Step 3: Consult These Resources and Tips to Shape Your Outreach Strategy.

To succeed on the Marketplace, you’ll need to make this campaign a priority. There’s a high correlation between success on the Marketplace and the amount of effort you put in to mobilizing people. You should expect to email hundreds if not thousands of supporters, make phone calls, even perhaps host events to get people to support you! The more people you reach out to intelligently, the quicker you’ll raise funds.

1. Find the Hubs. When Unreasonable was a new startup, we lacked a number of important assets including a credible brand and a proven track record. But in the 6 weeks our applications were open that first year, nearly 700 entrepreneurs from countries like Mauritania, Benin, and Serbia, began applications to attend the Institute. As much as we’d like to, we can’t take credit for getting the word out to so many applicants. Instead, all the recognition goes to our partners, organizations and individuals around the world that are trusted hubs for entrepreneurs (i.e. places entrepreneurs already go to). These organizations, including Ashoka Changemakers, SocialEdge, and Change.org, helped us to market to their networks by tweeting, blogging, and emailing on our behalf. In total, our partners spread information about our applications to well over 100,000 people. Targeting individuals with vast networks, organizations like the ones we mentioned above, local websites, meet-up groups, communities and blogs where the people you want to attract already go will lay the foundation for your viral call to arms!
2. Find a champion (or many).   Find a person, a group, or an organization that cares (or would care if you reached out to them) deeply about seeing you and your organization succeed. Find someone specific who can become the champion of your cause –  the cause of getting you to the Institute – someone who will take it personally and stop at nothing to make sure you get here.  Then, make the “right” ask of that champion (see “Make the RIGHT ask” below). This person, group of people, or organization could be someone in your country, in a neighboring country, or over here in the US. Let us know if you need help identifying some potential people, groups, or organizations.
3. Give Them the Tools to Market For You. Make it easy for your networks to spread the word by doing all the hard work for them. For example, here is the page we give our partners that makes it simple and easy for them to spread the word!
4. Create a sense of urgency. According to John Kotter, author of the aptly titled A Sense of Urgency, any effort to create change is doomed without getting people to see and feel a need for change. Why should people sponsor you to attend the Unreasonable Institute? And why does it matter that they act now? Because if you are one of the first 25 Finalists to raise $10,000 you receive rigorous entrepreneurial skill training, mentorship from over 50 seasoned entrepreneurs and leaders, a chance to present to and build relationships with a host of potential investors, and untold support into the future from this network of people as you grow your business and your impact that could improve the lives of millions of people. They must understand this is a deal, but a deal that is closing fast because you only have 50 days to edge out the competition (urgency)! Including specific goals and deadlines for action also incentivizes your supporters to move quickly (e.g. “Help us reach our goal of raising $500 by Friday by being one of 10 donors to give us $50!”).
5. Make the ask. According to Dan Zarrella’s blog post 5 Steps to Going Viral on Twitter, the tweets that are most often re-tweeted (shared by other twitter users with their networks) include a request to be retweeted. Similarly, your contacts are more likely to help if you make a request of them that is (1) easily actionable and (2) “sticky.” (1) An actionable request includes specifics. For example, instead of asking people to spread the word about Unreasonable Institute applications, we asked them to get one person they know to apply. (2) In order for people to act, they have to remember your request. According to the book Made to Stick by Dan and Chip Heath, making your request memorable, or “sticky,” is best done through a Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Story (SUCCESs). Check out our blog post on the subject for more details on how to nail these six principles.
6. Make the RIGHT ask. Galvanizing the support of hundreds require you take full advantage of all the assets at your disposal. We know some of you do not have extensive networks of people who could fund you on an online Marketplace. So lets try to make the best use of those people you do know (or those you can get to know before the Marketplace ends) and leverage their efforts to do so much more!  Let’s consider, as an example, a compelling concern one of our past Finalists raised on the phone. She’d just run a fundraising campaign over the holidays and asked hundreds of donors for financial contributions. She understandably felt it was inappropriate to ask them for funding yet again to raise money on the Marketplace.  We totally agreed. However, this donor base is not only a source of money, but also an incredible marketing base! Instead of emailing these donors or your champions (see “Find a champion” above) to ask for contributions, one might consider doing the exact opposite. She might email them saying “Please do NOT make a contribution. Instead, tell five people (again, this is concrete) you know about the opportunity to sponsor our venture on the Unreasonable Finalist Marketplace.” This strategy makes sense considering that an entrepreneur on Kickstarter (the online fundraising marketplace that inspired our marketplcae) receives the majority of her funding from contacts of her contacts. This is just an example, but the lesson here is make the right ask to the right people so as to best utilize their resources and what they can offer. Many people cannot offer money to support you, but they may offer so much more. Of course, your ask may be different for different people. You might be surprised how many ways you can leverage your assets!
7. Connect with local media. Reach out to local media sources in your area. You will be surprised who is interested in publishing your story and about what you are trying to do.
8. Learn from 2010 Fellow Maria Springer and 2011 Fellow Cynthia Koenig:  Maria held the all time record for most Marketplace supporters (nearly 300) and has compiled simply amazing list of resources here.
9. Learn from 2011 Fellow Moses Sanga: Raising Funds with No Internet, Credit Cards: Read how 2011 Unreasonable Fellow Moses Sanga from Uganda defied all odds to raised the cost to attend the 2011 Institute!
10. Learn from 2010 Fellow Khalida Brohi:  Khalida went door to door in her village in Pakistan to raise some of her funds.
11. Learn from 2011 Fellow Scot Frank: Those Who Did It Quickest in 2011. 2011 Unreasonable Venture One Earth Designs explains their approach to raising the cost to attend the 2011 Institute from 131 People in 22 days.
12. Learn from 2010 Fellows Simon and Jehan: Those Who Did It Quickest in 2010.  Founders of 2010 Unreasonable Venture Who Gives a Crap explained how they raised the cost to attend the 2010 Institute in 2 Weeks!
13. Be creative: The above mentioned approaches from entrepreneurs had not been suggested to them, they came up with them on their own. The best approaches have probably not even been discovered yet. But you and your teams were selected for your ability to overcome any obstacle in front of you…go be creative and unreasonable!
14. Get Media to write about you: Here are a good amount of tips on how to do so.
15. Make your marketplace profile amazing. Step 2 on this page is probably one of the best resources to getting people to care about your venture, so it is worth reiterating. Be sure to use the above suggestions, recommendations and examples to make your profile stand out against all the others. If someone comes to your profile and doesn’t understand what you do, doesn’t recognize the terms you are using, or is just generally not excited, they probably won’t be inclined to support you on the Marketplace. So before you go asking for support from everyone, make sure you have your profile as good as it can get.  As an addendum to step 2 above, here are tips that we’ve compiled after seeing your profiles.
    

