Crowdfunding, the practice of raising small amounts of money from large numbers of people, has enabled people around the world to start new businesses, fund initiatives, and raise money for themselves and others. Yet, not all crowdfunding efforts reach their desired goal. Why do some succeed, while others fail? This course will reveal the science behind successful crowdfunding, drawing on data from hundreds of thousands of campaigns. You’ll learn different types of crowdfunding approaches, and receive detailed advice on what to do (and what not to do) when crowdfunding. You’ll also have the unique opportunity to go behind-the-scenes with key players in the field with exclusive interviews from the founder of Indiegogo to successful campaign creators, to get the information you need to set your crowdfunding initiative up for success.
Dealing with Backers and Delivering Results
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来自 University of Pennsylvania 的课程
Crowdfunding
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从本节课中
Module 3
This module was designed to help you develop and manage a live crowdfunding effort, from pitching your idea to ensuring long-term success. By discussing examples of both high-quality and low-quality pitches, you’ll learn what makes messages memorable and be able to craft an effective pitch for your campaign. You’ll assess the differing benefits of showing prototypes and teaser trailers, and explore some of the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs have faced when delivering their projects and how to avoid them. By the end of this module, you’ll be able to employ a toolbox of approaches to craft a convincing pitch, and be prepared with the best solution to any situation.
与讲师见面
Ethan MollickAssociate Professor
Associate Professor of Management- Wharton School
Hello, and welcome to our next topic.
We are about to discuss how you deal with backers and delivering results.
Now this is especially important when you're dealing with reward-based
crowdfunding.
But in a lot of other cases, you're also thinking about how to take your backers,
your patrons, your supporters, and
make sure they're getting what they want out of your particular project.
So I want to talk about what the biggest challenges are and I'm going to use
numbers from the survey that I did to tell you what people actually thought
the largest challenges to delivering their projects and being successful were.
I'm going to talk about why delays happen and how to avoid them.
And then what to do if you do have problems, delays or other issues that
are preventing you from providing backers with the things that they wanted.
So I actually asked the survey takers, the people who created projects,
10,000 plus of them,
what their biggest challenges were when they were executing their project.
And number one was marketing and promoting their product.
And that's obviously something we've talked about in some of the other
lectures in this particular series.
So we've talked about how to do a good pitch and how to prepare for a pitch.
How to know what you're pitching.
So we've talked about that.
That's still a large challenge.
But very close runners up to that were manufacturing and
producing whatever reward we were expecting.
Now this didn't apply to everyone, but many groups did have this problem.
And also, how do you deliver and fulfill your rewards.
So, reward delivery and production of rewards turned out to be almost as
important as anything else in terms of the largest challenges people faced.
So I want to tell you a little bit more about those issues, and
maybe how to avoid some of those problems before they occur.
So I told you that manufacturing and delivering rewards are critical issues
that cause a lot of problems for creators of projects.
Here's a little bit more detail on why specifically delays
in producing projects happen.
And I think you can see here, that first of all there's no single cause that is
driving delays, it's actually a bunch of reasons.
The most prominent reasons are that some sort of issue with partner organizations,
especially things like suppliers, printers, production companies.
All of those working with those individuals tends to slow things down
because you're working with someone outside of your immediate team.
Another major issue is just shipping and fulfillment.
Trying to get things out to people turns out to be a lot harder than most people
were expecting, and dealing with that can be a big problem.
Lack of money can be a concern because once you've raised your capital,
it's very hard to go back to your backers and get additional cash.
So you're very budget-constrained in a lot of cases.
And also changing direction of
your project will slow down your ability to get rewards.
Slightly less of a concern, there's still issues where dealing with other creators
on your team and dealing with stretch goals that you may have imposed yourself.
So how do you avoid these kind of problems from occurring?
I know I've said this before in a number of other lectures, but
I cannot stress how important planning is.
And that's not just my view and the view of all of us here at Wharton who study
product design and innovation and entrepreneurship.
But it's also an overwhelming comment we got from people when we asked them what
the causes of delays were.
So plan as much as you can in advance and build slack into the system so
that one delay won't cause a cascading set of problems.
Something is going to go wrong in your project at some point most likely.
You want to make sure that that little delay or
little problem doesn't cascade into a set of problems for you.
So don't set everything too tight.
Make sure to give yourself time to deliver.
So even after building in slack there's still a lot of things that can happen.
And I want to go through some of the common pitfalls that we've identified as
a result of these surveys.
So one common problem is in working with partners, which we already talked about
was a major cause for delays and problems in fulfilling rewards.
And specifically, dealing with proofs and prototypes.
So you send something out to a printer, you send something out to an editor,
you send something to China to get produced and you get a prototype back and
the prototype usually has problems.
And people don't leave enough time or
money to deal with the fact that often there's rounds of corrections to do
with third party suppliers before you're comfortable with the end product.
So that's a big issue to think about and avoid.
A second problem is finding suppliers in general.
