Every crowdfunding campaign has its highs and its lows. If you’ve hit a lull, here are three sure-fire ways to get you back up and running.

1. Organise a fundraising event

Whether it’s a dinner party where you charge £25 per person, a cake sale at a local school, a ticketed music performance with a free glass of wine and slice of pizza, or perhaps even a live auction of rewards! Offline events work well to re-engage your supporters and attract new backers that perhaps aren’t online.

You can use events to break up your campaign, to celebrate milestones and encourage backers to become your very own project ambassadors working with you to help hit your target.

2. Engage local businesses

As you’re adding value to the neighbourhood, there’s a clear benefit for local businesses to get involved. First you need to establish a decent number of backers so they can see that the community wants your project to happen, then ask for a chat with either the business owner or their marketing manager.

Make sure to take with you an information pack with a summary of the project, key images, number of backers and any key supporters, and get them excited about the positive impact the project will have on the community before outlining the different ways they can get involved. Be clear about what you want from them whether it’s pledging money, offering discounts, equipment, materials, space, people power or by helping spread the word through posters in their business, emails to their customers and by sharing on social media.

Make sure to highlight what they’ll get in return e.g. a great new project that will attract people to the area, a public thank you on your project page, on social media, perhaps their logo on your website, the project site or on any marketing materials your produce. Here’s a sample business pack to get you started.

3. Social media

It’s super important to keep your project front and centre and a great way to do this is by using social media – Facebook for family and friends, Twitter for your followers, LinkedIn for business contacts, Instagram for when you’ve got great visuals to show.

Did you know tweets with images received 150% more retweets than tweets without images?

Aim to share on average three posts a day (on any combination of networks) and make sure to include an image, a joke, or a question (and ALWAYS a link to your Spacehive project!).  Tools that will help you manage your presence include Hootsuite or Buffer to schedule your social media in advance and Canva to help you design interesting visuals.

Wow #SaveBrightonTerraces already has a whooping 250 backers! Thank you – let’s do this! https://t.co/ojOQPaWNkn pic.twitter.com/Gl6JijEtcg

Looking for more inspiration and advice on running your campaign? Check out our upcoming Events and come meet other project creators in person.