Launching My Crowdfunding Campaign – First Days

by Jimmy on January 24, 2019

We just launched our crowdfunding campaign on Seed & Spark for our short movie, Milk Money.  We chose the Seed & Spark platform because it had a higher success rate (75%) than Kickstarter (43%) for movie projects.  A fellow moviemaker that I met at Cinestory Feature Retreat had also suggested it to me.  Fear and optimism are coursing through my veins right now.  I didn’t want to launch until I had my actors/actresses on board so that they could help draw attention to the project.  This was on the advice of my friend who helped raise over $18,000 on Seed & Spark for her movie “An Act of Terror.”

Milk Money short movie on Seed & Spark

However, we had to launch on January 23 (Wed.) because of the auspiciousness of launching when the first quarter moon begins.  Just kidding.  We had an article coming out in our local newspaper, The Fauquier Times, and it promoted our crowdfunding page so we had to have it live for prospective locals to donate.  In any case, the campaign will last for 45 days so we can have a mid-campaign bump once we get our cast hired.  This first week we need to get to that magical 30% of our goal to keep the momentum going and increase the likelihood that we reach our goal.  Apparently, campaigns that reach 30% of their goal in the first week reach their final goal 80% of the time.

I’ve been sending family and friends private emails and Facebook messages (although Facebook limits that amount of messages you can send in a day to like 10 before their spam blocker kicks in) and have gotten a great response.  After the euphoria of the first week, it’s going to be a grind though.  I consulted a social media manager who specializes in crowdfunding campaigns Monadnock Social to help extend our reach to beyond my inner circle, but was graciously told that I would probably be wasting my money with them.  You see, I only have 45 twitter followers and at the time I talked to the woman at Monadnock, I was two days until launch, and that wasn’t enough time for her to build up my following.  So I’ll see what I can do during these next few weeks to keep climbing towards the goal of $7,115.  Check back in for updates on our campaign.

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