Get Your Crowdfunding Campaign Funded Today: 3 Strategies We Use to Get Pledges

Creating a crowdfunding reward system is **drumroll** well, long. BYC is here to make it short and sweet.

Between building your product, creating videos and marketing materials, and reaching out to potential backers, there’s a lot to do. It can be easy to forget about the details – like what rewards you should offer backers to get pledges.

But getting your rewards right is key. After all, backers are investing in your campaign because they want something in return. They’re not just giving you their money as a token of their admiration. (Although, that would make things so much simpler).

So how do you come up with the perfect rewards that drive pledges? There’s a psychology behind it.

For reference, we’ll use a model to guide this article. Hubspot is a company that specializes in marketing and sales software. They’ve put together a model that shows the inbound methodology of making a customer’s experience a positive one to drive a conversion.



Customer delight is a process that products and brands use to drive conversions.

For the nature of crowdfunding campaigns, we can apply the same tactics used to acquire customers to attract pledges and their backers.

There are three core drives for customer delight: delight, attract and engage. Each phase requires different tactics. There are different roles, too. You’re the promoter. Your main goal is to turn strangers and prospects into ➡️ customers, or in this case, backers.

Think of your crowdfunding campaign as a restaurant launch.

Your product or idea is the main course. The rewards are the service and the price.

Customer delight will be the reason everyone comes in to eat.

You’ve had great PR. Everyone wants to go to the new hottest spot in town – the local mayor, celebrities fresh off the jetway, and the neighborhood folk alike! Even if you’re serving up the most delicious meal in town, few customers will keep showing up if the service is slow and inattentive, followed by an overpriced bill.

To create a crowdfunding success story, you must get in the habit of offering the right rewards at the right time and at the right price.

1) Delight, but don’t go crazy with crowdfunding reward options

Before you ask “why not?”, listen to this: more is not always better.

Kickstarter and IndieGogo are set up to offer different levels of rewards that you can customize by price or perk. Kickstarter emphasizes further and advises first-time creators to stick to five reward tiers.

Simplicity is key when it comes to rewards. You don’t want to overwhelm people with too many choices – that will only lead to confusion and indecision. Instead, focus on offering a few standout rewards that capture backers’ attention.

All of your rewards need to be worth more than the amount people are pledging for them. Backers want an ROI (return on investment) and value for their pledges.

Make sure the value makes sense before finalizing any of your reward tiers for your backers. They’re already supporting a product that is physically not in the market (yet). The perk or reward to get there must simulate quality.

2) Attract with early-bird pricing and bundles

Try using super early-birds and early-bird perks to attract backers to your crowdfunding campaign.

3) Engage others by controlling the timeline

We’ve successfully created engagement for pledges just by offering them at a certain point in the launch timeline.

There is a growing trend of creators using Kickstarter and IndieGoGo to create scarcity for their crowdfunding campaigns. This means using “limited-time” or “limited supply” reward incentives. Sending out updates, such as newsletters or email series, to increase excitement and FOMO, or “fear of missing out.” Scarcity creates desire, and when people can pledge and back campaigns on Kickstarter, they feel like they have some control over the timeline and what happens next. This ties into the engagement portion of the customer delight journey because it’s a precursor to the actual conversion (pledge).

This goes back to the original supply and demand law but can be applied as a crowdfunding rewards tactic just the same.

By limiting the supply and creating demand, creators can control when and how their crowdfunding campaign turns out. This also creates a sense of desire among customers, which can lead to increased pledges.

To create scarcity for your product, you need to set up a timeline for the campaign and make sure that there are enough rewards available for backers. At BYC, we split up the crowdfunding campaign into three parts: the pre-launch, the live campaign, and the post-launch.

There are plenty of other ways to use your launch timeline as an advantage. Basing your reward timing on campaign type is wise, though. No two products or ideas are alike – we know exactly which ones work best for your specific crowdfunding campaign. Get the pledge Creating a rewards-based system for your crowdfunding campaign takes time and planning. Each platform has its own way of setting up rewards, and being a stranger to their formatting is not uncommon.

Do you need help with setting up a good reward structure for your Indiegogo or Kickstarter campaign? With +4000 campaigns since 2010, we can definitely help. Contact us to boost your campaign.