes can show a screening before movie theaters do
• Start a “Film Festival”
• Encourage local talent to create or share a movie the created and play it
during the film festival

Video Game Night
• Ask local Video Game stores to borrow equipment to set up a gaming
night
• Ask your patrons to bring in video games

Miniature Event

Software / Hardware
Here are some great Software / Hardware resources for you to try!

Teach Kids to Program
• Hopscotch
Programming made easy No
typing. No syntax errors. Just drag
and drop blocks. Hopscotch is an
intuitive, friendly programming
interface designed for everyone.

Developing Software
• The cost to develop custom software is hard to put a price tag on.
• Ask Local Colleges/Universities for help
• Their students are often required to seek project work (where they don’t get
paid).
• Unpaid Internships
• Pitch the experience to do something for library-land, great exposure, great
resume add.
• Build development groups in your library.
• Hire programmers/technology enthusiasts on your staff

Bonuses for your patrons
• Comcast Internet Access $10 a month (Internet Essentials)
• http://www.internetessentials.com
• For the folks in school, using your @edu address get:
• Free Microsoft Products at www.dreamspark.com
• Free AutoDesk Products at http://students.autodesk.com
• DropBox
• Free Storage Space for Backing Up Your Data
• If you have to filter internet / protect from web based threats
• OpenDNS.com

Thoughts?

Thanks for attending!
Brian Pichman
815-534-0403
bpichman@evolveproject.org
@bpichman
Be sure to tweet me and
keep the conversation going