A short guide to UU crowdfunding

I get a lot of questions about crowdfunding from UUs. Wait, there’s a magical tool that allows you to raise tens of thousands of dollars in days with just the internet?

Well, sort of. Like with a traditional pledge drive, a crowdfunding campaign requires on certain kinds of groundwork.

So, what makes crowdfunding effective? When do you use it?  How is it different from, say, a pledge drive?

A pledge drive is what you use when your target audience is “the usual suspects”.  A small, committed group that you have a fairly close relationship with.  This is best used for “business as usual” costs, such as fundraising for the operating budget.  It’s based on a close relationship with a small group of people.

Crowdfunding is for when you have a project that could catch the attention of a larger, less committed group.  You have to be able to answer two core questions:  1) Who will care about this? and 2) Why?

Now, unlike a regular pledge drive, your “who” is not limited to the people you can contact.  Those people are more like your “starter who”.  If your story is good enough, they will share, and your campaign can spread.  But no matter how good your story is, with no “starter-who”, you can’t run a good campaign.  Unless you get media attention (thereby leveraging the group of that media outlet), you need to start with people you can reach and tell them a story they will want to share.

So, you need to ask yourself “what will resonate with my starter-who enough that they will share? And what will resonate with the people they’ll share with?”. Fortunately, these two stories tend to overlap a lot.

Sometimes, you have to get a bit creative with this.  One year, I was part of a team helping craft a campaign for barn renovations.  This was within the Northern Lights program, so we had a starter-who of UUs from across Canada.  That said, a barn renovation is a hard thing for even the most committed UU to get excited about.  So, we workshopped a little.  What is a “why” that would resonate with our starter-who?

Why renovate the barn?  In this case, it was so that the youth group could have a safe and comfortable place to gather.  So we focussed on that… On the impact of UU youth group on peoples’ lives.  Not only did we, as fundraisers, know a lot more about youth programs than we knew about barn renovations… It was a way easier story to find and tell.  Someone talking about their youth group experiences resonates with the average UU in a way that contractors talking about wiring just… don’t.  Sorry, contractors.

A “why” of “barn renovation” would have only been effective for that congregation.  A “why” of “youth program” was something that could resonate with our entire starter-who… and with the people they’d share the story with.

Sometimes, your starter-who isn’t directly reachable.  For example, your Facebook friends.  You can’t decide to post something they will see.  The algorithm decides.  When we run fundraisers in the UUHS Facebook group, that group is not our “starter-who”.  Our starter-who is a tiny portion of super-readers that Facebook tests the post out with first, to see if it gets traction. Whatever post we create has got to get immediate engagement to be visible—ideally shares, but at the very least a few comments.

This is best, accomplished, in my experience, by leaving a small grammar error in your initial post.  (This is not actually a joke… It’s an honest to god tip that I wish didn’t work but absolutely does).

You can also accomplish this by having some ringers in the audience, coordinated via email to share and comment and create initial momentum—UUHS is too big to do this effectively any more, but we used this technique in our early days. To read more about how we’ve adapted as we’ve grown, check out this article about our most recent mod fundraiser.

Sometimes, your starter who is baked into the platform.  In the case of UUs, using the platform Faithify allows you to potentially reach UU donors who are already interested in the platform itself.  You still need a compelling story—but your starter who is a little broader than it would otherwise be.  There are a lot of great crowdfunding resources on the internet, but the Faithify tools have the huge advantage of being designed to be accessible to the average UU.  You can read a great overview of their starter resources here.

But no matter what your platform, the formula is the same: Who can I reach? Why is what I’m fundraising for something that they’ll care about, enough to donate and share?