Apart from directing videos, I am also one half of a social enterprise duo. And in 2013, we ran a crowd funding campaign to raise money to install solar panels at our Indian sewing unit. It was not successful, missing its target by a few thousand pounds. We had done a fair amount of research into the various platforms that could host our campaign and into the rewards that we would be giving our backers. We had not considered the timing of our campaign.

Our campaign went alive almost two years ago to the date and it is only now, looking back I realise how lucky we were with our timing. That it was not April when people would be away on Easter holidays (much of our patrons are/were still in the UK and hence thinking local calendar) or in August when they may have gone away for the summer. It wasn’t in December during the furious shopping periods leading up to Christmas or during the lean days of January. We were lucky to have timed it in June.

While we had considered how long to run the campaign for (4 weeks) and when to install the solar panels (after the October monsoons), if we were successful, we had not really thought long and hard about when to schedule our campaign in order to give it the best possible shot at reaching its target. That happened by chance. Should we r another crowd funding campaign, this factor about when to launch our campaign, will be part of its design.