Backers 101

Objective: You will understand best practices to build trust with your community, which is essential to them supporting you. Your community and audience trusting you is essential to growing a strong business in general and to successfully raising funds on Backers. Trust not only creates comfort and incentive for your community to buy from and

Objective: You will be able to recognize your own privileges and use them to benefit disadvantaged communities, which strengthens your business and its community connections. Who are you? We’ve talked a lot about who you are in the context of your business, but we haven’t talked in depth about who you are in the context

Objective: You will be able to coherently tell your story to others, and get them interested in supporting your business. Knowing how to tell your story is critical for building a successful business. Ideally, your story is exciting to people, engages them as a customer/supporter/community member, and gets them to share your business onward with

Objective: You will learn how to identify your target community and audience in two respects: the community who will use your business and the community who will support your business on Backers. Identifying a target community makes everything you do in your business ー from product design to branding to community-building and more ー more

Objective: You will learn best practices to build genuine engagement and lifelong community, which are essential to raising funds on Backers and to your business’s success. From our Choosing Your Community lesson, you now know who you’re looking to bring into your community. The next step is actually bringing them in and then keeping them

Objective: You will learn how to embed social and environmental responsibility into your business, which benefits your business (especially in your community-building efforts) and the world! Will your business change the world for the better? Will it have a net-positive effect on the environment? Will it improve the lives of people who fit in the

Objective: You will better understand what your Backers campaign can offer supporters, and how your offering can add value to your supporters’ lives. We talked already about what your business is offering customers in the Business Value Proposition lesson. Now we need to talk about what your business is offering your Backers! Ideally, you’ll be

Objective: You will be able to tell your story in an engaging way that grows your community, builds your brand, and gets you financial support. Earlier, we talked about how to tell your story. Now, we want to go further and talk about how to do it in a way that captures attention, connects, and

Objective: You will learn how to build maximum excitement for your Backers campaign launch, which will help you raise more funds when you launch. You’ve put in a lot of effort in building your community, and you will continue doing so up until your Backers launch (and beyond)! You want to leverage all that hard

Objective: You will learn how to create a compelling campaign video and call to action that will get viewers to support you on Backers and beyond. You know how to tell your story. You’ve figured out ways to make it more engaging and meaningful for your community. You know your central message and your call

Objective: You will be able to optimize your efforts on launch day, maximizing funds raised while growing and strengthening your community. Launch day! WOOHOO!!! You’ve got everything ready and now you can actually hit launch! Your project is now out there in the world. Exciting. First, if you have any key media or large partnerships

Costing/Pricing Evaluation ー Understand what your product/service actually costs from production to fulfillment, understand what you can sell it for to individuals/wholesale/etc, understand the profit margin and if this is sustainable Objective: You will learn how to assess the costs of your product/service, what you can sell your product/service for, and whether this profit margin

Objective: You will be able to create attractive rewards for your Backers campaign that will upsell your community with equity, leveraging and strengthening the loyalty you have developed with your community. In our Campaign Value Proposition lesson, we discussed what your business is offering your Backers. We stressed the importance of upselling your current customer

Objective: You will learn about a few online tools to create a growing, engaged, lifelong online community. We discussed at length earlier how to grow your community. Now we want to look specifically at your online community, exploring what tools we can use to be most effective. It’s first important to consider what you need

Objective: You will be able to apply best practices to keep your community engaged with your business before, during, and after your Backers campaign. We’ll look at this in three phases: pre-campaign, during your campaign, and after your campaign. Pre-campaign This is about combining everything we’ve been talking about already. Choosing your community, growing your

Efficient design ー how to reduce costs in your design without reducing quality, social or environmental responsibility Objective: You will learn how to analyse your business designs to reduce costs without reducing quality, or social and environmental responsibility. There are many costs that you can reduce that do not cut at social and environmental responsibility.

Future resiliency ー how to design your business to adapt to a rapidly changing world? (navigating industry shifts, tech changes, climate change, etc) Objective: You will be able to envision different possible future worlds, imagine how your business can fit into these worlds, and assess what strategies can keep your business resilient in a rapidly