In recent years, crowdfunding – the contribution of money from multiple people, usually through the internet, towards a single project or effort – has become more and more popular in the entrepreneurial world. Through sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, RocketHub, Crowdrise, Appbackr, Mosaic, and many others, anyone with an idea, no matter the industry, has the opportunity to ask others to finance it. Because of crowdfunding’s increasing popularity, success with crowdfunding has become more difficult to achieve. To get some perspectives on what works, we interviewed three Workbar members about their effective campaigns on the most well-known crowdfunding site – Kickstarter.

Thinking Outside the Poster: Litographs

The project:

Litographs – a business founded in 2012 that screen prints the full text of books onto posters – started a Kickstarter in order to print on t-shirts. Strategically timed for the holidays, the Kickstarter exceeded its goal of $15,000 and raised $100,928 in one month.

What worked?

According to Danny Fein, Litographs’ founder, the campaign was successful for four main reasons – its mailing list and Danny’s social networks; its timing; its creative use of rewards; and its strong press coverage. “It’s really important to get your campaign off to a good start, and it’ll take on a life of its own,” Danny says.

Danny’s main goal for the campaign was to get it featured by Kickstarter on the homepage, but that doesn’t happen without a bit of leg work. In order to build momentum and prove to Kickstarter that his project was worth highlighting, Danny sent an email to his existing mailing list of about 4,000 people who already had an interest in Litographs.   He also promoted the page heavily on his personal social media sites – particularly Facebook. Instead of featuring a promotion on his website, he took the opportunity to offer a special price on posters – $15 instead of around $30 – available only on the Kickstarter page. This drove hundreds of customers, who were already Litographs fans, to “donate” to the campaign and get a poster for half the price. Kickstarter noticed the page’s immediate success and featured it soon after. According to Danny, about 50% of the money raised came from people who found his page through Kickstarter.

Danny also wanted to get some press coverage, but knew very little about public relations best practices. “I gave myself every possibility to have good things happen because it was so unknown,” Danny says. One way he did this was to make a wish list of around 30 blogs that he wanted to feature Litographs’ story. Instead of sending a press release, he scraped text from each blog, created hand-printed litographs of their logos, and sent them out via snail mail along with a suggestion that they cover his story.  Four out of five of them did, and the first was TechCrunch – leading to the largest spike in the campaign’s donors.

Lastly, starting the campaign in time for rewards to arrive by December 24^th was no coincidence. As a retail-centric project, the campaign’s positioning in time for holiday shopping was a major reason for its huge success. “It’s hard to overestimate how huge the holidays are – especially for a business like Litographs,” Danny says.

Litographs’ Kickstarter campaign had residual effects on the company’s overall success. The campaign raised traffic to the Litographs website 10-20% during the month while it was running, and the site’s traffic settled after the campaign at 4-5% more on average than before – even after holiday shopping season.

Last Words of Advice

Though Litographs exceeded its goal by a huge amount, Danny says that kind of success has pros and cons. While the increased order numbers decreased the costs of t-shirts and other materials bought in bulk, the unanticipated number of rewards Danny had to turn out for the holidays added a lot of stress and pressure. “Don’t overestimate the complexity of having 300,000 customers breathing down your necks – especially during the holidays,” Danny says. If your page is wildly successful, be prepared for the follow-through it will require. Because Kickstarter does not design itself as a retail store, Danny had to come up with his own system for following up with orders in order to follow through with every contributor’s request. “Double however long you think it will take,” Danny says, and only add stretch goals if you previously planned on it. If the campaign is already proving successful, don’t over complicate it – it only creates more work and complexity.

Putting a Local Landmark in a National Spotlight: The Brattle Theatre

The project:

The Brattle Theatre, a 60-year old arthouse cinema in Harvard Square, needed major upgrades –including a new HVAC and digital projection systems – and looked to Kickstarter to raise the $140,000 to do them. In five weeks, the Kickstarter campaign raised $149,580.

What worked?

To appeal to as many donors as possible, the Brattle put a great deal of thought into its rewards. “My impression of Kickstarter is that it’s tougher for local projects… our strategy was to make it attractive to people who don’t live nearby,” says Larry Yu, a board member who was involved in the execution and promotion of the campaign. To increase the chances of getting national donors as well as local, more personally-invested contributors, the Brattle offered a mix of lower to higher-end rewards, some regionally dependent and some not. These rewards included Brattle “Schwag,” movie tickets, a night with celebrity Amanda Palmer, and even choosing the name for the new HVAC system.

