Patreon a Year on — Should Creatives Ask for Funding?
It was last July that I finally drew a line in the sand. Or rather the line drew itself, because for some reason I was incapable. It wasn’t just that The Mud Home didn’t sustain me. It didn’t sustain itself. At all. Tech hosting prices were increasing, and the cost of holding a 10000 strong email list was killing me. It was clear. Something had to change. Either my website had to go, or it had to become viable.
For those who don’t know, The Mud Home is my natural building and empowerment website. It now houses well over 100 articles related to building with mud, low impact off-grid living, and my personal log on life alone in nature, out of the system. The free how-to PDFs have been downloaded over tens of thousands of times from people all over the world.
Of course I love The Mud Home. But that doesn’t pay the email provider, or buy in technical assistance. So one day I turned to Patreon. A year in, I’m scratching my head at what took me so long. Because it’s clear. Patreon has been a complete game changer. Not just for me, but for The Mud Home, and the folk who contribute.

How Patreon transformed things:
1. Community
I had never previously met most of the folk who pledged, which was something of a shock to me. All these people were out there enjoying my work, and I had had no idea! It was very humbling and gratifying to suddenly have an online space to connect with people who cared enough about my work to put their hand in their pocket and support it. It made me understand who really was my community.
2. A quality upgrade for The Mud Home
When someone pays you to do something, it is automatic that: 1. You take more responsibility for it. 2. You consider ways to be more useful. I felt this transformation at the beginning of 2018 when the funding began to pay for some badly needed tech help and a tiny percentage of my own time. Suddenly, I became increasingly motivated to provide more and more useful information. I began to create two newsletters a month instead of one, and upgraded the content. I also increased my how-to blog post output by 200%.
3. An alternative to the dreaded Facebook.
Social media has long been a bugbear of mine. I find it distracting and addictive, and not especially uplifting. Funding allowed me to hire someone to help with the social media posting, which in turn improved the quality of my posts, because I had previously been doing it through gritted teeth with one eye on the clock.
But best of all: Patreon provided me with an alternative social media platform. I now have a space where I can share personal updates with a small, intimate audience who care about them. My photos remain off-limits to Zuckerberg and co. and I retain my privacy. I do have some issues with the platform (see below), but the concept is brilliant.
4. A stable economic base to work from
Any website with a decent amount of traffic has monthly expenses, and I was continually stressed about how to cover mine. The monthly Patreon income gave me peace of mind. It’s also a great non-commercial way of funding alternative media. People are backing quality content rather than vacuous ad-oriented click bait.

The difference between monthly support and one-off product launches
Yes I could have focussed on selling mud building products. And yes I do have an online earth plaster course for sale. But to run the site purely as a profit venture would completely change the texture of The Mud Home. To make such a niche site even vaguely sustainable would mean I quit the free Mud Building information posts and Earth Whispering blog entirely, and focus on marketing. It’s a different beast altogether. Not one I particularly like or believe in. When someone in Congo or Nepal needs some mud building advice, I want to be able to give it, rather than withdrawing to calculate profit margins.
5. Possibility for growth
It’s become increasingly clear this past year (#Facebookgate) that many people don’t understand how the internet works. Governments even less. One aspect I see that most people are not clear on is this: You simply cannot have any kind of decent reach or visibility without money. To rank highly enough on Google to be seen (how often do you look beyond the first page?) you need a certain amount of traffic. You achieve this either by social media advertising, or by cultivating email subscribers. The more subscribers you have, the more money it costs. Last year before Patreon, I was actually having to cut swathes of people off the my email list because it was getting too expensive. The new support has enabled me to grow The Mud Home’s list which in turn ensures the website remains high enough up the Google rankings to be visible to the people who need to find the information.
6. Tech support
Tech is not my natural abode. Mud and nature is where I am happy. Back in 2011 I went from being someone who didn’t know what a PDF was, to someone who runs a website. Yes I managed it, even succeeded at it. But it has always been something of a slog, not to mention a dire waste of my time. My skills are content creation, visioning, creative writing, and pioneering, not strapping myself to a keyboard and trying to decipher code. It was frustrating. I had stacks of information in my head, but no time to publish it. Now someone has taken over the more tedious tech jobs (apparently she likes them!), I have been freed to produce more of what I’m good at.
7. Supporting people in the field
As part of the Patreon members scheme, I started up a closed Facebook group for those pledging $10 a month or more. The aim was to create an affordable way for natural builders and off-gridders to receive in-depth personalised help. Having built a mud home or two in difficult conditions, I knew what I needed when things were going wrong: positive, genuinely caring support (as opposed to judgement, criticism and ego-flaunting). A year in, I enjoy a sense of pride regarding that group which has seen some fantastic results. Some folk even increased their pledges out of gratitude!
8. Validation
This is fundamental. Every pledge, be it $1 or $25 is a yes for The Mud Home. It’s a yes for my creative writing too. It’s a yes for natural building. It’s a yes for sustainable living. It’s a yes for empowering people. It’s a yes for independent media. That ‘yes’ is what keeps me going.

