I’ve been thinking about what makes successful crowdfunding campaigns for at least the past 5 years. There are so many factors – planning, networks, storytelling, personality, amongst many others.

Despite many of these factors being pretty well understood, it’s always been hard to demonstrate and evidence the impact of each on a campaign in any kind of measurable way. When explaining to students, non-profits and universities, we’ve been forced to point them to successes and failures in the market, and try to draw out learnings from them.

Last week, inspired by a talk I had seen about target planning for major gifts fundraising, I thought I’d try to do a bit better, and encode some of these well-known success factors into a campaign simulator. Today I’m releasing the first version.

It’s pretty basic, but it does produce interesting looking graphs, and there is a very strong relationship between the key success factors and the projected campaign totals the simulator suggests. Here’s an example running on some test data for a small personal crowdfunding campaign.

Head over to Crowdfund Calculator and take a look. All feedback welcome!