Campaign Updates

Day 6 and 7

End of first week. The past two days were more about planning the next steps. Sent a bunch of invitations through linked in, got a few interesting questions from people in the slack channels we posted (we now have a FAQ page). The donations in the past few days have been mostly from friends en family, not ideal. We have got around 1.7k hits in the project web pages but we don’t have any conversions from random people on the internet that was not before acquainted with our work: Big Problem. This is why we rearranged the project site to emphasize the rewards, let’s see if that works. We are going to test that with a few ads.

Day 5

Got a fair amount of donations from the folks we were with at the Open Data conference. Worked on promoting on different slack channels and preparing, got some good positive feedback from people who work with data about the video. Ran a few ads to test the market in the US. We expect some conclusions about the tests in 2 days.

We reached $3.600 USD in donations

Day 4

I flew back to Bogota. The rest of the team stayed in Quito to try to “sell” the last merchandise. I am writing this flying over the Andes right now, finally took the time to update this #SaveTheData diary. Managed to send some personal invitations over whatsapp to friends and family using a custom link hoping to make pun: dskt.ch/simestima. Which in colombian spanish means something like “if you care about me…”

Right before boarding the plane I was able to talk to my friend who runs an agency. They will hopefully help us launch the right online campaign.

Sent a bunch of emails and direct messages to family and friends, but our donnors so far know us personally.

We closed the day with around $2.180 USD in donations.

Day 3

We were all busy all day talking to conference attendees. We still haven’t had the time to do online marketing. We went offline for the first wee during the conference.

Something that worked (hopefully) was to talk personally to some large organizations and funders. They have seen the develpement of our company for the past two years, and they were happy to commit verbally to get the institutional rewards to sponsor 4 Data Apps, totalling $8.000. Still need to work the politics so it may take a few weeks to close them.

We closed the day with around $1.750 USD in donations.

Funny thing though, our journalists friends from Cuestión Pública also launched today their own crowdsourcing campaing, support them , like I just did.

Day 2

It was strategic for us to launch for the conference. All the people with mindset we need for our campaign would be here for 3 days: journalists, activists, funders, gov-tech people.

We got a place to make a small intervention in the conference so we went for a “Guerrilla” Interview session with attendees at the conference. Making sure we would keep the same format of our video.

We got some of our data drive physical goods to give instant gratification for those who would donate to the campaign right away.

One very special donation came from a very good friend of us who runs a Macroeconomic Research Newsletter from Brazil.

We sold “donations” for a total of 1500 USD collected

Day 1

We all flew to Quito, Ecuador. We are here because we are attending Abrelatam the most important Open Data conference in Latin America.

We launched. We couln’t finish on time all the messages we needed to prepare the launch. So basically relied on the support of those 200 individuals I messaged personally

We messed up some of our launching pieces and images. We ended up making a message to use our product, when in reality we actually had to invite people to join our cause on Kickstarter.

Around 1000 USD on the first day

Day -X

We didn’t finish the right messages for the expectation campaign, so we ended up - Programming a few social meda posts. - Sending a personal messages to friends and collaborators (around 200 emails) who are working in our industry from different countries in Latin America.