Crowdfunding and the Cool Kids
Yes, you can own it. You can manipulate any platform to your own design.
It’s been a few years since I’ve launched a crowdfunding campaign as a creator. The past few years, I’ve been in the background collaborating on projects. My recent shift has been towards pushing for more comprehensive strategies for my clients at Indigo Impact. I’m convinced the one-off crowdfunding campaign isn’t enough to sustain an artist’s long-term career.
We receive numerous requests from artists with an asterisk, “can it be less gauche.”
Since my early days of crowdfunding moonless and spaced I’ve developed a few sound fundraising strategies for artists, social action groups, and stand-alone projects. Indigo Impact launched at the beginning of this year to contain and disseminate those ideas. We receive numerous requests from artists with an asterisk, “can it be less gauche.” Our clients are non-conformists. Terms like “pitch,” “marketing,” “trends,” “traffic,” “data analytics,” ”promotion” and “PR” seem forced and inauthentic to their work. Our job is to reassure our clients. We throw all those terms out the window. We say what’s your goal and how can we support you reaching it.
Can we just say crowdfunding is an awkward word? It’s lame. It inserts all these ideas of begging, rejection, meeting unrealistic goals, techno-fixes, and salesmanship. When done poorly it can be somewhat of a pitch instead of a conversation. We like the phrase creative support. We educate our clients on how to ask for creative support. We also educate our community and our client’s audiences on how to be a creative supporter. Indigo doesn’t have the magic sauce but we also think about creative support from a comprehensive side angle. Artist support is not a new idea, it’s an old one. As much as we need dollars we need our ideas to seep into public discourse. There’s a need to flip it, reverse it, and look at it upside down. We find new ways to encourage, curate, and develop art making.
We remove all barriers that impede art from being wholly embodied and digested by the people.
We once knocked on gold doors and wooed aristocrats for a small percentage of their wealth. No longer is it so limited. We now can look towards the proletariat — the working people — the community — for support. We can embed art into the collective DNA. All we have to do is exercise the muscle regularly and own it. If we set our minds to it, creative support can include artist sustainability, autonomy, ownership, public access, and push the understanding our humanity.
No matter the platform an artist will agonize over the presentation. It would be swell to directly transfer your images, sounds, and writings into a template that surrenders to your every whim. That is not the case, the platforms are generic, stiff, and do not conform to a mere mortal. Let’s not get caught up in our rage against the machine. Let’s accept it as an unchanging state. Let’s do as artists do and work brilliantly within our confines.
moonless and spaced were a three-part series ending in a long form film, orbiters. Both projects we partially funded on Kickstarter. Those early days were so much work. I was too exhausted to put up another project. orbiters never got made. Now I see my single-mindedness. I should have asked for support putting art into the ether. I know this sounds like semantics but it’s a mindset. Climbing another mountain is difficult when you only see the mountain in front of you. When you see the mountain range and the interconnectedness of all of nature, you relax and the mountain is taken in stride.
I love Sloan’s response, my partner Indigo Impact, “Oh we’ll figure something out. Don’t worry about content right now just tell us more about the project.”
After 3 or 4 years and some lessons learned in other campaigns, on different platforms, and with many types of artists, I can see the big picture. This space is here for a reason and we must take advantage of it and bend it to our will. It’s become more accepted to ask publicly for artist support. The space has more latitude for an artist’s rebel soul. It also seems to allow much more experimentation, exploration, and discovery instead of polish, high end and ready-to-launch content. The range of support has widened supporting small projects and large projects. Long-term and consistent patron support now exists supporting working artists.
In the rapidly changing digital world artists are the interpreters of the known and the unknown.
It is important to have an arm or a leg that is autonomous and supported by the people. We must keep listening for those calling for our voices to be heard no matter how many in a room even if only a whisper. We must work and own the space for experimentation and workshopping. Thus if it is not called a crowdfunding platform then a fundraising campaign if not fundraising campaign then direct creative support — hell call it what you want just get it launched-done-on exhibit. As artists, we must get strong at bending the universe towards us. We must design that place where our work lives and exhibits to the public.
