119: How Who Gives a Crap Raised $66,000 by Sitting on a Toilet (Crowdfunding Series Part 4)

Simon Griffiths sat down for what he believed in and, it turned out, parking it on a toilet was an epic marketing win for a good cause.

Griffiths and the team behind Who Gives a Crap toilet paper employed a clever stunt in which they livestreamed their co-founder sitting on a toilet until they reached their crowdfunding goal, and it worked. The company gives half of its profits to charity to increase access to toilets and sanitation in developing countries.

But it takes more than a good cause and a good marketing ploy to have a successful crowdfunding campaign. The team also relied on thorough preparation and consistent messaging to blow away their goal.

Griffiths and his co-founder Jehan Ratnatunga did a first take on their video in January 2012, hoping to launch soon after. But they realized that it wasn’t quite what they wanted, so they went back and tried again, even taking the time to get advice from an ad firm in Melbourne.

The video wasn’t the only thing they had to prepare. The team wanted to be sure that their campaign would be a coherent, quality whole, and if that meant delaying the launch so that they would have time to refine things, that was OK.

“We thought we’d go live in February or March, and then it just kept on getting continuously pushed back, and then it wasn’t until July that the campaign did go live,” Griffiths says.

They were only working on the campaign part-time during the preparation phase, and it ended up taking six months for all of their ideas to come together in a way that they were happy with. Preparing an effective campaign isn’t like heating up a microwave dinner. It’s more like cooking a multi-course feast. It takes time.

In this episode you will learn:

• What makes your campaign newsworthy and why people should care
• How to make your campaign as shareable as possible
• Why the first 24 hours are the most important in any crowdfunding campaign
• Kickstarter or Indiegogo. How to pick the one that works for you
• How to keep your message consistent across every media channels
• & much more!