Making Moves: Meeting with Indiegogo

I'm going to start this post while I'm thinking about it, because this week while I'm in NYC for separate event (though it's occurring to me now that it'll be a great venue in which to pitch this idea to a ton of strangers), I have a pretty cool opportunity to meet one on one with a senior director from Indiegogo to go over and get whatever constructive criticism I can for the GDF11 for Pets upcoming campaign. He also suggested we tailor ours similar this one.

The solar roadways campaign makes me slightly less skeptical about Vaskis' biggest suggested change: increasing the goal to $2 million. I get that of course they want us to aim high, they are getting a cut.  But it also makes sense from a signaling point of view, looking at the previous goal of only $95,000 to get started seems like a shady and mixed signal...and mostly really not enough to do everything that Spectragenetics really wants to.

So, in a recap of our last team meeting, I started organizing our crowdfunding campaign ideas through this Indiegogo blog post. It may seem like a bit of a no brainer to look at the advice on the crowdfunding website's own blog...but I'm not sure it happened last time.  So here's my crack at deconstructing the elements of successful crowdfunding.  Also, it's pretty simple and good stuff, so if you're designing your own campaign and this hasn't occurred to you, check it out!

Strategic Moves Made since Last Campaign (and why this one will build on upon the last but be much more effective):

We are putting much, MUCH more thought into our “pitch.”  Studying best practices in “explanation viral videos,” we will produce our own featuring highly sharable content under the counsel of Acres, a New York based mission-driven advertising/branding agency, responsible for Air BnB’s viral explanation videos,

We are planning more levels of perks, for example maybe something like this- (though I don’t know if we want to get into the manufacturing costs of different sizes…)

$5- Personalize thank you on your wall so you look like an awesome and innovative person in front of all your friends *

$15-some kind of Animal Lover bumper magnet or t-shirt, something else very well designed/covetable and cool looking GDF11 promotional thing*

$25- Free and first product small size  (certain size of product) and first chance at first product, LIMITED QUANTITY*

$50- Free and first product medium size, LIMITED QUANTITY *

$100- Free and first product large size, LIMITED QUANTITY

*everyone gets a personalized thank you on their wall

We will continue to be transparent about use of funds, showing how hitting each mark will get us closer to the donors getting their benefit

We have a motivated and passionate campaign designer with development, fundraising and production experience strategizing the campaign for her project in the Social Innovation Incubator at Carnegie Mellon University and will be providing fun & frequent updates & deliberate/extensive outreach to influencers.

If you guys had a meeting like this, what would your number one question/priority for him be?  (If you comment before Friday at 10am, I might just ask it for you....assuming he doesn't cancel on me...which in trying to mitigate my grandiose expectations, I haven't ruled out that possibility).