Fundraising
In order to promote our team and cover some expenses we spent on our project, we decided to carry out some charity sales.
We designed our team logo which is the artistic display of our team name: ATCG, inspired by base pairs: including adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine (C).
Figure 1. We were designing our team logo and its final version
After we finalized the team logo, we managed to contact some suppliers to customize our peripheral goods with our logo on them and the items we chose included face masks, badges, and so on.
Figure 2. Hot items of our peripheral goods: face mask and badge
After talking with other iGEM teams, firstly we decided to find some public places, like shopping malls as our charity sale spots to promote our peripheral goods. Of course, despite many rejections and setbacks, we managed to sell out of some of the popular products such as badges. For the rest of the products that did not sell well, we resorted to promotions, with the combination of great publicity and discounted prices we sold quite a lot. During our promotion, we also introduced our project to passers and many of them showed support for our work.
Figure 3. We successfully sold some items
Our fundraising campaign created success and we have summarized a few key points of success.
1. Popularity
We attracted a large number of random strangers by doing speeches in public, many people like to "watch", so the crowd grew.
2. "Herd mentality"
We placed our team members in the crowd and they helped to set the mood throughout the presentation. They also played a leading role in selling our products at the end of the day and not only that, they also praised our products which attracted a lot of people to buy them.
3. Promotion strategy
We positioned our peripherals precisely and also did a lot of research for similar products. We set a minimum price that we could accept and sold them at a higher price initially and then decrease the price when the sale is stuck.
4. Future Plan
We decide to increase the online promotion of our peripheral goods, for instance by advertising them through WeChat. We will add an online purchase channel to eliminate the location obstacles and make purchasing more feasible.