Common Questions

Simply stated, best practices indicate you should support projects of people you personally know and trust. While the SWET Projects site and community is designed to promote authenticity and transparency with all our campaigns, there isn’t a 100% guarantee that a user’s project contains accurate or truthful information. As such, supporters should do their best to fully understand and trust the project they intend to support.

Beware of project pages that attempt to bypass the prescribed payment method (ie, posting direct links to alternative payment methods). Please report any pages that request direct payments or users who attempt to contact you to arrange an alternative method of payment.

Building trust between supporters and creators is not just important, but essential to the success of any crowdfunding platform. SWET Project Creator profiles are prominently displayed on each project page so that supporters can learn more about each project creator, which increases trust and project marketability. Users are required to display their authentic identities when using SWET Projects. This helps ensure that supporters understand who is collecting the money. SWET Projects helps communicate account authenticity while protecting users’ personal contact information by leveraging Facebook. Each SWET Projects user may connect a single Facebook account to their online project page. In doing so, the user’s name, photo and number of friends is displayed. However, the link to a user’s Facebook profile remains private.

SWET Projects accounts that fail to meet the above requirement, or attempt to use Facebook accounts that don’t appear authentic (no photo or low friend count) will not be approved for inclusion within the SWET Projects Search Directory. 

While it’s free to create and share your online Project, SWET Projects will deduct a 6% fee from each contribution that you receive. Since our fee is deducted automatically, you’ll never need to worry about being billed or owing us any money. A small processing fee of about 3% will also be deducted from each contribution. Please see Pricing & Fees for more info.

SWET Projects operates on only a 6% fee deducted from each contribution received. Very few organizations can claim they help as many people on such a small percentage of gross payment volume.

In short, SWET Projects is an incredibly efficient and effective way to provide financial support to those service projects that you care most about. Not only can supporters give in an extremely targeted way, but more money goes directly to the intended recipients than other organizations can claim.

SWET Projects has major operating expenses like any popular internet service including technology, infrastructure, payroll and benefits for our dedicated team of employees. We have purposely created a business model that allows users to sign up and launch their campaign for free. Our site is void of advertisements and other distractions – helping our visitors to explore and discover our users’ projects freely.

We offer the greatest flexibility for pricing and structuring your SWET Project to fit its unique and specific quality and needs. Some projects have a product in mind, with manufacturing costs and launch dates. Other projects have a phased approached to their development while meeting current operational costs. having immediate access to the funds will allow for an acceleration in the growth of the project while also building a community of support. 

The interaction amongst contributors and Project creators enlarges the stakeholder base. The opportunity to galvanize the community is as important as the financial support received. Some of these projects are part of a SWET Studio which is also geared towards crowd-sourcing solutions in addition to the crowd-funding.

In our “How It works: Getting Started” page, we purposely oversimplified the steps into large milestones for Pre-launch and launching your project. Like anything worthwhile, time and consideration in the preparation for your project is key to its success.

You should give yourself at least 60 days of dedicated time and attention to assemble the elements of your project;

Here are some of the key items:

Assemble your Team: no project can exist in a vacuum. If you are considering launching a SWET Project, then the intrapersonal germination period of your idea is over and it’s time to start testing the idea with the people in your life. It is those conversations that will help refine your idea – begin to “ground” it – by moving it from speculative musings to reality. Your team can be friends, family members and trusted colleagues who act as collaborators or sounding board for your idea. In the business world, they act like an advisory board or group. Feel like you are on your own with this one – Contact us to craft the support structure you need. Expanding your team to include people who can provide the expertise in the campaign elements is a good move, too. Using photographers, videographers, social media marketers especially for email campaigns are something to consider. While you are certainly capable of doing all of these things yourself – you may want to consider the ROI (return on investment) of diluting your time and energy on many tasks as opposed to discerning what your strengths are and how best to utilize your energy.

Build your social presence: Create a social presence for yourself and your project. On your list should be a personal Facebook account as well as an account for your project. Know your target audience – (first identify who would be interested in this project beyond your friends and family) and understand how they communicate with each other  – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Pinterest. Identify the groups and communities they belong to. Then determine which platforms your team is most comfortable with and start there. Managing social media communications so that they are active, rotating and timely is best done with a Social Media scheduling tool like Hootsuite. Most of these tools have free account options. These help with posting your updates, blog posts, twitter feeds and replies to comments manageable by letting you write the items in advance and schedule when you want them posted by choosing the times when your target audience is typically online.

Build your community and email list: In all social marketing, email is the key tool to success. Your landing pages, social media campaigns and posts and blog posts are tools to build your email contact lists. Brainstorm with your team on ways to build your email list – get creative! Identify your most likely big supporters as they will be your first contributors and the most enthusiastic communicators to spread the word about your project! Creating email campaigns is an art and we’ll go into more deeply in a later posting. Ready for some email support now? Contact us!

Setting your project timelines/goals and creating perks: While we don’t restrict the length of your project’s campaign, keeping it around a reasonable 90 days will help keep the energy and buzz around your project strong – people like deadlines and it demonstrates careful consideration. Your project goal should have some reality to it. Tasks, materials, production, and time are all factors that need value assigned to them. It is crucial to build a budget for your project addressing these and other factors that are unique to your project. Taking a “lean” approach in building your budget is recommended as it reflects a flexible responsive startup mentality. Again, feasible goals indicate to people you are serious about your project and their money.  Knowing your numbers will allow you to get creative with your perks. Perks are incentives offered to contributors in exchange for their support. Projects offering perks raise significantly more money than those that do not. They help you attract a larger audience, make people feel more valued for their contributions, and help you spread the word about your project. Make them fun for your target audience as well as meaningful. Successful campaigns have used Thank you notes, stickers, pre-release copies of your products as perks for their projects. $25 perks are most common while $100 perks raise the most cash. Be strategic in structuring perks so that you can manage the fulfillment.  For example, if fulfilling 10 of a perk is of no issue, but 100 or more will cause an issue, limit the number of that particular perk. 

Tell your story – create your pitch: Now that you have your team assembled, you know your budget and you know your audience, it’s time to create your pitch. What’s your story – make it personal. Putting yourself into your pitch makes it accessible to people, it gives them something to relate to – YOU! Or the community you are helping. the first paragraph is what will catch people’s attention – so the first 3 – 5 sentences are crucial. Test out your pitch by writing 10 – 12 different approaches, and then asking people which one(s) they prefer. Now you are ready to tell your story. You may also use a phased approached with your campaign by designing stretch your goals thereby being prepared when your initial campaign is successful. A Pitch video will give your campaign an even higher rate for success. Storyboard your video with a script, images and interview sequences and and other details you want to be sure to include. Need help with producing or scripting your video? Contact us!

Spread your story: Press Releases and Engaging your community. After all of this work, it will be easy for you to create a Press Release for your local media outlets. Be sure to make a list of Your local media outlets and their contacts including their emails, twitter handles and other social media links. Make an initial contact with them about a month in advance to let them know your story and your launch date (make sure it doesn’t occur on a holiday!) – this will give them time to follow-up with you and schedule an interview with you. Also prep your social media scheduler with about 10 each of Tweets, Facebook posts, short email messages and, if scheduling an event, – then detailing the event. Keep in mind that Tweets are 140 characters – of those, 24 characters are used for hyperlinks and 24 characters when you use images in your tweets – we highly recommend using images in your Tweets as they more than double the amount of re-Tweets (an enviable goal!).

These are the key tips for successful campaigns – keep checking back for links for deeper learning and future posts.