People who haven't done the research in advance and haven't located a printer,
haven't located a production facility, will often find it very difficult to do so
on the fly and learn how to do it.
So spend some time upfront finding potential partners to work with.
You don't need to finalize that in advance but
it helps to know that those things are problems that you might encounter.
Another big problem that came up were people's real jobs.
As I told you, most people,
about 80%, are doing their crowdfunding projects on the side.
So real jobs can intervene, you have a lot of projects due,
you have to work overtime, something happens at work.
So not leaving time to realize that you're going to have to spend 20
plus hours a week executing a new project can be a real problem.
Also other life issues interrupt.
So people get ill, family members get sick,
you have children or people have needs in your family.
All of those issues, personal, mental health, all come into play as well.
So thinking about realistically the challenges you might face and
leaving slack to deal with these things, and
to make sure you're taking care of yourself is really important.
Another major issue are key people fall through.
So I saw a lot of comments where somebody left the band at the last second.
Or a member of the artist collective left.
Or your CTO left the company.
If those things happen, it could throw you off.
So thinking about your organization, your team, in advance and
making sure that everyone is equally committed is important as well.
And for a very narrow cause that comes up in a huge number
of comments is actually Chinese New Year.
So the fact that China basically shuts down operations for a couple of weeks at
the beginning of February, end of January, due to the lunar calendar.
Is something that a lot of people don't anticipate, and
often can throw off production schedules by a considerable amount.
So if you are shipping things to China to get produced,
make sure you're aware of the Chinese holiday schedule.
Don't expect it to operate on the Western schedule that you might be more used to.
I also ask people who actually have projects that failed, why they failed.
And now you have to be a little careful with this data because a lot of people
won't admit the actual cause of failure, but
I think that those answers lined up pretty well with some of the causes for delays.
So one of those is a much more common,
much more serious version of the things that we saw before.
So not just having a family member who is ill, but having a death in the family,
having a real bought of sickness or mental illness.
Those can be serious concerns that can cause real delays,
very hard to predict those things from happening.
They're random and hopefully they will not be issues that you'll have to deal with.
And similarly, other nasty things that can happen, like robberies or
suppliers who run away with your money and shut down, are also causes for failures.
So it wasn't like the failures were very different from the cause of delays.
They were actually worse versions of the things that we saw delays being caused by.
So obviously you can't avoid all these things even with a lot of planning.
So if things are going badly, it is much better to make sure that your
potential backers know about this early on and are sympathetic and
understand why you're doing something.
So you should make sure you're giving updates, whether that's via email or
via a specialized website or via Kickstarter, Patreon, or Indigogo, or
whatever system you're using, make sure you're updating people frequently.
Sometimes your backers can actually help you, and
they're much more likely to be sympathetic if you're open and honest as you go along.
That honesty that you pay at the beginning is rewarded later on because backers will
trust you when you say there are issues or delays.
You can't always make everyone happy, there's always going to be angry people on
the Internet, there's always going to be some people complaining.
But if you're speaking frequently, those people won't be as listened to as happy
backers and people who are willing to give you trust and support.
Similarly, sometimes things go really badly.
A relatively small number of projects,
as you've seen in another one of my lectures, fails.
Something around 9% of projects fail entirely to deliver.
But that's still around 1 in 10, 1 in 13% chance.
So you need to make sure not to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy.
If things are going very badly and you're going to fail to deliver, you should
recognize that fact and do your best you can to make things good with your backers.
Rather than pouring every dollar and every ounce of energy and every ounce of
happiness you have into trying to make something that's failed, succeed.
So I found that only about 13% of backers said they got some sort of
refund when a project failed.
And only about 17% understood why a project failed.
If people got refunds and understood why projects failed,
they're actually happier than if they don't understand those things.
So you should make sure you're communicating with backers early on about
potential causes of failure, that you're updating them as things go along and
go badly or well.
And that you pull the plug if things are going very badly, and
realize that failure does happen and sometimes it's outside your control.
But if you're honest about it and give money back,
you have at least have a chance of salvaging some of the reputation you have
as opposed to spending every dollar or trying to hide.
None of those things work particularly well.
So in summary, issues can occur that cause problems for your project.
And a lot of those issues are beyond your control.
So what you should try and do is control the things you can.
Do your research, make sure you know all the potential pitfalls that you can
encounter even if you encounter things you don't expect.
And to deal with things you don't expect, build slack into your system.
Leave time for delays.
Leave extra budget to deal with issues that might occur that you can then pour
back into the project if things go well.
But don't leave things on a knife's edge,
because you're going to find that some delay then cascades and
causes problems and heartache for you across your entire project.
And communication with your backers is critical.
You can't just expect that they will instantly sort of know
what you're doing by telepathy.
You need to actually give them information on a regular basis, build trust with them,
treat them as the partners they are in delivering the project.
And you'll end up with much better results even if you're delayed and hopefully not,
but even if you have to cancel what you're planning.
