We need to present the team in a creative and eye-catching way. I would like to send a short questionnaire to all team members to collect informal info to work on. Any tips? What questions would you recommend to include?
For a successful crowdfunding campaign we need two or three things to work - you must express the campaign as a mission and cause, this mission must be one that your team believes in, and hopefully some or all of the team has some experience (personal or professional) that not only prepares them for success but emotionally makes them hungry for that success.
So the types of questions you could ask include "why does this research matter?" "How would you feel if the project succeeds?" and "how would you feel if the project fails?".
I'd be happy to list your questions in a chat and more importantly to discuss how to make their answers matter to your donors - how they can tell a story!
Warmly,
Arjun
Hi there,
To give you some background on my experience, I've helped crowdfunding campaigns raise over $50M over the past 3 and a half years, and I have great experience in presenting the teams behind these projects.
Campaigners who work in teams raise over 3 times as many funds as campaigners who choose to work alone, so it's important to position your team correctly when putting your campaign in front of the crowdfunding community. I would ask everyone on the team the following questions and craft their bios based on their answers:
- Who are you, and how are you connected to the project?
- What problem(s) are you trying to solve with your research and findings?
- How will it make a difference in people’s lives?
- What was your "ah-ha" moment that inspired you to do this research?
I also recommend creating an eye-catching graphic for the campaign page that includes each team member's bio, headshot and other fun facts or data.
Hope this helps!
I have experience doing exactly what you're doing.
The key when you have a team to present is to look through your whole team.
1) Is there a specific category of information (say, their college) that is impressive across the board for each and every one of them? List this type of info next to each individual.
2) For all the other categories of information that are not uniformly impressive for each individual (say, # patents filed), add those to a general statement about the team. E.g. "We've filed over 20 patents, have 5 PhDs, etc". This way, even if only one guy did all 20 patents it makes the whole team look better, and instead of burying that impressive info in that one guys info, it's distributed across the whole team in a summary descriptive paragraph.
Get good photos of each team member, convert them all to black and white to avoid distracting disparity between color balance etc between the photos. Do a circular crop of each photo (you can use Photoscape, a free program for this), resize them all to the same diameter, and you're done.
if you have any further questions on this or other aspects give me a call.
Credentials and Compassion - Including credentials and why they have them is important. Not just that someone has a MD degree, but why did they go to medical school. For example, " I went to medical school to learn how to crush cancer and improve the health of my community." Also, it's good to bring in a personal story from the individual to show they are compassionate wanting to help people, not just looking to get funding and write a paper.