    
    1) Review Your Posted Profiles

    Many of you have images that don’t fit or are cropped weird, or have sentences where the punctuation is slightly off.  Be sure to check out and read through your profile and then adjust accordingly.

    
    

    2) Need to Save Some Characters?

    I know many of you are struggling to get all you want to say into the space and thus are putting together sometimes weird sentences.   Try thinking :what are the 2 or 3 things I want the reader to get from this”. Keep that and leave out most of the rest.  Other smaller character-saving tips include substituting the “&” sign in for “and” or being more careful with repeating things (for example: instead of saying “WHO – the World Health Organization” just simply say “the World Health Organization.”

    3) Make your image compelling:

    Your image is step one to get people’s attention and excitement to initially click on your venture.  Make it grab their eye and their attention, and maybe tell a small bit of the story of your venture.  Edom Nutritional Solutions has a great photo not because it has a child on it (I surely won’t go there , but because it is bright, the faces are close up, and its sheerly joyful image make it stand out.

    4) Make your tag-line compelling:

    In general, these are looking pretty good! Remember, your tag line is 120 characters to get someone excited enough to click in your venture.  Make it memorable, and make it leave the reader wanting to her what you have to say.  Nne does a great job with this because when I read her description (“This project is to assist the poor rural women to sell their agricultural products at 40-50% or 100% profit margin”) I immediately thought “whoa, tell me more, tell me how you can increase profit margin that much!’

    
    

    5) Make the text in your profile clear, free of jargon, and leave people feeling confident in you/your company:

    As we read through some profiles, we realize that they wording could be much more clear and get us way more excited.  Heck, we were EXTREMELY excited after reading about and meeting you.  We want that to shine through in your profile.

    a) Be specific.  Don’t use vague terms or numbers. Do you increase farmers income by 45%? Say so. Did you run a pilot with 500 people? Say so.  Do you have 10,000 customers a month? Definitely say so!

    b) Be clear.  Explain what you do, what you sell, and how it makes the world or a person’s life better so that someone who has never heard about what you are doing could understand it.

    c) You all have milestones that are amazing.  Make sure you tell people about them!  Milestones in your profile should leave people saying “Wow! Yes! This entrepreneur, this team, and this venture are going to do it!”

    6) If you have one, use your Alumni buddy for help:

    They have been through a lot of training on powerful communication and on how to clearly articulate the most important things about your venture.  Be sure to ask for their help.

    
    

    7) Learn from each other:

    Take a look at other profiles of Finalists.  Learn what you think is done really well and what is not done so well.  Try to incorporate those things that are done well and maybe suggest changes to those that aren’t done so well.

1. Always say “thank you.” Our mothers taught us the importance of these 2 great words. Do not forget the power of saying thank you to those who help you! So thank YOU – we could not be here if it weren’t for you Unreasonable entrepreneurs!