What is crowdfunding, I hear you ask? To put it simply, it's harnessing the power of communities through the internet to fundraise. In the last few years, quite a few films have been made using crowdfunding. In fact, community projects, inventions, art installations, all sorts of other things are getting off the ground using crowdfunding.
How do you go about it? Well, that's the funny part. Some pretty smart entrepeneurs out there have cottoned onto the twin concepts of social networks powering the idea behind raising cash. Instead of begging everyone through facebook to lend you money, you set up a project in one of the popular crowdfunding sites. You create your own funding tiers with various returns for the money, whether it be social value or material goods, you give something in return for the investment. The people who have already signed up to these new fundraising networks then pledge a certain amount of money to your project and if you meet your fundraising deadline/goal, the money is transferred into the account created for the project. Too good to be true? Not at all.
The success stories abound. From the film DAY which surpassed its funding goal of $3500 on IndieGoGo, to the Glif, an iPhone4 tripod stand raising $137,417 on the site Kickstarter, the stories keep coming. The most well-known ones are IndieGoGo, Kickstarter, Fundbreak, FansNextDoor, Profounder and CreateAFund.
As with all forms of fundraising, how successful you are depends much more on your own publicity efforts than on the actual website. They all have their own quirks. Some of the website don't let you collect the funds unless you've reached your target, others take a cut or a percentage of your funds towards the cost of hosting your fundraising platform. Some are more industry specific than others. IndieGoGo is aimed at film. Profounder is more a business entrepeneurship site.
The things is, there are no shortcuts. If you know how to drive traffic and attract audiences, you're set. If you don't, you need to learn really fast if you want to use these platforms.
I'm about to embark on two or three fundraising efforts. One is for an artistic residency in Guatemala, using the Kickstarter platform. The second one is raising funds towards completing my documentary and the third one is to raise enough funds towards making PodTales (my production company) a going concern, with some staff and infrastructure.
Stay tuned. I'll update you on when the funding campaigns go live and how well I go. I'm sold on this idea of fundraising. After all, I just pledged $20 towards the Glif. If they can do it, I can do it and so can you.
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