Mapping your crowd

Your crowd is everyone you can ask to give to your campaign.

• Family.
• Friends.
• Fans and followers.
• Colleagues.
• Stakeholders your project impacts on.
• Other artists.
• Artist support networks and arts organisations
• Local businesses and people who may be aligned with the subject of your work.

Some of these people will give you money. Some will help you spread the word. Both types of support are vital to your campaign.

But first you need to ask yourself:

• Who is your art for? 
• Who are you speaking to? 
• Who does your work most resonate with? 
• Who are your people?

If your answer to those questions is ‘everyone’, think again, ‘cos that just ain’t so. You may be making art for people like you. You may be making art that has a larger purpose. You may be making art that connects with many different groups of people. But one thing’s for sure, you’re not talking to everyone. No one ever does. Once you know who your work appeals to, it’s easier to understand how you can connect with those people.

Think about the motivation for each group.

• Why your project is interesting to them.
• Why they would give to you (or help you spread the word).
• What’s in it for them.

Time for some quick maths to work out approximately how many people you need to ask to give you money. The average Boosted project is around $5,000. The average donation is $50. This means you will need to aim for at least 100 donors. 2.3% is the average website landing page conversion rate across all industries, so if we divide that by your number of 100 donors you will find that you need to reach over 4,000 peeps across your four-week campaign. 

Thinking about the numbers and dollars might be a bit daunting, so instead of tiering your crowd by the likelihood of them to donate, it might be easier to think of your crowd like the layers of an onion – with you at the core! Each member of your team has an immediate of circle of people who they are in regular contact with and may already support them.

Each member of your team has four ‘tiers’ of person they are trying to reach. Each tier is further away from them so to tap into that tier they require more effort to reach.

• TIER 1 is Friends and Family
• TIER 2 is your Social Community
• TIER 3 is your Artistic Community
• TIER 4 is the General Public

Friends and Family are both the easiest to access, and the most likely to support. You have a direct line to these peeps! They know who you are and what you do (and might already be supporting your creative endeavours). These are the people that you want to be your key supporters. It doesn’t matter if these people don’t donate large amounts to you, these people build the energy around your campaign. Remember, Boosted doesn’t publish donation amounts, so a $5 donation and a share can be more effective than a $500 when it is coming from the right person!

Social Community is the next tier of people you can reach. These are people you know personally but you might not consider a close friend. This may be a colleague or ex-colleague, a member of your social netball team, or someone in your post-grad year linguistics class. These are people who you have a direct line to but who mightn’t know what you do artistically. For these peeps, it is important that you communicate what you are crowdfunding for, and why that is important to them. These people require a bit more effort to reach and a bit of convincing to donate. These are the peeps who see your posts on Facebook or Instagram, so make sure you keep them in mind when you are drafting up your stories!

Artistic Community is the next tier of people to reach out to. These are people who you mightn’t know personally, but love what you do (if only they knew!). They might be peers in your field, fellow hobbyists, or just people who love art in just the same way you do. The challenge here is not to convince them that your project is worthy, it’s finding a way to reach them! Have a think about how you consume arts media. Maybe there is a substack you are subscribed to, a page you follow, or an organisation you are a part of. Try reaching out to these places and asking if they might share your campaign. By having these intermediates share your campaign, you will be able to reach more of your artistic community and raise funds from outside of people you know personally.

The General Public is everyone else! These people require the most effort to reach, and the most convincing to donate. You will need to tell them who you are, what the project is, and why they should care. To reach these people you need to create a groundswell of support that catches the public’s imagination. The best way to tap into the ‘General Public’, is to first tap into each of the other tiers beforehand. Maybe it’s a media moment, or a share from an influential supporter, support tends to snowball, so by manufacturing some initial momentum you may be able to create a self-perpetuating machine that markets itself.

The key to cracking an egg-ceptional campaign

Mapping your crowd can be scary. But you might surprise yourself by how many people you actually know. The key to crowdfunding is to get as many people invested in your campaign’s success as you can. One way to visualise your crowd is like eggs in a frying pan. Each time someone becomes invested in your campaign, it’s as though you have cracked an egg into the pan. Think of the frying pan as the potential people you could reach, each egg you add has its yolk (the peeps they directly influence) and a white (the communities they are in). Sometimes you get a double-yolker and sometimes the whites overlap, but the main thing is each egg you crack helps to fill up the pan.