Designing a flawless crowdfunding campaign on a budget is possible if you are willing to put in the work. By writing a strong, engaging pitch and creating great graphics using simple tools, you can create a professional looking campaign that backers will want to support and share with their friends!
Enventys Partners put it well when they said, “Design is a critical part of any crowdfunding campaign. It’s a part of what paints the whole picture of your product or company. Good design will build your credibility, while bad design can ruin your campaign’s chances of success.”
A crowdfunding campaign with just text and no graphics looks plain, a little boring. A bit rushed. You want potential backers to be drawn to your campaign. You want them to be able to tell at first glance that you have been putting a lot of work into setting up and promoting your campaign.
Here are a few tips and tricks for designing flawless graphics for your crowdfunding campaign:
1. Use Canva for Free
If you have a budget for fancy design programs, know how to use photoshop, or can afford to hire a graphic designer, that’s great. If you are an established company and can afford to take the easier route you can save a lot of time and get back to what you do best instead of playing around with graphic design.
If not, don’t despair. Canva is a great drag-and-drop option that makes it easy to design all kinds of graphic content for free! They have free images, layouts, and text formatting, with optional paid content.
I’ve recently fallen in love with Canva because they make it super easy to create compelling graphics for social media, headers, marketing materials, ads, and more.
2. Choose a Color Palette
Sticking to a general theme and color palette is a great way to brand your project and create a pleasing, cohesive look that people will remember no matter where they see you online.
Pick a main look and color (or a few different colors and shades that look good together) and incorporate those things into your ads, graphics, and marketing materials. It’s a good idea to start with your logo and go from there.
Make sure that this color palette and theme carry over from your website to your social media and your crowdfunding campaign so people can easily identify you if they try to find you in different places online.
3. Include High-Resolution Images
You don’t want to spend all this time creating great graphics using not-so-great images. Use the best camera you have and if you don’t have one that works well, borrow or rent one if you need to.
Another option is to use a stock image service like Pexels, which lets you download images for free and use them for commercial purposes without attribution.
Need more help? Here are some helpful tips for taking great pictures.
4. Don’t Use Too Much Text
You have plenty of opportunities to give details of your campaign in your pitch video and in the body of your crowdfunding campaign, so try to limit the amount of text that you use in headers and other graphics.
The goal is to make sure that your images aren’t too busy or distracting. Headers should be clearly labeled, and other images shouldn’t be more than about 20% text. Make sure that you are using a clear font that is easy to read and choose colors that don’t hurt the eyes.
5. Create Graphics with A Goal in Mind
Your time is extremely valuable and running a crowdfunding campaign is a time-consuming endeavor. I know a lot of people who have launched crowdfunding campaigns while working full-time! The point here is that you don’t want to waste your time doing something that won’t have an effect on your campaign’s success.
While I truly believe that anyone can take a bit of time and learn to create great graphics, throwing something together quickly or without a plan in mind is likely going to be a waste of your time. Think about what your goal is when you create each graphic. Do you want to highlight the features of a product? Make your audience feel something through a picture, by including a thought-provoking quote?
Be mindful of your audience and what you want them to feel or learn by looking at your graphics and the time you spent making them will be well worth it. Looking at similar campaigns and businesses to see what they are doing is a good way to get inspiration or find out what you shouldn’t do.
Conclusion
The great thing about learning to make great graphics and coming up with a plan for the design side of your campaign is that these images can be used in several places to help people become familiar with your brand.
Using the same template you can create images for social media, your website, your press kit, and of course, headers and graphics that will be featured on the campaign page itself.
Planning to launch soon? Check out our press release pricing plans.
Feel free to leave any questions or comments below!