Even with creative and diverse prizes, the Brattle’s campaign needed quite a bit of marketing power. In the first two weeks of the campaign, the Brattle reached its 20% mark, and finished strong with around 40% of funds rolling in the last week. According to Larry, a large reason for the campaign’s success near the end was the snowball effect of the Brattle’s promotional efforts. The theater started by promoting the campaign to its close networks – friends, family, and fans of the theater. In those initial solicitations, the promotional team also made an effort to focus on more influential connectors in its network that could help spread the word – connectors like influencers at Harvard University, the City of Cambridge, and local press and niche film publications. Using the theater’s press releases, the Boston Globe wrote several pieces highlighting the Brattle’s campaign.

Last words of advice:

The theater’s campaign succeeded and exceeded its goal, but Larry says, “It’s hard work – it doesn’t just sort of happen.” Plan for many hours of marketing power in order to get your project off the ground, and don’t expect donors to just find you. The Brattle already had many fans, and it still had to invest a lot of time, effort, and incentives into spreading the word about its campaign.

Finding a Sweet Spot in a Niche: D Programming Language Conference

The project:

Andrei Alexandrescu, a D Programmer, was part of a group that wanted to organize an annual D Programming Language conference in the Bay Area in 2013. To do it, they needed funding for the rooms, speakers, food, and other conference amenities, and they decided to reach out to the D Programming community using Kickstarter in order to fund it. In one month, they raised $30,855 of their $29,999 goal.

What worked?

According to Andrei, the conference’s campaign succeeded because of its niche appeal, the length of the campaign, and the group’s ability to find initial investors. “I think one month is a sweet spot,” Andrei says. The group built momentum from the start by lining up some initial investors through their personal networks and by posting about the conference in targeted areas, such as D Programming forums, Hacker News, and Reddit. “Try to find some reliable contributors to seed it,” Andrei says, because when people are convinced the project will make it, they are more likely to help it get there. Once the campaign reached 50 contributors, they extended the reach of their network by emailing donors and asking them to spread the word. This strategy and the short timeline for funding kept up the campaign’s momentum, without major lulls. Once they reached their goal, the successful campaign gave the conference so much credibility that Andrei’s employer agreed to provide and pay for the conference’s venue.

Last words of advice:

Though a successful crowdfunding campaign gives a project credibility, Andrei cautions, “It’s a leap of faith, and you can lose face very easily… If it fails, it can be very disappointing and can hurt your project’s reputation.” He also advises to be aware that contributors can retract their donations last minute, which happened to them early on in the campaign. Had it happened later, as they approached their deadline, those retractions could have cost them the entire pool, so it’s always best to plan for a cushion.

For further reading on crowdfunding best-practices, start with these resources:

Raising Money Through Crowdfunding? Consider These Best Practices for Success | Entrepreneur Magazine

How to Run a Successful Campaign on Kickstarter | Shopify

The Untold Story Behind Kickstarter Stats [INFOGRAPHIC] | AppsBlogger

Successful Kickstarter Campaigns | Garrett Gibbons

Kickstartup | Craigmod.com

Much has been discussed about Yahoo putting an end to their work-from-home (“WFH”) policies, and even though Marissa’s announcement was almost two months ago, I still get questions about this as larger companies ask me about Workbar.

My first reaction to the news was, ‘good for you Yahoo’.  They need an infusion of creativity and innovation into their strategy, and a good way to do this is to have people physically work together.  Workbar was built on this philosophy.  However, thinking more about it, Yahoo’s WFH ban addressed the symptoms of poor management and a core cultural illness.  Sending everyone back into the office reminds me of grade school when I got grounded by my parents or sent to the principal’s office for misbehaving.  Yahoo is treating their employees like children rather than trusting them to work in the best way for themselves as well as to the benefit of the company.

A key element of the collaborative environment at Workbar is that members are in control of their day.  They choose where and when they work.  They may work for large companies, they may be part of a startup team, or they may be freelancers working on projects for both large companies and startups.  The common denominator is that individuals have choice and independence in how and where they spend their day.  To accomplish this, there needs to be a healthy respect between employee and employer.  Both trust each other to seek out a balance of productivity and creativity, a balance of solo work, inter-company discussions, and a healthy set of external relationships.

