At the TriFilm at Trailblazer Studios social in March 2013, I found myself having a very enjoyable conversation about crowd funding. A friend and I were specifically talking about the Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign since I had recently blogged about it and the campaign is making news because it’s breaking online crowd funding records. But the topic quickly switched to the crowd funding donation process.

Conclusion? It’s a pain. You’ve gotta really want to donate.

Since that conversation, though, I’ve contributed to a few campaigns on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. And I realized something: if I really care about the campaign, the donation process doesn’t feel obnoxious at all. In fact, it feels pretty simple, fast, easy, and worthwhile. (It’s all relative, eh?)

So what makes me actually donate? What was different about those particular campaigns that made my perception change? I was willing to go through what I perceived to be an inconvenient, lengthy process; why?

These are important questions because one day I may want to start a crowd funding campaign of my own. I need to know and understand the user experience. What process am I asking my family, friends, and fans to go through? I want them to feel the same way I did when I donated: that the process was fast and easy, and it was totally worthwhile to be a part of the project’s success.

With that in mind, I took a close look at my decision making process to figure out why I was so willing and eager to support certain projects and not others. These questions basically helped me decide whether I would donate or not. Here’s my criteria:

• Do I know and/or trust the people attached to the project?
• Do I think they’ll deliver what they promise?
• Do I want the project and/or team to succeed?
• Do I care about the subject matter? Is it relevant to me?
• How will it affect my relationships I decide to donate? Or if I don’t donate?

Thinking through these criteria made me realize something else. There’s another level beyond donating, of course. It’s my willingness to share the project with folks not directly connected to it.

I’m more likely to share the project if it’s REALLY well done. If the fundraising video was well executed, really interesting, informative, and captivating from the start then I’ll share it with my friends so they can join in, too. Even if I don’t donate, I’ll share the link so others will know about it.

There’s another layer of truth in that statement. Did you catch it? I’ll elaborate.

Most of us are used to watching really great content. We watch a lot of movies, trailers, commercials, and TV shows so we know the “good” stuff when we see it. We know how it looks and how it makes us feel. That, in turn, makes it really easy to spot the “bad” stuff. It also makes the “bad” stuff really, really hard to watch.

The “bad” fundraising videos are often confusing, boring, or poorly executed. The pacing is off or the production lacks something. They aren’t interesting and they don’t share any helpful information — like, for example, how my money will be used. Bad videos, I believe, can also make us distrust the folks associated with the campaign — whether we realize that or not. There’s just something “off” about it, even if we can’t say exactly what.

It may be a great project but if the video is too tough to watch, we may leave the campaign page immediately without donating. We don’t want to be confused or frustrated or bored.  So we want to quickly move on to something more important. Or, at least, we want to move on to stuff that’s more interesting and entertaining — like watching the Taylor Swift goat video for the 15th time just to get a laugh.

So, lessons learned?

Make the campaign video spectacular, unforgettable, short, informative, and enjoyable. Start a project about something that’s really interesting and exciting. Make stuff that’s relevant and entertaining. Make promises you can keep and then deliver on the promises that were made. Make me believe you’re trustworthy and then actually BE trustworthy.

Online crowd funding is interesting stuff, for sure.

It’s got to be a challenging, emotional thing to run a crowd funding campaign, you know? You pour yourself into this thing and desperately hope that others will believe in you enough to support your efforts. You hope you’ve done a good job; one that earns a donation so you can work on this thing that you dream about doing. You believe in yourself and your team enough to put your reputation on the line; to say that you’ll deliver what you promise, too.

Whew. Yeah. A big, challenging, and courageous thing to do so publicly.

I have a lot to learn. I’m learning as much as I can so that, one day, when I’m ready to test those waters myself I’ll be slightly more comfortable with it. In the mean time,  I tip my hat to anyone already trying it.