The Organic UGC Campaign Checklist

22 pre-launch checks to run before a creator wave goes live — so it drives installs, not just impressions

Views can lie. Installs don't. Most UGC teams find this out the expensive way: they ship the wave, wait for views, then open the dashboard and reverse-engineer what went wrong. This checklist moves that diagnosis to before launch — where it costs nothing to fix.

It's a pre-flight audit, not a strategy doc. Run every clip and every campaign through it before a single creator films. Each check has what to look for, the red flags that mean you're not ready, and the fix. The checks are ordered most → least critical: a failure near the top kills the campaign no matter how good everything below it is.

Score each check ✅ pass / ⚠️ weak / ❌ fail. The go/no-go rule is at the end.

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SECTION A — The Product Moment (is it clear enough?)

CHECK 1 — The 3-second test

• What to look for: one product moment a stranger understands in 3 seconds, sound off, no caption.
• Red flags: you need a sentence to explain what's happening; the moment is a feature tour, not a single beat; nobody outside the team "gets it" without context.
• How to fix: strip to one moment. Show it to 5 people muted — if 4 don't get it in 3 seconds, it's not your moment. Pick a different one or tighten the frame until it reads.

CHECK 2 — The surprise gap

• What to look for: the result beats what a viewer would predict (faster, weirder, bigger, more accurate).
• Red flags: the output is exactly what anyone would expect; no "wait, really?" reaction from outsiders.
• How to fix: find the input/output pair with the widest prediction gap and lead with the result. No gap = no reason to keep watching.

CHECK 3 — The screenshot frame

• What to look for: at least one frame worth saving on its own — a result card, a number, a generated output.
• Red flags: every frame needs the surrounding video to make sense; nothing is savable as a still.
• How to fix: design one standalone frame (big number, clear before/after). It travels on surfaces video can't reach.

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