These are the technical steps of how to share a crowdfunding campaign.
You, as the Campaign Owner, are responsible for your campaign sharing and success – so get sharing and don’t forget to ask supporters to share too!
Campaign owners and their teams share the campaign with their networks: friends, family, colleagues, mailing lists, media, and any other avenue within their means and comfort zones.
A common misconception about crowdfunding is that a crowd is ready and waiting to fund projects as soon as they launch. We wish that were true on multiple levels. Our job would be easy, and all the wonderful projects we see on our platforms would reach their goals. But if you plant a tree and no one knows where, who will watch it grow?
You must share your campaign and set expectations for your supporters to share the campaign (if you desire them to).
We’ll go over the technical basics here. However, for best practices in campaign promotion, we recommend exploring our Fundraiser and Crowdfundr HUBS.
Part 1: Identifying and growing your crowd #
One of the toughest parts about crowdfunding is finding a large enough crowd to fund your campaign.
Even on platforms with a larger audience to market campaigns to, you still need to do the work we’re talking about here. Your campaign needs to ‘rank’ high to reach its organic audiences. To rank high, you need to create an engaging campaign, have a marketing strategy, and communicate with your audience.
That’s what these resources will help you with. As our platforms cover a range of needs, we’ll direct you to different places depending on that need.
Everyone should read our blog post “A Guide to Campaign Promotion: I’ve launched my crowdfunding campaign – now what?” Even if your campaign is on Crowdfundr, CoCoPay, PetFundr, or Sponsifi, you’ll find this article helpful.
Finally, our HUBs are excellent sources of information for all fundraisers.
FundRazr/CoCoPay/PetFundr users
We designed The Fundraiser HUB for those fundraising for a cause (whether personal or otherwise). This HUB is for FundRazr, CoCoPay, and PetFundr users.
View our Campaign Promotion Toolkit on the Fundraiser HUB for cause-related campaign promotion.
Crowdfundr users #
Creator-crowdfunding is a whole other ball game. So you get a whole other HUB! The Creator HUB is your spot for help on creative projects.
View the Campaign Promotion Toolkit on the Creator HUB for creative-project-related campaigns.
Part 2: The Share Center #
The Share Center now contains all sharing options. You can also turn your personal message on or off.
Click ‘Share’ in your sidebar menu and choose your option to share.
Keep the checkbox checked if you want your personal message shown. Uncheck it to turn the personal message off.
Part 3: The Share Bar #
Allow us to introduce you to your share bar:
This bar specializes in social sharing. It contains everything you need to share campaigns with your entire network.
Social media
Just in case you’ve been enjoying the benefits of under-a-rock living, these are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. They are direct social media sharing options, meaning you can click a button and share to your account.
For example, clicking the Facebook button will open Facebook’s log-in window. Enter your information, and then it will open into the post-dialogue.
These work in the same manner for Twitter and LinkedIn.
You can also share via Pinterest by clicking on the three dots (…) at the end of the share bar.
We didn’t want to crowd the bar, and Pinterest is not a particularly popular form of sharing (sorry, Pinterest!).
What about Instagram and TikTok??
These platforms ARE gaining more and more followers……however, they’re different when it comes to posting links. Instagram and TikTok only allow certain users to directly post outside links (if at all) and only for certain sites. Perhaps this will be an option one day, but until then, you’ll have to plant the link in your bio for these platforms and direct people to click here.
Private media/Dark social/Links
You can also share your campaign via private posts, which you send to specific people instead of posting for the world to see. You can directly send a link from Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or email.
Note: WhatsApp only appears as an option when sharing from a mobile device.
**We designed this option for you and/or your supporters to share to a few email addresses. If you want to upload an entire email list, see our post on Contacts.**
Clicking the ‘Links’ option shows you your shortcode for the campaign (ConnectionPoint’s shortcode for all our platforms is fnd.us) and the QR code.
Short codes are excellent for sharing on Instagram, TikTok, and anywhere else where a limited number of characters is allowed. If the length doesn’t matter, you can always grab your link from your browser’s address bar.
Note: your link comes with a reference code; it’ll start with ?ref= followed by a series of numbers and letters. This is your user profile’s reference code. It’s how our platforms can tell who has shared the campaign. When potential supporters click on a link shared from your user profile with this code included, they will see an endorsement banner telling them you want them to see the campaign. This adds a strong layer of trust to your campaign. Read more here.
If you do NOT want an endorsement banner to show, share this link without the reference code attached.
For example, fnd.us/ConnectionPoint?ref=ab_o40rtf will become simply fnd.us/ConnectionPoint
Widgets
Are you looking to create a link to your campaign on a website? You COULD do a simple text link… but we like to do things fancy here (in the most simple ways we can). Why not put in a button or a badge??
This link opens the widget menu, where you can grab a snippet of code to paste into your website to create a SmartWidget badge or button that people can click instead of a texted link (yawn).
And you DON’T need to be a programmer to do it. Trust us, if your friendly neighbourhood content writer (who couldn’t code to save my life) can do it, so can you.
When you open the Widget menu, you’ll see this:
Once you’ve chosen your style, click “Get the code.” You’ll then see options to click a Loader script and a Widget script.
Copy & paste both the Loader code and the Widget code into the source code for your website.
Loader script – This is the Javascript code needed to enable the widget. Place this snippet anywhere on the page, but it works best in the Header or Footer.
Widget code – This is the code for the widget itself. Place this snippet where you want the widget to appear on the page.
Restrictions & Tips
- If you use WordPress.com or a similar Content Management System to host or build your website (Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, etc.), these widgets may not work for you, because WordPress and some other Content Management Systems tend to strip Javascript from the source code before loading the page for a visitor.
- This link might help IF you have some advanced HTML knowledge:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Javascript
- If you have more than one campaign running at the same time, you can place them all on one web page. To do this, you only need to add the loader script to the page once, and then, for each additional campaign, you only need to change the 5-digit code for your campaign.
- Most email clients and newsletter services are not able to run JavaScript, and the loader code for campaign widgets is written in JavaScript. This means that you will probably not be able to embed a campaign widget in an email or newsletter.
Are you an organization looking to customize widgets for your website? Click here:
Didn’t find what you were looking for? Try our Campaign Sharing FAQ! #
