Flying Saucer x Waverly Labs: The Anatomy of a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign

We’ve spoken and written a lot about customer acquisition and retention over the years. Beyond an important topic to broach for any marketing agency, customer loyalty is especially important to our team: it’s the holy grail of successful relationships – what keeps us up and creating nearly 24 hours a day. That’s why we’re so proud of our work with the incredible team over at Waverly Labs. After years of collaboration, we just helped them design, launch and scale their second Indiegogo campaign.

Within a few hours of going live, it had already raised 216% of its $75k goal.

Yup. #humblebrag.

Here’s a quick peek behind the curtain of how a successful collaboration and Indiegogo campaign like this one is built.

Project Management: thinking ahead and prioritizing

One of the biggest perks to building long-lasting relationships with a client? We get really good at interpreting feedback and developing a short-hand to move things along quickly. This proved especially helpful for our account director and project manager extraordinaire, Anaïs.

“Timing and coordination were really essential with this project, because we had to align so many different elements: website updates, video production, campaign perks, press kits, social campaigns, Facebook ads, email copy and of course – the Indiegogo page itself.

Once all of those assets were ready, we had to be very deliberate about how we defined our audiences and at what points in the campaign we reached out to people, so we assembled everyone that was familiar with the project and mapped out a strategy. With daily communication on Slack and regular, iterative check-ins to make sure everything was on track, the whole campaign ran really smoothly.”

Brand Vision: positioning innovation

For our head of content Sarah – who’s been working with the Waverly Labs Team since day one of our collaboration – the challenge was to make sure the Ambassador was understood not as a new generation of Waverly’s flagship Pilot translator, but as a brand new solution poised to disrupt the way teams, groups, and companies communicate across language barriers.

“Because I’ve been working with the Waverly Labs brand for a bit, I know how beloved and trusted it is, so it’s always a fine line between communicating the novelty and reinvention of a new product, while making sure it’s clear that this is still the same team and technology that built the Pilot.

The way I was able to capture it was through the slogan “First a gadget, now a tool.” It encapsulated the shift to a prosumer tool, it communicated the history and forward momentum of the product, and it made it sound robust and practical. We were able to expand on the copy and marketing assets from that idea, and we’re really happy with the results! I really love being able to work with clients for an extended stretch of time; it lets you shift and adapt as you hit benchmarks and goals together – it’s really rewarding.”

Design: aiming for clean consistency

For our designer Michael, the Indiegogo campaign was all about keeping things simple and consistent.

“There wasn’t really any need to reinvent anything, but we wanted to give the whole look and feel a bit of a refresh to adapt to current design trends and best practices. That meant creating a new color palette, doing a bit of resizing to make sure each section worked on all devices, and making sure the renders provided by the Waverly Labs team were featured front and center on all of our assets. When it comes down to it, we’re big believers in the idea that if it works, don’t fix it – so we kept changes at a minimum and highlighted the best parts of the product’s slim, techy design.”

And there you have it: the anatomy of a successful, well-orchestrated Indiegogo project! With the campaign now coming to a close and our goal surpassed by nearly 200%, we’re shifting our attention to helping the Waverly Labs team communicate with backers as they dive into the production phrase and start hitting new milestones. Because when it comes down to it, just like a long-term work partnership, building trust and rapport with backers and audiences is all about clear communication, support, community, and consistently delivering great work.

Curious to know how we can help you launch and coordinate a successful crowd-funding campaign? Get in touch, we’d love to hear what you’re working on!