Five things I wish I'd known before starting a crowdfunding campaign
The Sweetman brothers are fast approaching their £50,000 social enterprise crowdfunding target. How are they doing it?

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Ambitious crowdfunders need to stack the cards in their favour, and there are five ways to enhance your chances of success. Photograph: Pegaz/Alamy
1. The right platform
There are five types of crowdfund: equity, donation, reward, debt/peer-to-peer lending, and royalty (which takes a percentage of future revenue in return for investment). To succeed, the type has to match your ethos, organisation and brand. At Stickyboard, we opted for equity raise using Crowdcube's platform. We offer community web development, so being owned by the community fitted our principles. The platform you choose will be the shopfront for your campaign, so take a look round to get a feel for projects and perhaps sign up to a few to see how often they send newsletters and promote projects.
2. Focus on why you're a good investment
This point took us a while to realise. We started by spending more time saying why what we did was great rather than pointing out why investing in us would be awesome. Focus on how an investor benefits (eg, EIS tax relief, rewards, return after what period), and how you know they will see those benefits (eg, your USP, years of experience, track record, quality of team and non-executives).
3. Be prepared to run a full time 'election campaign'
You would have sold yourself and business before, but not like this. You, your team, and brand need to be personable, likeable and get in front of as many people as possible. Investment depends on your likability as much as your strength of idea. Just think of a crowdfund as an electoral campaign: its