Doing work on engaging potential funders to get them interested in your campaign before launching can significantly improve your chances of success. Indeed, campaigns that 'cold start' and don't do any engagement or marketing before the first day of launching often struggle to reach their funding goal.

The value of having an existing community of potential funders to tap into on day one of your campaign is best illustrated by when people with an existing fanbase venture into crowdfunding. For example, when famous American entrepreneur and author Seth Godin launched his campaign to crowdfund his book project 'the Icarus Deception' he reached his target of $100K within three hours, because of the huge interest from his global fanbase.

However, less famous entrepreneurs also have the opportunity to create high levels of interest around their project before launching, by using mailouts, blogging and other social media platforms to promote ideas sometimes as early as six months before launching.

Tapping in to your existing network of friends can help create the first buzz around your project. Equally, if you can't get your friends excited about your project pre-launch, then that will be a good indicator that you will struggle to engage a wider community of funders.

A good way of getting people engaged before launching campaign is including them in ideation and design of what is being proposed, such as the name of a character in the game, or colour of the swings on a playground you want to raise funding for.