Why we dread asking for funding
I won’t lie. Starting up the Patreon funding system is strangely terrifying. It took me six months for me to actually publish my campaign. I’m now watching a couple of other would-be patreon creators with clearly meaningful projects writhing in exactly the same discomfort. Why?
1. Independence
“You’re very difficult to manipulate.” It was a comment one boss made to me two decades ago, back when I still deigned to graft in a hierarchy. It’s true. I’m almost impossible to coerce, and create my life in such a way that no one really has anything over me. So for me, accepting money from patrons and allowing them closer inside The Mud Home has involved a huge leap of faith. I endured many a sleepless night considering the implications for my work. Would it mean these folk had ‘control’ over me? Would it impact what I created?
The reality? I did set up some clear guidelines in the beginning, but basically my fears were unfounded. What I realised is, nearly all the folk who contribute are already on your side, that’s why they are supporting. 90% of people offer support for no other reason than because they believe in what you are doing already.
2. Fear of failure/rejection
A very powerful reason why people don’t ask for funding is fear of rejection. I’ll be honest, I was coming from a local environment which wasn’t especially supportive. So yes, I did wonder: What if no one actually values my work enough to contribute? Let’s face it, after five years of blogging, it would have been pretty heart-breaking if only six people had contributed.
In my case, the economics pushed the envelope, so I simply had to bite the bullet. Of course the truth is, if not enough people value your work enough to support it, may be you shouldn’t be doing it. Although that truth was hard to swallow, it was ultimately what brought me to a place where I was prepared to let The Mud Home go if need be. Happily it didn’t come to that.
3. Fear of criticism
The internet can be pretty vicious, and for some reason certain (rather cowardly) people think it’s acceptable to be rude online in ways they would never dare to be if they met you face to face. Here’s what one guy wrote to me when I sent out the invitation to join my first earthbag building course in 2016. “This Eco-friendly capitalism is worse than an oxymoron…I know it’s not fun to get email like this. It’s such a bummer, and so distracting for a writer who might never return your email…So don’t take this personally but your project has become just another level of eco-bullshit to me…” Ooh so many judgements! So little actual knowledge about what it takes (and how much it costs) to run a course. I wouldn’t have minded so much, but I was surviving on about $200 a month at the time.
So yes, I was braced for insult when I launched the campaign. Though I should add, like any online publisher, I have become incredibly hardened to moaners over the years, and tend not to take many prisoners. It is however both interesting and disturbing the way anyone in a philanthropic/socially responsible/ecological field is criticised for earning what is usually a very meagre amount of money. It is a dysfunctional state of disempowerment, but that, of course, is a different article.
4. Increase in workload
In the beginning I did wonder if running the Patreon thing was going to be so time consuming that it negated its benefits. And I wouldn’t deny, if you’re starting out, the first couple of months you will probably be adapting to a fairly significant addition to your workload. For me though, this straightened itself out with time. I have a schedule for Patreon photo, audio and video posts, and find member interaction very useful, because the questions generate new information posts for the website.

Issues with Patreon
Knowing the challenges of running an online platform, I’m a little hesitant to criticise someone else’s. Patreon has empowered many artists and was an inspired idea. I find it completely reasonable that a platform takes a small cut of the earnings. How the hell else are they supposed to pay people to run the support, and other people to deal with the tech? If you want a workable, efficient online platform, this is reality.
There are, however, a couple of things Patreon could improve. The site is still a little clunky, which in 2018 it shouldn’t be. I’d love it if Patreon upgraded the posting system so that it functions more like Facebook. You can’t upload videos directly to Patreon, and while there are ways round this, it makes it complicated for people who are not techies. My greatest wish of all is that they would design a way of uploading an album of photos into one post, because most of what I do is photo-based how-to, so I need to publish sequences of images.
Upshot?
If you’re a creative, or someone who publishes a lot of your own quality material online in any format, then you are doing both yourself and your community a disservice by not finding some way to sustain your work. Launching one-off campaigns is exhausting. What you need is a monthly income, and Patreon is a practical way of achieving that. True, setting it up requires some discipline and self belief. And it’s terrifying to face the prospect that no one will support you. But in truth if you don’t open a door for people to contribute to your work, you are not supporting yourself.

Atulya K Bingham is an author and natural builder.
You can download the free 20 page illustrated PDF of how she built her mud home here. And avail yourself of the oodles of natural building and off-grid living tips from www.themudhome.com
Here is her Patreon page.