We must get our work up on its feet by any means necessary.
The number one thing we hear at Indigo is that “I have no content to share.” I love Sloan’s response, my partner Indigo, “Oh we’ll figure something out. Don’t worry about content right now just tell us more about the project.” We come off as true “California Girls” baking in the sun while working on our laptops. People get a little put off by our dismissal of their worries. You have to realize we hear the same things over and over. The only thing we need to listen to is you and your work. We’re not great expert fundraisers just great listeners. We like to say our job is like 90% listening, 4% redirecting you towards your goals, and 1% the tangible work.
The message and project will dictate the content.
Working with Saul Williams on Neptune Frost was eye-opening. Here’s an artist that just has ideas pouring from his creative brain. Keep in mind we started the conversation about his dystopian hacker poetry musical campaign 4 months before we launched. Even before that, he’d be in conversation with us about the possibilities of such a campaign. He used Indigo to inform himself about all aspects of the platform and create a strategy authentic to his work. He manipulated what he could and forced the platform into the background and his work into the foreground. Not everyone can be Saul Williams on tour in Europe, performing constantly, and making words rise at will. We can learn from Saul. Check out something as simple as his IG page or his Twitter. He is a walking content machine.
Think of content as all the matter in the universe. Everything is content. You are content.
I’m not saying to share every piece of your life or your baby’s cutie smiles. Break your project down to the micro level, to the iterations, take it back to the origin story. Before I launched ELEPHANT, I kept shelving the idea of a film campaign for production funds. I wasn’t ready. All I had were these little experimental videos and a photo I was obsessing over. I began with my own funding and found support to move the project forward. Content flowed from that point. Content consisted of films I was watching, articles on violence and self-care, stories from friends, pictures, photo ideas, plants that would hold a key role in the film, ideas, and notes on generational trauma. I was sharing the project with friends. They validated my ideas as content. That little voice whispered, “you’re ready and you have everything you need.” Months before I launched, I e-mailed my supporters and my friends and asked for their support with this caveat that this campaign might not follow traditional guidelines. A bold note that we were going to experiment with ELEPHANT. You’ll find a couple of non-traditional methods in the campaign that I felt were necessary because it was so personal. For example a video much longer than 3–4 minutes. A video about the inspiration instead of a pitch. At the end of the video, I asked for backers to be in my circle as I take on a project close to my heart and my life. I shared what content I had available.
That little voice whispered, “you’re ready and you have everything I need.”
I have a need to be unorthodox. A need to do things the backasswards way just to see if it will blow up in my face. That’s why I founded Indigo. We stay in a lab using our own projects as guinea pigs to give you sound tested advice. I believe the work is important. We aim to offer you many options and increase your confidence so you can do it your way. Indigo sees itself as a leader cultivating a space for an autonomous spirit. The path uncharted is not the negative connotation of the wild wild west. It is the fertile land of the Rainforest with unknown possibilities and resources. (Yeah you’re going to have to work hard to achieve all you ask of the universe.)
- I challenge you to think sideways about these buzz terms like content, audience, promotion, and marketing.
- List your goal first then make a bunch of doodles on how you can bend the universe toward it.
- Connect those ways you talk to your village, circle, fans, and supporters.
- Write down the current ways you engage with your people as a group.
- Now think about how you can do that better and be more intentional.
- Don’t stop being honest.
- Lead with authenticity.
- Put your art first.
- Share what comes easy.
- Design the space virtual, digital, and physical with the tools available.
- Bend all towards your design as much as possible.
- Ask. Ask for your creative supporters to believe in your work. “Believe in this next vinyl of nature sounds from Siberia never before recorded.” They believe in you and the project. They will post, talk about it, engage in discourse, and give any needed funds of support until the project is a success–launched–on display.
- And of course it goes without saying. Be a good neighbor. Artists are not gods just super sensory humans. We must reciprocate all this energy our creative supporters are giving.
Indigo is working on a longer downloadable guide to fundraising, crowdfunding, and artist sustainability. We hope to share stories and ideas from the many global projects we’ve been fortunate to touch. Until then MAKE ART.
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Ask me questions at @mariaajudice