Sounds great, but as Yahoo shows, companies have some inherent pitfalls in leaving the where-to-work decision up to the employees.

The WFH Catch 22…

Employees have rightfully come to expect some level of remote work.  Why shouldn’t they?  If I break down work into components that make up most of an average professional’s day, I can divide this list into interactive tasks and independent tasks.  The interactive tasks need to happen in an office or alternative workspace, such as Workbar, where the team can come together; while the solo ones often are well-suited for a WFH setting.  Check out this Herman Miller video demonstrating the importance of excelling in company collaboration.

Solo vs. Collaborative Work

If we look closely at the interactive tasks, many of them are, by nature, unplanned.  Briefings take place in planned meetings, but equally as important are the somewhat random updates you get from bumping into a colleague.  Mentoring can be accomplished in formal settings, but is more natural through the offhand help of a coworker acquired by just grabbing lunch together periodically.

Using writing as an analogy, I like to think of the informal aspects of interactive tasks as controlling the tone in writing. Without informal interactive work, our day can become dry, boring, and laborious – it’s a job instead of a career or a passion.  As individuals, we end up prioritizing our solo work over other tasks.  These are assigned tasks with deadlines and deliverables, so of course we are going to want to get these things done so we can switch gears and have fun; and of course it’s easier to get through a ton of solo work without the distraction of others.

Here comes the Catch 22.  If each employee gets to choose the best setting for their work, and they tend to prioritize solo work, the unplanned elements of interactive work are going to suffer.  Next thing you know, you are in Yahoo’s shoes.

Remote Work Duck Soup…

So how are top companies addressing the natural Catch 22 related to remote work policies?  Here are three general strategies:

Make it too nice to not show up:

Lounge space in Communispace

One method is to create an awesome office.  Inc. puts out a list of the World’s Coolest Offices that is pretty inspiring.  I’d surely be more apt to want to show up at one of these offices rather than your average cube farm.  Around Boston, we’ve seen a number of companies take this approach – some of them participate in our OuterSpaces distributed coworking network.  Communispace, for example, has designed a mostly open workspace with bays for different teams working in groups.  They’ve included an ample amount of breakout areas, phone rooms and conferencing areas so people achieve a combination of independent and interactive work.  To me, the best part of a space like this is a huge kitchen and coffee station.  These areas organically become the de facto place for ad hoc interaction, as well as a functional spot for company-wide meetings.

Be onsite but mobile:

Other companies enable remote work though formal mobile worker programs where employees do not come into the office.  Instead, the company sets up specialized centers for mobile workers to work together when they are “on campus”.  These denser collaborative areas are intentionally designed as a space for formal and informal interactive tasks and connections – meetings, group work, conference calls, bumping into each other in the kitchen – and are less focused on individual work, which can happen from many locations including an employee’s home.

Novartis is a good example of a company that has taken this approach.  As they rolled out their mobile worker program, where certain employees don’t have fixed desks, they opened a few on-campus collaboration centers.  People who opt into the mobile program get lockers in one of the centers and use it as a base, while at other times they are able to work from home or elsewhere.  As a next phase this summer, Novartis will extend its mobile program to Workbar, so participants can choose their work location between home, the on-campus mobility centers, or Workbar’s coworking centers.

Follow a fully distributed work model:

Writer Scott Berkun has compiled a list of 100% distributed companies with at least 20 employees. The largest or most well-known names on the list – 37Signals, Automattic Inc. (known as WordPress) and GitHub – not surprisingly have a distributed model as a core element of both their products and their own company culture.  This tells me that successfully operating with a 100% distributed workforce is achievable, although probably not for everyone.  Scott spent a year as a team leader at WordPress and shared his findings in a Harvard Business Review article about how this company thrives with a fully distributed model.  He sites that proper tools, culture and adjustment of company protocols are all needed to keep up corporate creativity and productivity.

What’s next?

Remote work as some part of the workspace equation is only going to grow.  We choose what we wear to the office, and next we will choose when we show up to the office.  Flexible workspace practices make sense for companies interested in lowering their operating expenses, improving employee work/life balance, and in global environmental issues.

To not end up like Yahoo, though, companies should give some thought and planning into how they want to enable people to work remotely and how they will keep communication lines open.  Before moving into a distributed work model, companies can start immediately with putting a culture in place that will keep creativity and productivity flowing, even when people aren’t forced to be physically present.