LESSONS I LEARNED FROM MY FIRST ONLINE CROWD-SOURCING CAMPAIGN –PART ONE

A couple of months ago, I championed an online campaign on indiegogo, an online crowdsourcing platform. The campaign was aimed at getting financial support to enable Afchix Uganda, together with the rest of the world, to celebrate the International Girls in ICT Day. Our goal was to bring together 1000 school girls in the rural schools in Uganda. 

Incepted in 2004 by Dorcas Muthoni, the vision of Afchix Africa is a gender diverse ICT Industry, for we believe that women have a role to play in the social-economic development of this continent as a whole. Currently, we are active in Uganda, Kenya, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho & Tanzania.  Our simple strategy is to reach out to the very young girls in schools, expose them to the various opportunities in ICT, give them testimonies and change their attitudes about STEM, as we help them uncover their potentials in Technology. For the past years, the kind of questions we have received from the girls and the testimonies are evidence of the need to provide career guidance in schools and thus the reasons Afchix still exists. 

For this year, AfChix Uganda decided to take its career guidance activity to the next level, by exploring a different approach -bringing together 1000 girls from 20 schools from the rural, as opposed to our previous approach of visiting an individual school and talking to a few girls. Our hope was to reach numerous girls at the same time, save time and resources and create an environment where students can mingle and share with their peers from other schools. This was to be held on the International Girls in ICT Day. Like any other function, this meant mobilizing resources, hard work, with a dedicated team. 

We did not meet our financial target, nor did we meet the targeted number of students and/or schools. However, I am glad to say our event went on as scheduled –thanks to our supporters, schools that participated, students and our dedicated #TeamAfchixUganda. 

You might be or know of an individual, an organization or group that might engage in a similar task. As the lead person at the forefront of all our activities including the campaign, I consider it a privilege because I was able to learn a few things which I thought I could share and maybe someone out there will be able to learn one or two things.

Much as we tried to systematically plan for our online campaign, there were some challenges we faced and some things we learned that we needed to have done before launching our campaign.

Identify a chief partner of your event.

Identify and get a chief partner to endorse your proposal. The chief partner should be an organization or (an individual if it’s a personal campaign), that identifies with your activities, is famous and is capable of attracting the necessary traffic. This must be well in advance of the event. You do not have to rely on approaching one chief partner because they might have already committed to a similar event. For our case, after failing to get Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) on board, and considering the time frame, we then went ahead with our plan anyway, with no chief partner. This affects your campaign to a great extent. Sometimes your only identification is that “Partner”. People or organizations would like to be a part of reputable bodies, so you definitely would not go wrong.

Network of friends

What is your network of friends like? Both as an individual (championing the campaign) and as the organization (Afchix Uganda) in this case.

Knowing your network of friends will highly determine the success of your campaign and/or help you make informed decisions. 

As an Individual: As an individual who is acting as the “face” of your organization, how many of your friends do you have that you can count on? Forget about the over 2000 friends on your facebook.  How many are willing to go with you all the way through your campaign? Remember some will start with you but will drop you along the rough side of your journey. How many are willing to contribute financially or even share your campaign with their networks? Bear in mind that there are a number of dependent-minded people; those who make decisions based on other people’s decisions. Naturally, some people just never believe in themselves. Even when they really agree with you and want to support your cause, such people will support you when they see that the people they look at as their “superiors” are supporting you. So how many of them do you have? Definitely you cannot bank all your hopes on such friends.

During the first week of our campaign, as I continued to reach out to friends to help me share our campaign with their networks, I received a couple of emails from a few friends who indicated willingness to help share our campaign with their networks but it was on condition that they saw some money raised in the account. That brings me to my next point that its human nature that people will want to associate themselves with success; they prefer to jump into success to maintain a certain ‘reputation’. A handful would put up their throat and be part of the rough side of the journey. So yes, be expectant, you will actually have a list of such friends plus many more and you have no right to blame them. It’s a bitter pill to swallow but bottom line is you need to sieve your friends to help you know your position, not just for the campaigns but in your daily life too.

As an organization/Company/Team: This can be sub-categorized into two; 1) the kind of co-workers you have & their network of friends and 2) the network of friends the organization has, such as partners/sponsors/well-wishers, etc. 

The idea is you will need to ask your team mates or co-workers to share the campaign to their networks, tweet about it, etc. But how financially strong are your team mates and their friends?

Your team

Afchix Uganda for instance is a network of women in technology, comprising young girls, some are still at university, some are about to graduate, others just graduated and are looking for jobs, a few have just joined the working class while a number of us are working on our own start-ups. Majority of each of these categories are most likely surrounded by the same class of people. My point is given the respective situations, by tweeting and sharing, this team and its networks may not be in position to raise all the funds simply because of their financial statuses at the time. So you might want to consider the other networks outside your team. For our case, we were fortunate because we had on board friends from other Afchix chapters. Analyzing this will help you rate how much connections you can have once you launch the campaign.

Sponsors/Partners/Collaborators/well-wishers

Take time to identify all partners, sponsors and well-wishers of your organization. This could be those that have sponsored you, are aware and support your activities. You might consider having face-to-face meetings with them as opposed to just online communications. In the process, some might choose to provide financial support while others might share with potential supporters.

Target Audience

What is your target audience?

This being an online campaign, it automatically means that your campaign will reach even beyond your demographic area and to people you have probably never met.

But what is your target audience? Are you targeting crowdsourcing from individuals or companies/organizations? Knowing your target audience and what they expect of you will help determine a few things:

If you are targeting sourcing from individuals, how do you intend to give back to them? You need to know that the output will solely be dependent on how close your relationship is with your friends and how willing they are to support you. This means this target group works better if it’s a campaign for a personal thing as opposed to an organization’s. However, if they are individuals and friends to the organization, then you are in the right track.

If its an organization, bear in mind that in some cases, an organization will be willing to support you financially and even share your campaign to their networks. However most organizations will go through some protocol before providing financial support for a project or cause. One of the things an organization will consider is “How they benefit”; they have conditions about fellow competitors coming on board. So, considering this scenario, what is your plan about giving back to them? How about a scenario where over 10 organizations would offer varying support, how do you plan to give back according to their level of support? How will you address the issue of competitors? Indiegogo for instance has “perks” or some gifts that you could choose as your reward to your funders for your campaign but how many of these organizations would be interested in the perks? Are the perks equivalent to the expected rewards that the sponsoring organization expects anyway? How will you deliver? You might as well consider doing away with the online campaign and instead drop hard copy proposals with outlined benefits to organizations if you want their financial support.

…..In my next phase, I will talk about how people around you view your cause, the unfriendly modes of payments, the timing of your campaign, my experience with a local online crowd-sourcing platform, the budget, impact of what you tweet about, all coming up in a week’s time.