The Crowd Supply Guide: Define Your Community, Write Your User
As creators prepare to launch their campaign, many are tempted to jump right into the glamorous stuff of a campaign: filming a cool video, taking alluring product photos, sending excited tweets and posts to friends, family, and followers. We don’t want to dull that enthusiasm, but that’s not where you should start work on your funding campaign. After all the hard work you’ve done on your project, you need to start the next phase with some important marketing decisions nailed down. That’s why we recommend that the first thing you think about is your campaign copy. That’s not because it’s the most important piece of collateral for your campaign, it definitely isn’t. It’s because the process of writing it will lay the groundwork for the ideas and approach you’ll use in all of the other marketing and presentation of your project; it will help you ensure your message is consistent and well-crafted. It will help ensure the fun stuff is good stuff.
That does not mean you have to complete all of your campaign text and get it ready to publish before anything else gets done. It does mean that the issues you think about and the questions you answer as you start the job of writing will help and inform the rest of your campaign. Starting with campaign text lays the conceptual foundation on which you’ll build the rest of your campaign. It’s more about laying the groundwork than completing a deliverable.
We also understand that many people, and maybe engineers in particular, find that writing is, to put it kindly, an unwelcome challenge. That’s okay. For this part of the process, don’t worry about grammar or structure or word choice or topic sentences or any of that other stuff. The important thing here is that you spend some time thinking about the things you’ll need figured out before you can build a good campaign. Get that done, and our professional writers and editors will help you get it down on “paper.”
We think the best way to approach this task is to think of it as “writing the story” of your project. In this story, your project is a hero on your user’s quest to solve a problem or attain a goal. It’s not a story about you or your company (although obviously those are important characters). It’s the story of how your product is a hero to your backers. Think of it this way: every transaction, every act of consumption has desire (a.k.a., demand) at its heart. Desire implies a subject (the one who desires) and an object (the thing they desire). You need to write a story whose subject is your user. Your user is on a quest to solve their problem with the object of their desire, your project.
Okay, that’s all pretty windy and abstract. How do you put this advice into concrete practice and actually start writing your campaign copy? Your own process will vary, but thinking about the answers to some of these questions should help you get started:
- Who are your users? Be very specific. Give them names, ages, a career, a haircut. Imagine where they are in life and what they are trying to do. You want your potential backers to identify with them, to see themselves in the story.
- Why do your users need your project? What does it help them do? Or, what can’t they do without it? Paint a picture of what your project can do to improve or enable something your users love. What, specifically, are your users doing when they need your project?
- Try some one sentence summaries of your story. E.g., “Phyllis the engineering student couldn’t afford a bench full of test gear, until Labrador came to her rescue” or “Tangara is the music player you wish you had in the early 2000s.”
- Think about how you decided to undertake the project. What drove you to start it and keep working? What will change or improve for you when the project is a reality?
- Which monsters does your product slay? What are users finally able to do when they’re freed?
Obviously, none of these questions will have single or “right” answers. They’re intended to get you thinking about the elements of the proposition you’re about to put in front of your backers. If you spend some time just brainstorming answers to these questions, you’ll start to form the outline of your marketing strategy. If your campaign collateral is full of happy, busy users doing stuff that’s crazy cool, rather than a bunch of dry spec tables and less-than-compelling descriptions of your PCB, you’ll know you’ve gotten it right.
Note: If you have questions about writing style and our standards for prose, check out the Writing Style Guide.
Question not answered here? Contact us to see how we can help.
The Crowd Supply Guide: Table of Contents
For Everyone
For Backers
- Supporting Crowd Supply Projects
- Ordering, Paying, Shipping: All the Details
- How are Backers Protected?
For Creators
Getting Started
- When and How Should I Submit my Project to Crowd Supply?
- The Life Cycle of a Crowd Supply Campaign
- Why Projects are Rejected
Before Your Campaign Launches
- Define Your Community, Write Your User
- Building Your Open Source Community
- Why Open Source?
- Set Funding Goals
- Properly Price your Product
- Marketing and PR
- Campaign Photography: Creating Stills and Videos
- Working with Manufacturers
- Writing Style Guide
During Your Campaign
After Your Campaign Concludes
- Your Campaign Has Ended, Now What?
- Fulfillment & Logistics
- Solicit Field Reports
- How Are Funds Received?
- When are Funds Received?