Success in Crowdfunding: How Will Acorn Help Nancy?

Nancy’s Crowdfunding Problem: Failure to Get Funded

“Hairdresser Nancy has an idea to open a hairdressing salon for the elderly in her local area. She has had the project and profile approved and is now listed on the Acorn Platform . She is deeply passionate and knowledgeable about hairdressing, and has a lot of clients who she believes could help spread the campaign. Her problem is that she doesn’t have much experience in digital marketing, and only has a small budget to share the campaign.”

How can the Acorn platform help Nancy succeed?

78% of all crowdfunding projects don’t meet their funding goal.

This is often due to a poor marketing campaign with little reach. Founders pay tens of thousands of $ to market their crowdfunding campaign. This means that people like Nancy with a limited marketing budget will often struggle to get funded. In Keep it All (KIA) funding structures, founders can leave with nothing despite spending thousands out of their own pocket.

Enter, the Acorn Marketplace…

Step 1: Targeted Re-marketing

Our innovative crowdfunding engine will take Nancy’s contacts and begin to build a custom audience to share her campaign. We will work with platform partners to target campaign adverts, and content through email marketing, social media and adverts.

This means that Nancy doesn’t have to worry about running her own marketing or social media campaign, or using an expensive agency to do it for her. In addition, she can opt-in for buying paid marketing and content services within the Acorn Marketplace, and this will be taken as a percentage of her raise.

This means she doesn’t need any of the money upfront and only pays if her campaign is successful.

Step 2: Inbuilt Analytics

Nancy will be able to track campaign progress through her own dedicated analytics interface. Because she can see how far her campaign is reaching and where the engagement is, she can make better decisions on if, when and how to boost her campaign with additional paid ads or services.

Step 3: Tiered levels of Integration

Nancy can decide on the package of marketing tools and guidance she wants, depending on her budget and the reach she needs to achieve her funding goal. Founders can opt for different tiers of marketing reach, which provides different levels of automated tools and guidance based on data from previous campaigns of similar categories.

This means that a small community project such as Nancy’s can crowdfund for relatively cheaply with only a small percentage in marketing costs in order to reach her modest target. On the other end of the spectrum, a larger global brand trying to sell a tech gadget has the option of going for higher tiers of marketing to reach a more global audience.

Step 4: Early withdrawal of funds raised

Because Nancy has a limited budget to spend on marketing and content, she will benefit from the option of withdrawing part of her funds during the campaign stage.

Being able to withdraw part of her raise at set milestones within the crowdfunding period, will be able to buy her extra content, reach and services within the Acorn Marketplace.

Step 5: Stats of Success

As the platform insight builds audience profiles for many different types of founders like Nancy, it also builds a bank of incredibly valuable statistics on what works and doesn’t work for crowdfunding campaigns.

These stats can be used to market similar projects to lookalike audiences and will also be beneficial to the long- term revenue generation capabilities of the platform.

Through the integrated targeting of Nancy’s campaign to the right people, on the right scale for her project, our next generation platform will be able to drastically increase Nancy’s chance of success.

Using the Acorn approach, we can help Nancy’s project be a ‘cut’ above the rest — let’s hear it for Nancy!

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Next up: Find out how Acorn can help increase transparency in crowdfunding.