How to Relaunch a Failed Crowdfunding Project

Launching a successful crowdfunding campaign requires a lot of planning, hard work, and persistence. But even if you’re working with these three things, you may wonder what happens if your crowdfunding campaign fails. When this happens, the best thing to do is to learn from the mistakes that led to the campaign’s failure of the campaign and put this to good use when relaunching the failed project or initiating a new one.

Since Kickstarter, one of the most popular crowdfunding platforms around, was launched in 2019, approximately 334,769 projects have been launched on the platform. Of these, only 182,164 projects reached their goal. That puts the crowdfunding success rate on Kickstarter at 35.76% and proves the fact that running a successful crowdfunding project isn’t as easy as you might think.

In this article, we’ll look at the reasons why crowdfunding campaigns fail and how to successfully relaunch a failed campaign. One of the main reasons that campaigns fail is that they don’t adequately budget to fulfill their campaign. Easyship can help with this.

We’ve had plenty of experience in funding crowdfunding ventures and are the exclusive shipping partner for Indiegogo. We can help you figure out how to plan and budget for your crowdfunding project, and help you find the best and most cost-effective way to fulfill it.

10 Reasons Why Crowdfunding Campaigns Fail

Over the years, there have, unfortunately, been more than a few failed crowdfunding projects. There are several reasons why some of these projects fail, including those outlined below.

1. Bad Rewards

Often, crowdfunding projects fail because the backer rewards are just not that attractive. That’s why it’s important that you have rewards that will interest your potential backers and generate as much buzz as possible for your project.

2. Poor Descriptions

This is another reason that contributes to a low crowdfunding success rate. In order to grab the attention of potential backers, you need to have a short but captivating description of what your project is all about. Try and write this description in short, easy-to-digest paragraphs and if possible, include infographics and images to make the description more appealing.

3. Setting Unrealistic Goals

When discussing how many crowdfunding campaigns fail, you’ll realize that many of them are unsuccessful because they started with unrealistic goals. If your fundraising goals are too high, you can easily end up with a failed campaign.

4. Unreliable Shipping Arrangements

No backer will want to put their money behind a crowdfunding campaign only to realize they won’t receive their reward because the campaign owner had bad shipping arrangements in place. You need to map out your fulfillment plan before you begin your campaign, and that should include reliable, reputable couriers.

5. Lack of Outreach

This is another factor that contributes to a low crowdfunding success rate. Often, project creators rely on their family and friends and word-of-mouth advertising in order to promote the project and attract attention. Unfortunately, this usually isn’t enough.

6. Not Leveraging Social Media

In this day and age, social media can be make or break for your crowdfunding campaign. If you don’t have a strong social media presence or aren’t willing to go the extra mile to promote your campaign on social media, your campaign might not be as successful as it could be.

Right about now, you should be asking yourself, “What if crowdfunding fails?” It’s an important question to ask, but you should put it in perspective and remember that an unsuccessful crowdfunding campaign isn’t the end of the world.

Use it as a teachable moment. Figure out what you did wrong and then fix the problems before you relaunch the campaign or kick off a new one. Many project creators have experienced setbacks and funding failures, but then ultimately gone on to create successful campaigns.

One example is Rob Decker, a photographer and artist. Decker’s initial National Parks Poster project was a big flop and this was because there were several flaws. For example, he made the mistake of setting his funding goal too high - he aimed to raise $27,000 but ended up with just $5,370 from 43 backers. He also didn’t pay attention to social media promotion and depended heavily on his family friends.

These mistakes meant his project ended up on the list of failed crowdfunding projects. However, with his next project, he corrected these mistakes, restructured his pledge rewards, and then recorded tremendous success.

It’s also important to be aware of what a failed campaign means for your fundraising. Certain crowdfunding platforms, like Indiegogo, will allow you to keep whatever funds you raise, even if your campaign doesn’t reach its goal. Others will force you to return whatever funds you raise to your backers.

How to Relaunch a Failed Crowdfunding Campaign in 10 Steps

The fact that your crowdfunding success rate is low doesn’t mean you should give up. Instead, it’s an opportunity to prove you can learn from your mistakes and still find success. However, in order to successfully relaunch your crowdfunding project, there are certain things you should take into consideration.

1. Analyze the statistics from your previously failed campaign: Crunching the numbers of your failed crowdfunding projects is a good way to understand what went wrong and where there’s room for improvement. It will help you decide if you need to set more realistic goals, reach more people, or set better backer rewards, for example.

2. Take the time to brainstorm with your potential backers and other important stakeholders: This is essential to learning from the mistakes of your failed campaign. These people are already invested in your product and want to see you succeed, so ask them where they see room for improvement.

3. Carry out a pre-launch campaign: The success of your crowdfunding campaign depends largely on what happens in the first few days. So, to capitalize on this, you should make sure people are aware of your relaunched campaign before it actually begins. This way, you’ll already have a bunch of backers on hand as soon as your campaign launches.

4. Revisit your project’s funding goal and adjust it if necessary: Sure, you’ve got a great product, but perhaps you were a little too ambitious in setting your campaign goals. This has resulted in many failed crowdfunding projects. If this was the case, it may be worth thinking about whether you need to revise your funding goal. After all, it’s better to set a smaller goal and succeed than set too big an amount and fail.

5. Make the campaign timeline as short as possible: Creating a sense of urgency around your campaign can get backers to commit faster, helping you on your way to success. Most experts recommend 30 days for a campaign as that gives backers plenty of time to decide whether to put their money down.

6. Use social media to get people talking about your project: Just because you’re planning to relaunch your campaign doesn’t mean you should hit pause on your social media posts. Ideally, you’ve already got people talking about your campaign on social platforms, and keeping a steady flow of posts will keep people interested and help you generate more interest in your relaunched campaign.

7. Organize giveaways before your project’s relaunch: This is another great way to generate some buzz ahead of your relaunched campaign. It’ll help people get interested in your new campaign and your project, and the winners of the giveaways will probably get you some organic coverage when they win.

8. Prepare a new press release with updated content: You want to make sure that people understand that you’ve rectified the issues from your failed campaign and are going to be coming back better than ever. Make sure to line up the appropriate media contacts in advance and send this out before your relaunch date so that people are already talking about the new campaign before it’s even live.

9. Make arrangements for reliable and timely shipping: We can’t stress enough how important it is to have a solid game plan for fulfilling your campaign. Many campaigns fail because they forgot to budget and plan to properly send their products to backers at the end of the campaign. If this happened to you, you need to sort it out before relaunching your campaign.

10. Offer exclusive deals to previous backers who support your relaunched campaign: There are a number of incentives you can offer to previous backers to get them to support your relaunched campaign. Think about whether early-bird rewards or discounted prices will entice them to support you the second time around. Consider it a thank you for supporting your failed crowdfunding projects.

Find Crowdfunding Success with a Relaunched Campaign

Many people ask, “But, what if crowdfunding fails.” As you can see, the answer may be to relaunch the campaign. Relaunching failed crowdfunding projects might not be an easy task, but it can be done, and very successfully.

You’ll need to look back on the things you did wrong then that led to the failure of your project, brainstorm with others on possible new ideas, improve on your strategies, and create more awareness in order to relaunch your campaign.

Easyship has a lot of experience with fulfilling crowdfunding campaigns and we integrate with platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter to ensure that you can send out your campaign orders with ease. Sign up for an Easyship account now and see how our many crowdfunding tips and integrations will help you make the most of your campaign and improve your crowdfunding success rate.