I thought today’s article should focus on less of gyan and more of the real stuff. Take for example, the DIY Day project (by Ritwik De and Subhadra Kamath). The DIY Day concept is a daylong festival, working towards promoting and celebrating the independent art movement in Delhi. Following its motto of ‘Doing It Yourself’, the festival was kept free of corporate chains as it raised funds by crowdfunding on TheHotStart. Interestingly, the campaign was so attractive that the requisite amount was raised in just 17 days! That’s admirable by any standards. So what exactly were the reasons that made their campaign successful?
A shared objective: All the stakeholders worked diligently towards one goal i.e. to have a celebration of independent musicians, artists and creative thinkers all under one tent! So whether it was the core team behind DIY Day or the entrepreneurs who decided to put up some cool stalls, the resultant synergy helped channelize all their energies in the right direction.
A simple but emotive pitch video: When a pitch video is the first advertisement of your project, it has to be extremely easy to understand. At 74 seconds long, the pitch video was short and crisp enough to retain a viewer’s attention. Interestingly, it was an uncomplicated video without a fancy background and hi-tech editing and still, it turned out to be very effective. But the idea was presented in a fresh and concise manner. Also, the strong and clear narration helped the viewers easily understand the concept was. Keeping it simple worked well for the DIY Day team. Tip of the day – you don’t need to spend 10k and 100 hours to create a cool video.
Relentless and strong social promotion: By now we know that social media is an incredible source of garnering public attention. Through its e-mail marketing outreach program, Ritwik, Subhadra and the DIY Day team were able to incisively reach their target audience. Also, their highly engaging FB page was able to create and maintain excitement for its audience.
Pictures and doodles: The campaign was able to absorb a lot of attention with its active Facebook page. Posting pictures frequently helped the creators keep their audience interested. The pictures showcased the talents of various independent artists and were therefore able to add on to the hype around the project. They also created several fascinating doodles that illustrated their ideas, goals and crowdfunding plans.
DIY Day got all these ingredients together in the prefect equilibrium and voila! It had a supremely successful crowdfunding campaign.
Click here if you want to check out the story so far at TheHotStart.