Check out some case studies from a range of our top project categories.

These campaigns make us proud and have achieved amazing results!

'Shacky' - Social Good

Joep Pennartz raised $25,137 for his tiny house getaways project called Shacky. A true hustler, his do or die attitude was the key to his successful crowdfunding campaign.

“Treat your pledgers like kings and queens. People that pledged love your campaign. If you treat them right, they will become your ambassadors!”

Joep's genius strategy employed publicizing personalized thank you's for each and every supporter. He released 2 per day, and let the supporters know about it while also asking them to tag themselves.

This resulted in each supporter having a bite-sized chunk of personalized content that all their friends could see. Behind the scenes, he was really promoting his campaign in a very appreciative and ‘non-needy’ way. Also, supporters’ friends assume that the pledge happened that same day. This makes a wonderful way to maintain the perception that the campaign was still ticking along nicely.

'Black Hops' - Food & Beverage

Dan Norris and his team raised $17,805 for their brewery called Black Hops. In fact, they hit their financial target in the first day of the campaign launching. Their campaign was Australia’s most successful beer crowdfunding campaign ever.

“The key part of our crowdfunding strategy and how we created such strong early momentum was setting up an ambassador group on Facebook. This helped us create an engaged audience upfront, who helped us promote our campaign.

To do this, we set up a page on our site telling people about the campaign and asking for their email so that we could notify them when we went live. When people signed up for the email, we invited them to join the ambassador group on Facebook."
"The impact of that process was significant. The ambassador group snapped up most of the Early Bird offers ($40 discount on normal price) and by the time we emailed the list, there were only a few left. Those went quickly too, and by the time we shared it publicly, we were already into the other nine rewards. The impact was we hit 50% of our target in the first few hours, before we even launched publicly.”

Dan’s strategy is one we're constantly relaying to budding campaigners. This urgency at the beginning of a campaign is invaluable. Also, this is compounded when, at the public launch, supporters saw a sold-out reward and the fear of missing out on the next reward ensued a beer buying frenzy.

'Gayby Baby' - Film & Video

Maya Newell knew she had a big project on her hands, but at the beginning the audience didn’t match the project size. Maya needed a substantial amount to make a full-length feature documentary film highlighting same-sex parenting. With a goal of $100k in mind, she had to have a great strategy. In All-or-Nothing crowdfunding it’s nearly impossible to start with no audience and reach a target so high.

How did she overcome this? She took things in two stages. First launching a short film (of the same project) with a $10k target. She hit this target without too much struggle, then produced the short film. This initial campaign helped her to understand the audience of the film, what types of marketing worked for her crowdfunding and most of all helped her make a start on a smaller yet very engaged audience, who would be a massive asset for any future campaigns.

After screenings & promotion of the short film she was empowered with information on what worked, the buzz behind the project was building and she could begin planning for another campaign.

Maya’s second campaign was for the exact same project, just a bigger and better version, a full length film. Everything from the beginning was building up to this final campaign.

Maya ended up reaching that $100k mark with her second campaign. She took things in two steps which resulted in a comfortable fundraising experience. Had she aimed for that $100k mark with her first campaign, she probably would have failed.

'Bob Brown Foundation' - Environmental

The work of the Bob Brown Foundation has always been focused on preserving our natural resources, from endangered animals to native rainforests. The work they do is more important now than ever before, with the effects of the climate emergency being felt everywhere.

“Nothing will save us from ourselves but ourselves. We need action for Earth based on the reality that this is each and everyone’s responsibility.” — Bob Brown

BBF has run over 10 successful crowdfunding campaigns to support various initiatives.

They ran two crowdfunding campaigns in 2020, with their latter 'Save Australia's Native Forests' being their highest fundraiser to date, finishing with $130,354 raised from 1426 supporters.

These funds will help them to fund their ongoing efforts including endangered species research, direct frontline action and national advertising campaigns to continue to spread awareness of the cause.

Next: 3. Before You Start

4 tips you must know before you start your campaign!