Stats

• For our audience, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit turned out to be ineffective. It’s important to note that for other documentaries this might be completely different. Knowing your audience and how to find them is your homework before you start the campaign!
• Unsurprisingly, our top countries of supporters were the Australia, USA, UK, Germany, Canada and Singapore, matching our YouTube and Facebook demographics from our first film.
  • The campaign ended with 204 backers for a total of $44,000 (AUD) / $31,250 (USD). Keep in mind that Kickstarter takes a commission (5%) and that there are also credit card fees (3% + $0.20). Around 16% of backers representing 3% of total funds raised found us via Kickstarter.
• 70% of the total amount raised on Kickstarter came from 5 high-level supporters. Discarding these ‘big spenders’, the average pledge was $47.
• Pledges at reward levels below $71 made up 60% of backers but represented less than 10% of total funds raised
• On average, a click on Twitter cost us around $2.17 which, of course, can never be profitable because of the low conversion rates (see more details below)! However, I considered Twitter as the main tool with which to engage our audience and to “build the brand” of the film long-term. More than 80% of our Twitter engagement was “organic” (not paid). A rule-of-thumb is that you cannot spend money to create virality, but you can spend advertising dollars to amplify whatever is already going viral.
• Here comes the ugly truth. When all was said and done, we had achieved around 750,000 social media impressions. which resulted in 150,000 video views (20%), which in turn drove 5,500 (4%) visitors to our Kickstarter page, of which 3.7% converted into actual backers. That means the overall conversion rate from 750,000 impressions to 204 backers was a shockingly low 0.027%!
• In other words: if you cannot generate a massive amount of attention via traditional or social media, your campaign will not be successful.
• Here’s another way to look at the numbers:
  • When running Twitter ads, a click might cost anywhere between $0.7 - $3.50 (USD)—our average was about $2. if the average backer is worth $47 and the conversion rate is about 3.7%, you can calculate the average value of a visitor to the Kickstarter site as $1.74.

Crowdfunding Takeaways

• Influencer marketing and partnerships successfully generate traffic—but actual conversions were low
• Social Media Ads can buy traffic but do not make sense from a commercial point of view (conversion rates, costs per click, average pledge amounts)
• A very small number of backers (2-3%) generate the vast majority of total amount pledged (70%). Get to know a few patrons, superfans, and big spenders before your campaign!
• Crowdfunding might be a (small) part of your fundraising effort, but they are more important as a tool to build your audience and brand

Crowdfunding Takeaways from the Filmmaking Team

The modern filmmaker is more of an entrepreneur who has to create a ‘product’ for a ‘market’. Audience building and branding are part of this process. Taking risks is part of being an entrepreneur. We filmed about half of the entire productions before asking for film commission (Screen Australia) or Kickstarter money.

The professional network built over many years is a key source of high value supporters. Brand awareness of our first film and the relationships built with the community translated into high level of credibility. As your email list grows, the work should get easier. Or, with each new project, you can raise a bigger budget for your bigger ambitions.

Crowdfunding Takeaways from TFC

Advertising your campaign to “cold audiences” (i.e., people who have never heard of you or your project) and asking those people to donate money is difficult. How often do you give money to strangers on the first ask? But it is possible to advertise on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter through retargeting.

When you retarget them, your message touches them several times to build a waterfall of information and intrigue. Then, you convince them to donate. So, while you might start out with a cold audience, or an audience based on demographic or psychographic parameters, you need to first build awareness, and then you can retarget them using a Tracking Pixel to continue showing the campaign to for those who did visit your website, viewed your video on that platform, interacted with your CTA button because they have shown an interest and may just need more encouragement to convert.

You can also create an excluded audience so that you stop showing your ads to people who have already converted. You can also upload your own email list to various platforms or target those who have visited your website as a way to keep your campaign in front of them across platforms. Sometimes conversions will not happen until the audience is touched several times with your message.

Part Two: Distribution

My background is in distribution and I had self-distributed our first Bitcoin film on various platforms before, so this perhaps gave me a leg up.

Theatrical (and COVID lockdown)

The theatrical run had first priority for us, but even before the premiere we used cinema screenings as tests. We meticulously collected feedback for qualitative and (important!) quantitative feedback via a net-promoter-score which we increased to 69 by incorporating suggestions from our fans. Usually this was to cut out confusing or long parts. The final edit was 15 minutes shorter. We then started our world tour—with big events in Sydney, Melbourne, and Berlin. These events were supported by corporate sponsors and generated up to $15,000 (AUD) / $10,660 (USD) in revenue and 100,000 social media impressions each. We also had smaller or closed private events and I even attended Davos to present parts of the film to the finance elites and billionaires there!

This was right before the Coronavirus paralyzed the world. Unfortunately, just when we were getting warmed up and figured out how to effectively market these events and organize them with the help of local communities, the world around us changed dramatically. I had no choice but to prepare a TVOD launch.

Film Festivals

To be honest, festivals were a bit of a painful experience at first. I had applied to about 30 festivals and spent about $2,000 (USD) on application fees, but in the end, our documentary, with its narrow target audience, wasn’t the right fit for most events…that is, until we were officially selected at DocEdge, an Academy Award Qualifying festival in New Zealand. This was perfect because geo-blocking this one territory didn’t hurt the global TVOD launch. Recently, we have targeted smaller tier 2 and tier 3 festivals and have been accepted to 15 smaller ones, many of whom are now being planned as online festivals, where our documentary fits right in. We have won two or three smaller awards and are continuing with the festival run on a very limited budget.

Digital

How did we premiere the film online? My company holds all distribution rights to the film, so I decided to launch it on CryptopiaFilm.com using the Gumroad backend. We ended up renting it for about $6 (USD) and offer a buy option for a higher price which does not allow for digital download due to the piracy problems our first film encountered.

I used the analytics from the Kickstarter campaign and queued up a few influencers and journalist pre-launch. We hoped that we could count on our fanbase and influencers on launch day and hired a freelancer to help us with researching hundreds of critics, journalists, podcasts, etc. By launch day I had also grown a LinkedIn newsletter to over 1,000 subscribers.

Via various platforms, we generated around 800,000 social media impressions, 80,000 trailer views and 30,000 visits to our site in the first two weeks. The conversion rate on the site was only around 7% and I still experiment with different pricing, wording, packaging and ad campaigns. It is still too early to draw major learnings from this launch period.

The film has just been released on Amazon and other platforms. We plan on providing an update as soon as we have more details to share.