What is "they's?"
Indiegogo can be an incredible tool for raising money for nonprofit charity projects. But as with anything, you get what you put into it. Don't think for a moment that this is a "quick" tool for fundraising. Our first 45-day campaign took a year and a half from start to finish.
If you want to succeed, here are a few tips:
Spend 3-6 months planning before you begin.
Make sure you are offering perks and a final product that people will actually want. Yes, you are raising money, but people want something of reasonable value. I'll say this again..."reasonable" value.
Create a budget--a real, working budget that is based on funding contingencies and includes things like shipping, Indiegogo fees, PayPal and credit card fees, staff time, advertising and promotion, etc. If your project required you raise $10,000 to make it work, you simply cannot raise $10,000 or you will be quite short in the end.
List realistic fulfillment times. And if you can't reach them because of something you didn't expect, communicate with your backers frequently.
Do NOT over-promise and always fulfill your perks!
We've run 2 of these. The first was to finish making a documentary film: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/one-little-pill.../
the other was to put it on DVD: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/one-little-pill.../
It's been a while, but I seem to recall is was very cliquish. They's allow 'liberals' to raise money for completely bullshit projects, but when I tried to raise funds for a manufactured prototype it was deemed 'too risky'. Complete and total bullshit. {One Star is Too Much}
As a production house which serves dozens of of crowdfund campaigns every year I have a unique perspective on how campaigning is a great tool for start-up businesses that counteracts Patrick's (and sort of Shawn's) seemingly limited understanding on the value of Indiegogo.
Considering collectively we've seen $2,700,000 in successful campaigns in only two years I would say using this platform is perhaps not a "key" to success, but a stepping stone that is a poor choice to NOT consider for start-up businesses and new to market products. Our campaign success rate is 90%, and has less to do with the "pre-game prep" as it does with having a desirable product or service to launch and a consistent plan to follow throughout the process.
Shawn is correct that having a strong circle of interested parties helps, but it's not the key to running a great campaign. And Patrick is ignorant to the resource that Indigogo and Kickstarter provide to product creators who need to test market interest without going to market blindly with a much larger investment then a little bit of marketing funds. Very few if ANY campaigners are "looking to fund a backpacking trip around Europe." The only questionable site for "panhandlers" is Gofundme. Indie and Kickstarter
offer product or services for donations often in the form of pre-support sales, makes me wonder if Patrick even looked at thh sites before he "reviewed" them.
Kickstarter and Indiegogo are incredible tools when used correctly to avoid bigger losses when officially going to market. I've watched creators go from a simple idea to a full fledged corporations all thanks to testing the market with crowdfunding, Occulus, Pebble, Movi, JIBO, M3D.. and those are just extreme cases. I've personally helped launch BIGi, AIDO, XkeyAir, CONNEX, aMagic, DESKTEK and many many more with campaigns that all exceeded $200K or more in donations. Many of them only had a few dozen to a few hundred in social media engagement to start and now are exceeding 10's of thousands because of their campaigns.
Don't get me wrong, campaigning isn't the easy answer to product launching. You do have to work just as hard as you would if the product was officially launched, but it reduces inventory and stocking cost loss for unmarketable products that could be triple your investment when done the traditional way.
So...
You can run hundreds of prototypes at the cost of thousands, spend thousands more in marketing and eCommerce or shelf stocking fees and hope what you've invented has market interest that returns your incredible investment...
Or.
You can run a single campaign with one or two prototypes, test the market with pre-sales even make changes based on customer feedback and be in the positive with the knowledge and funds to support that your product does have a market BEFORE you launch.
One of those sounds like a smart business decision ... I'll let you decide which.
IndieGogo can be great, but it's a force multiplier as opposed to a key to success. I have seen people succeed and fail with their crowdfunding projects. The success have bee all about the pre-game and prep. The idea of 1,000 true fans really plays out here. You need 1,000 true fans; 10,000 people with some spare cash; and 100 people who are likely to catapult your message to others.
Online panhandling. If you want to ask your friends and family for money so you can go backpacking around Europe and are too lazy to pick up the phone and do it the old fashioned way then this is your solution.