Tools


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CrowdFunding Campaign Tools. Resources for increasing the size of your community. Find out about social reach amplification.

  • Social Reach Amplification:
    • ClickToTweet —  Provides you with a link that serves a tweet you’ve written for people to send to their followers.
    • Paper.li — Allows you to create an online newspaper around your campaign’s social activity.
    • RebelMouse – real time social publishing
    • Scoop.it – share ideas that matter
    • ThunderClap— Amplify your message with the power of the crowd
      • Pitch Video
      • Video Hosting
        • Vimeo — consider themselves home of high quality video.  Good editing tools.
        • YouTube — Part of the Google portfolio, great for sharing.
      • Blog — Many projects use their campaign as their blog.  Some continue to use it after the campaign is completed. Below are several options for off site blog applications.
        • Tumblr – now part of yahoo, great for content which is heavy on images.
        • WordPres – king of the hill for open source cms platforms
        • Blogger – Google blogging application
      • Landing pages:
        • Unbounce — Allows you to create landing pages for surveying your campaigners or advertising your campaign via things like Google Adwords.
      • Social Media Presence:
        • Facebook — A must for any crowdfunding campaign.
        • Google+ — Creating a Google+ Page for your campaign is great for connecting with a slightly different crowd than on Facebook.
        • Twitter — Another must have for any crowdfunding campaign.  Best to build your follower list early.
        • Pinterest — A great place to get involved in the conversation around the topic(s) of your campaign — as well as a place to share pictures relevant to your campaign.
        • Instagram — Picture sharing. Great for everything from sharing pictures of perks to snapshots of their campaign page.
        • LinkedIn— Social media with a business twist.
      • Shortened Links
        • Bitly — Bitly’s tracking tools to see how many clicks you’re getting and from where.
        • Google
        • Owl.ly – from HootSuite
      • Music Sharing — Musicians, you probably already know these ones, but if not — these are great ways of sharing your current music with potential contributors to get them excited about supporting your musical efforts.
      • Photo Editing:
        • FotoFlexer — Whether you need to edit photos for your campaign page or perks, this is a free and user-friendly online solution.
      • Create Infographics — Great for generating graphic explanations and visual data of your campaign.
      • Slideshows:
        • SlideShare — A good way to share images from your campaign.
        • Scribd – Another good platform to share, distribute or embed documents.
      • If You Need an Extra Hand:
        • TaskRabbit — Outsource your tasks.
        • Zirtual— Virtual personal assistants.
        • Mechanical Turk – From Amazon, brings workers and tasks together
        • Elance – Hire freelancers for anything.  Strong on graphic design projects.

       Campaign and Team Management

      • Task Management:
        • BaseCamp — A great way to delegate and manage tasks with your campaign team.
        • Teambox – Project management platform.  Apps are available.
        • Trello – Project management.  Apps are available.
        • ZenDesk– This is more of a ticketing / support platform but depending on your project – you may need it.
        • Hojoki – This is another application which is tough to classify as it can do so many different things and integrate with so many other applications.
        • Doodle – Web based meeting scheduling tool.
      • Document Collaboration
        • Google Docs – Google docs allows you to share / edit all types of files.
        • Evernote – it is a bit hard to classify Evernote as it can do so many different things.  It also integrates with many other applications so this is a good place to start.
      • Sharing Large Files — Many email clients have limitations on the size of files you can share. These sites provide free and paid services for exchanging larger files.
      • Tracking:
        • Google Analytics — Industry standard site tracking tool.
        • Batchego — Batchego let’s you take the information in your campaign and create a world map of your contributors.
        • Krowdster – Cloud-hosted analytics and discovery tools allow you to use the power of big data to research platforms and campaigns, discover and connect with supporters of similar projects, optimize your campaign page and to make evidence-based decisions about your crowdfunding strategy

      Spreading the Word – 

      • Create Pre-Campaign Buzz:
        • LaunchRock — Launch Rock allows you to create a “Coming Soon” page.
      • Email Management:
        • MailChimp — Email marketing tool. Great analytics, plenty of apps.
        • Sendy – Uses Amazons SES
        • Boomerang for Gmail — A plugin for Gmail that allows you to schedule emails.
      • Social Media Best Practices:
      • Social Media Management:
        • HootSuite— You can schedule tweets in advance.
        • TweetDeck — A free alternative to Hootsuite, developed by Twitter.
        • Klout — Social Media measurement tool. Creates a “Klout score” for social media accounts.
        • Webstagram — A web-based app that lets you monitor Instagram hashtags and mentions.
        • Pinstamatic — A manager for Pinterest.
        • Instajelly — Similar to Pinstamatic — but for Instagram.
      • Social Media Amplification:
        • ClickToTweet —  Provides you with a link that serves a tweet you’ve written for people to send to their followers.
        • Paper.li — Allows you to create an online newspaper around your campaign’s social activity.
        • RebelMouse – real time social publishing
        • Scoop.it – share ideas that matter
        • ThunderClap— Amplify your message with the power of the crowd
      • Finding Related Audiences:
        • Google Alerts — Tag key words on topics and receive alerts.
        • Meetup — Search for interested groups, schedule meetings.
        • HelpAReporter— Connect with reporters by sharing your expertise.
      • Engagement Tracking:
      • Paid Advertising
      • Additional Exposure:
        • Reddit—  Great resource for everything on the internet.

      Fulfillment

      • Custom Printing — If you have an image or logo you want to put on a perk, the following sites have countless things to print them on.
      • T-Shirts:
        • TeeLaunch — Will print and ship your T-Shirt rewards. Founded for to support crowdfunding campaigns.
      • Shipping:
      • Fulfillment Management:
        • BackerKit — Designed for Crowdfunding campaigns. This site helps you service your post crowdfunding supporter needs.
      • Surveys and Online Forms — Surveys
      • Marketplace for Crowdfunded Products:
        • OutGrowMe – Online market place for your crowdfunded products.