How to promote your crowdfunder

Share on social media

A good first step for promoting your crowdfunder is to share it on social media.

• You can automatically share your fundraiser from your Youcaring control panel, by going to the Share fundraiser tab, and selecting an option.

Make sure you write appropriate and personalised covering text for your social media shares!

It’s probably OK to share your crowdfunder several times on social media:

• Once at the beginning, once in the middle, and once more at the end might be a good approach.
• Think about how much you can get away with posting about it without irritating your friends!
• Remember, if lots of your friends care about politics too and dislike Tories, they’re probably seeing quite a lot about #GE17 in their social media. If your friends are less political or not so left-leaning, they might not be seeing any other anti-Tory stuff at all.

Make it personal, approach potential donors

The more personal your approach to your friends, family or colleagues, the more likely they are to respond!

Emails (or Facebook direct messages if that’s more how you and your friends roll) are a good strategy. Group emails are good – personalised emails are even better.

Who can you send your email to? Think about:

• supportive local groups
• groups in your community of interest
• as well as local contacts

It’s a very good idea to emphasise that you’d like the recipients of your fundraising email to forward it on to their contacts. And can you ask them to add a covering one-liner personally recommending you as a good person to donate to? Can they forward the email onto ‘friends of friends’ or ‘colleagues of colleagues’?

Show some passion in your email – tell a personal story of why this matters so much to you, and to the people in your life that you care about. If you’re not sure what to write in your email, have a look first at the existing central crowdfunder pages on stopthetories.nationbuilder.com for a bit of inspiration.

If anyone comes back to you sounding interested in donating but asking a question, make sure you respond promptly and show gratitude for their interest! Your aim is to make people feel good about donating, to feel a part of something worthwhile.

Speaking to people – either in person or over the phone – is even better than social media or email.

• Start thinking now about what your ‘pitch’ could be to close people in your life that you can talk to about your campaign.
• Is there anyone you’ve not spoken to for a while, whom you reckon would really love your campaign? Can you call them or drop by?
• It can be a good idea to practise your main lines for your pitch while you’re home alone, so that you don’t have to improvise them in the moment.
• You can totally tie in preparing spoken lines with writing the covering text (or recording a simple video) for your crowdfunder page itself.

And do you know any groups of people (in your social circles, or more formally) who would be interested in hearing you talk about your #StopTheTories campaigning,curious as to what’s going on and what they can do to help? You already know why you’re doing this, so perhaps you can find a way to talk to others about it.

Getting past the awkwardness…

It might feel strange to be asking for money. Assuming you’re generally reaching out to people who share your dislike of Tories, you don’t need to be too shy right now!

Millions of people all around the country are angry and horrified by the prospect of a much increased Tory majority until 2022, and wishing they could do more to prevent it. You are giving them an opportunity to do something to help!

If it helps, you can point out that unfortunately all effective election-time campaigning does take money. We just can’t reach very far outside of our lefty social media bubble without it. The Tories have their millionaire friends to bankroll their activities – we have millions of ordinary people on our side! And you’re giving of yourself to unlock the support of ordinary people in your community.

Ask the wider #StopTheTories movement for help

You can send a direct message to #StopTheTories Channel with a link to your crowdfunder. We’ll certainly be able to share the best crowdfunders on our page. You can also post it in the #StopTheTories central project group, and you can also contact other #StopTheTories pages and groups.

Post to other social media pages

You can post your crowdfunder around social media pages in much the same way as we took you through for promoting your Facebook page in the first place. Go back to the How to build your following and get connected page in this guide to review our tips and instructions for this.

Good luck, and make sure you let us know how it goes!!