The marketing of my project (and those of the rest of the #SciFund-ers) is the most essential aspect of the Challenge. I can’t expect random people to show up on RocketHub looking to spend money. Besides writing an effective proposal that turns potential contributors into actual contributors, I need to market the hell out of myself and use my entire network of friends and colleagues to join the cause (and get them to contribute as well).

I like to pretend that marketing is my specialty. To some extent that is true, I would say I know more than most scientists in this regard, but research is my real specialty and I can research and apply anything. So my first step in my marketing scheme is to learn what worked for the most successful projects in the first round. Luckily the awesome folks at #SciFund (Jai and Jarrett) wrote up blog posts that explained what worked so well for each person. Check out the posts here, here, here, and here.

From what I’ve read there are 3 main groups that us #SciFund-ers (from now on referred to as we) should hit hard and can probably expect contributions from:

1. Friends and family
2. Social network and audience
3. Personal favors/miscellaneous

The personal favors group is a bit of an enigma so we can’t really target our marketing scheme in that direction, well we can but not directly. I’m defining personal favors as people who are contributing to my project that I don’t really know. For example in a couple of the examples I linked, some of their projects got picked up by national media outlets.

In order to target this potential audience, I need to make sure that my project is accessible and updated frequently. That is just a good blogging habit and extremely important to build an audience. Luckily for me, my research is constantly being updated and I’m always writing notes, thoughts, ideas, etc to keep my content fresh.

But I/we can and should hit up our friends and family. The least that I should hope for is that they tell their friends and family. I’ll call that social networking the old fashioned way. But I can hope for something like a 10% conversion rate. I think that would be a great number. By that I mean that 10% of people I ask to contribute will contribute something. And I think something like 25% would be willing to tell their friends. I’m making up these numbers of course, but I think they are reasonable (although something like 1-5% is more likely for people who will donate).

Social networking is going to be key in this campaign. It is very similar to old fashioned networking, but the information will spread much faster. Not only that, but in this case having a large social network isn’t as important as having the right connections. For instance, my social network is comprised completely of colleagues from around the world thanks to ScienceOnline 2012. If a few key people (those with even larger reach than my own) in my network contribute and share my proposal, I think I have a great shot of making my goal.

But my marketing campaign isn’t ending there. I am affiliated with the GPSA as the Media and Transparency Committee Chair and I have made quite a few connections within UNM with regards to promotion. Part II of my marketing campaign will be to reach out to those within UNM and others in ABQ to help spread the message.

To reach a broad audience I actually am not going to focus on my project. My aim will be to show people that crowdfunding is a viable alternative to traditional scientific funding. To do this I am contacting the UNM Marketing and Communications department (those responsible for maintaining the UNM homepage and the news site), the UNM Daily Lobo, and the Weekly Alibi (Albuquerque’s best newspaper, in my opinion) and asking them to work on an article about crowdfunding for science and featuring my project as an example of the process. By being a pioneer for the UNM community, perhaps I can show other students that crowdfunding is a real alternative, cultivate relationships for the next round of #SciFund, or even spearhead a UNM centric crowdfunding platform (that would be ideal).

The final aspect of my marketing campaign incorporates my local scientific community. I will speak with the Physics and Astronomy Department Chair about possible promotion outlets (with his backing for added support). On top of this I’m a new recruit of the Initiative to Maximize Student Diversity (IMSD) program and hopefully they have some outlets for support.

And as I travel forward in time, I’m sure I’ll come across new outlets to promote my project and I’ll be pursuing those as well. In the meantime, I have a lot to work with and I hope I have another open science success story to contribute to the world!