This is a guest post by Dillon Carter.
Running a crowd-funding campaign isn’t something you take on light heartedly. You won’t sleep for most nights, you’ll be pulled in multiple directions and, let’s face it, you’re gonna cry. Ok, so the last one was a bit over dramatic.
Either way, crowd-funding campaigns are very time consuming and difficult. It’s very important to have your A-Team prepared and I’m not talking about your co-founders.
You’re time is valuable, and like most creators, you’ll likely juggling a bunch of responsibilities while managing your crowdfunding campaign, ranging from a full-time job to taking care of a family.
In this post, we’re going to delve into the many ways a virtual assistant can help you reach your campaign goals. Using a virtual assistant, you can build a light-weight customer support team, grow social audience, and create amazing videos that help share your story in campaign updates. Having a dedicated small army at your fingertips can really improve your chances of success on Kicsktarter, Indiegogo, or another crowdfunding platform.
Customer Service
Customer service may not seem very difficult, but replying to backer questions, emails, and remaining in constant contact with your supporters can take its toll. Having dedicated customer service virtual assistant help with customer service cuts down on your messaging volume and allows you to focus on expanding your campaigns reach.
Imagine how awesome it would be to completely outsource your email inbox and even set up your own customer support through ZenDesk.com, all completely automated by your VA, who is dedicated to serving your campaign supporters.
Finding Manufacturers
The first steps towards finding an overseas manufacturer for you product may seem daunting. Rather than dealing with the hassle, pass on this task to your virtual assistant. Have them set aside four to five hours to develop a list of potentials to begin working with. This saves hundreds of hours of searching. I recently did this with my personal assistant for two hours and she responded back four hours later with around 100 possible manufacturers for my site.
Social Media Management
Social Media is a great way to build exposure and kick start your viral growth. A virtual assistant can spend roughly two to three hours a day scheduling posts, responding to messages and comments while also growing your list of followers. I used one of my virtual assistants to grow my personal twitter account to just over 2,000 followers within a few months. Have your VA focus on specific hashtags to generate a list of leads that are interested in specific topics.
Writing And Submitting Press Releases
Press releases are very important to getting coverage of your campaign and your product. You can have your virtual assistant write your press release for you or you can write it yourself. Either way, outsourcing the task of submitting it to an assistant with experience doing so saves you countless hours. This is time you could spend improving or marketing your campaign!
Video Promotion/Creation
Your promotional video says a lot about you and your campaign. This is something many never consider outsourcing. Finding a rockstar is easy! Your VA can take all of your videos and mesh them together and add the effects needed to produce a high quality video. After that, have the VA email the video to your Social Media VA to be promoted on your accounts and blog.
I would suggest finding multiple VAs to handle these tasks so everything is laser focused and organized. Find a rock star Social Media Manager, a rock star writer and a world-class customer service assistant.
Odesk.com has the perfect dashboard for managing your team. Each member is shown the position for which they are responsible for. You can follow their hours worked per week and also check their logs. Odesk even records your teams screens every few minutes so you can relax knowing your team is busy working on real tasks!
Conclusion
Automating these tasks by outsourcing them to your virtual assistants makes the whole process simpler and increases your chances of reaching your campaign goals. The best thing about outsourcing is that it won’t cost you much at all. On average, a virtual assistant only costs $3 an hour and by limiting the amount of hours your assistant spends on each task, you save even more money than you thought.
Have a question? Leave a comment below!
