Gathering essential feedback before you launch a crowdfunding campaign is always helpful. The more you do, the closer to the target you’ll hit. This will also help you plan your campaign and gather credible data that you can showcase to potential investors.

However, when your project is at such an early stage of development, you might not think that extensive product surveys are possible, or even necessary. Should you conduct product surveys at all before launching your crowdfunding campaign or should wait until you have something prototyped first?

While it’s true that pre-launch surveys are very different to post-launch or soft launch activities where customers can actually trial your products themselves, there are still many ways you can gather key feedback, opinions, advice, and general input before you set your crowdfunding campaign live.

Based on some of our experience offering marketing and crowdfunding video production in London, we’ve outlined our advice on the right approach and techniques for gaining maximum feedback.

Start Conversations on Social

Before you actually send out a survey to anyone, your own social platforms are good places to get a general idea about whether people would be interested in your future product. As long as you don’t give away any secrets about your brand, you can probe people to let you know their thoughts and feelings on your new concept.

Obviously, you need to apply some strategy here regarding where you post, who you’re targeting and the way you phrase your questions. For instance, simply posting onto your Instagram account which only has a modest following won’t give you much data and the information you do get will be distorted by the fact that those reading your post will already be familiar with what you’re trying to do.

What you want to do is reach completely new audiences on platforms that foster exploration and discussion. For example, the increasingly popular Clubhouse could be a great place to soundboard your idea within a designated room.

The clubhouse also has the benefit of potentially putting you in touch with people in your industry who may be able to offer industry-related advice or potential collaboration opportunities. At least in the earliest days, it was known as a platform heavily frequented by SEOs and company leaders.

Send Newsletters

If you’re lucky enough to have a growing email list, whip up some newsletters to get people to take a product survey. Contacting your subscribers and asking for product feedback will not just help you get valuable data but will also add more credibility to your campaign, with more people recognising that you’re actively engaged in forwarding your project and taking on board the feedback of your audience.

Hopefully, your subscribers will understand your eagerness to design a fruitful campaign and potentially pass on the survey to someone else. However, you can increase the chance of this happening with simple incentives.

Look for Forums and Online Discussion Platforms

Reddit’s topic-based forums can be a good place to put the feelers out there. This is one of the top places for crowdfunding campaign creators to get insights into their customer’s preferences as these spaces harbour large numbers of people who are keen to share ideas, critique and contribute to various topics with strong and valuable opinions. Obviously, it’s hard to discern the background of who is actually giving you feedback or what their motives are, so take any serious criticism or opinions with a pinch of salt.

Tips for Creating Survey Questions

Asking the right questions is just as important as finding the right people to ask. Below are some tips for squeezing out the right nuggets of information that can help inform your process going forward.

  • Don’t ask leading questions – Try not to put your own opinion into the question prompt, otherwise you risk distorting your survey results. You want to get as true and genuine an opinion as possible.
  • Define a clear goal – Set out clear, attainable goals so that your survey information will actually be actionable and practical. Do you want to understand why certain customers don’t love your product as much as others? Are you unsure about specific features?
  • Focus on using closed-ended questions – For larger-scale survey campaigns, questions that use pre-populated answer choices for the respondent to choose from, such as multiple choice or checkbox questions, are easier for respondents to answer and much simpler to quantify when it comes to organising the data and analysing it.

Learn More

For more great tips and advice about smashing your next crowdfunding campaign, get in touch with us at Wow Your Crowd where we can help you with your crowdfunding video production in London or other aspects of your Kickstarter campaign!