THE OLIVE BUNCH
A WACKY KICKSTARTER SENSATION
The quest
The Olive Bunch, a 2D animated series in the making, tells the story of 3 best friends growing up on a beautiful Mediterranean island. Amira, Stephano and Yani, enjoy rural life during occasionally mischievous adventures while searching for their place in the world. There is an olive grove. Sunshine. Folk tales. Comedy. Mystery. In order to share this story on a screen one day, the client needed to raise funding.
The series had been selected to pitch to investors and producers at Cartoon Forum 2020, the largest animation conference in the world and more. For these pitches, the creators needed to produce a short trailer. And what better way to get proof of concept than to put it to the test with the toughest judges aka. the crowd! And so the crowdfunding mission to make The Olive Bunch reality began…
The magic formula
How do we charm our way into people’s hearts…
and wallets?
How do we crack the algorithm of the largest crowdfunding platform in the world?
Let’s begin!
Landing page
The first step to a kick-ass Kickstarter campaign is to create a kick-ass pre-Kickstarter campaign. We crunched down the numbers and we calculated the amount of pre-registered backers we would need to fund the project on the first day. So we created a landing page for the purpose of getting as many email sign-ups as possible. We told our story using catchy taglines and exciting visuals, and asked people to share their email in order to get a reminder when the campaign was launched.
Email marketing
And so they did. We exceeded the number of email subscribers we needed to achieve the email conversion rate we were aiming for to get picked up by Kickstarter’s algorithm. Obviously!
How did we do that? Catchy and direct subject lines, compelling and helpful content, selecting the optimal timing to send out emails and of course all the tricks in the book to end up in the receivers’ inboxes! Email open rates were sky high and so were the pledges after each email campaign.
Social media marketing and Media buying
And what about those who bounced? Our little pixels chased them all over social media until they did.
Organic and paid social media content was getting some serious engagement. We created ads for 10 different types of audiences, based on location, age, interests, professions and ideologies. This micro-targeting was one of the parameters of our A/B testing. We published, we analysed, we optimised… we conquered!
Kickstarter page
Our biggest challenge was to build a viral Kickstarter campaign by cracking the algorithm. Based on a carefully crafted formula, we set the funding goal and the stretch goals, some of the wackiest rewards Kickstarter has ever seen and we told the story of Amira, Yani and Stephano to the world. And the world responded! We achieved over 30% of our funding goal in the first 24 hours and 100% in 10 days. Before the campaign finished we got our stretch goal and a loooooot of love! We even made it to Kickstarter’s “Projects We Love” list <3
Public Relations
Community management
Creating organic discussions online is our favourite hobby. In this case, we entered forums, Facebook and Linkedin Groups, and subreddits to spread the word. What worked particularly well in this case, was sharing content with influential accounts in the animation and the crowdfunding realms.
The happy ending
The project was 138% funded, exceeding
the funding goal within the first 10 days!
The campaign made it to Kickstarter’s
“Projects We Love” list.
We got features and interviews in the most
influential animation media in the world,
like “Animation Magazine” and “Zippy Frames”.
The Olive Bunch is probably the cutest
TV show on Instagram.
The trailer was produced with huge
successes in investor pitches…
more coming soon!
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