Council Post: How To Design A Crowdfunding Pledge Reward Chart

By Evan Varsamis, entrepreneur and founder/CEO at Gadget Flow, investor, and marketing advisor at Qrator Ltd.

The most important call to action feature for any crowdfunding campaign is the pledge reward chart. If you don’t organize the pledges in a way that’s sustainable for your brand, you’ll never reach the desired goal you wish to achieve.

Over the years, my company has worked with over 5,000 campaigns and counting. We have received a lot of requests and feedback from campaign creators on how to design a crowdfunding pledge reward chart. To be honest, it’s difficult to create a generic rule for setting up an ideal one.

We’ve narrowed it down to a few tips and tricks to consider when designing a perfect crowdfunding pledge reward chart. It will obviously vary from campaign to campaign, but sticking to these basics will help you think deeply before designing one.

Determine the retail price versus the preorder discount.

In order to make your crowdfunding campaign valuable, you need to set a price that highlights the discount at its best. The idea behind crowdfunding, as we all know, is to sell a product at a discounted price before retail launch. If you don’t make that discount lucrative enough, your campaign will not seem like it’s worth your backers’ money. Most of them would prefer to purchase your product when it’s out of the crowdfunding phase and available for retail sale. 

It’s difficult to understand the mindset of people backing a crowdfunding campaign, but one thing that’s common among every backer is the way they judge the credibility of a campaign. If they find your discount interesting enough, they’ll back your campaign instantly. So your pledge reward chart needs to highlight the retail versus preorder pricing as much as possible. 

Clearly state product details.

We’ve seen many campaigns with little or no information about product details in the pledge reward chart. This instantly affects the credibility of your campaign and will cause backers to avoid choosing a reward. You need to specify details when designing a pledge reward chart. This includes product specifications, colors, customs duty evaluation, shipping costs and so on. A detailed pledge reward chart will help boost your campaign and improve your credibility at the same time. 

Don’t overlook the delivery timeline.

Every pledge reward chart has a setup for stating the delivery timeline for the product. Even if your delivery timeline is tentative, you need one for clarity. Your backers need to have an idea of when they can expect the product to ship. By specifying a delivery timeline, you will only make your campaign look more credible. However, you must send regular updates in order to have transparent communication with your backers. If you face any issue with delivery or manufacturing, it needs to be stated separately under updates. 

Set up super early bird offers. 

After working with so many crowdfunding campaigns, we’ve come to the conclusion that your first backers are your brand ambassadors. They are the ones who’ll help you spread the word and make your campaign reach the masses. In order to make them feel special and draw more and more attention to your campaign in its early days, you need to have super early bird offers. This will help give your crowdfunding campaign get that instant boost in the initial days and help it reach the basic goal faster. The super early bird offers need to be better discounts than the regular crowdfunding deal. 

Don’t offer old-school $1 pledges.

Over the years, we have seen many campaigns offer a $1 pledge reward as the basic, but our analysis shows that this does not work for all campaigns. Specifically, with product campaigns, backers are always looking to grab the product at a discounted price. Having a $1 pledge reward will not boost your campaign or help it reach its goal faster. It’s more like having a redundant pledge reward on the campaign page. Instead, avoid it, and stick to product-related pledges, which are better for your campaign. 

Use pledge reward images.

Most pledge reward charts will give you the option of uploading an image along with the description. Use that image to highlight the offer. You could highlight the deals, colors, pricing advantage, etc. Overall, it needs to look visually appealing and help explain the reward. 

Think deep for those stretch goals.

Stretch goals are the key to giving your backers an extra something. It could be extra colors for the product, accessories or even a new product that requires more money to manufacture. Either way, the stretch goals need to be considered as a part of the extended pledge rewards and must be stated clearly on the campaign page. This will help you grab people’s attention even more while making your campaign and business plan look more credible and sustainable.

Overall, designing a perfect pledge reward chart can be time-consuming, but the more time you spend on it, the better the result will be. Your pledge reward chart can make or break your campaign, and it’s necessary to put in your best effort when designing it.