Crowdfund-a-thon
We built, we made - This actually felt great!
I was headed the wrong way on US-101 when I realized that the event was on Stanford campus and not in the Indiegogo offices. A reroute on the GPS and a detour later — I was on campus. Being on campus is a humbling experience. The D School served as the destination for some of my most memorable experiences on campus. We had the photo exhibition that featured Apple and Steve Jobs. The exhibition for the 2 quarter long Design for Extreme Affordability which consistently features life altering ideas for the developing world. The first floor played host to the Indiegogo Causes team — hat tip Bre. The crowdfund-a-thon was sponsored by Embrace Global. They do some amazing work and you should really stop reading this and take a look at their efforts to make infant mortality a relic of the past.
15 minutes in and I was still not sure exactly what I was doing. I knew I wanted to be here and the work that these folks were doing would dwarf the time and energy I spend writing SQL. The mission was pretty straightforward, it’s the actual mechanics that I was confused about. In a matter of a half hour, that would not be the case.
The day started with an introduction, and a get-to-know-other-people chit chat. A brief into to Indiegogo followed that told me a ton of things which were not all that obvious before their rebranding earlier this month. Then we learnt about the mission of Embrace Global and the lot of us were struck by the simplicity and the efficacy of what they were trying to do on a global scale. The crowdfund-a-thon would be a day long project that would kick off a crowdfunding campaign for Embrace in conjunction with Indiegogo’s own efforts for International Women’s Day. The product that we were building the campaign for was the Embrace baby warmer. The warmer has saved countless lives of underweight babies in developing countries. However, since it is different from traditional incubators and other “homegrown” solutions, there is a learning curve. The baby warmer comes at a fraction of the price of incubators and is an order of magnitude more safe than “homegrown” remedies. We wanted to launch this campaign that would help educate and spread the word about the baby warmers. With that goal in mind, we started working in our group.
It was a race to see how much info can be taken from the websites, brochures and packaged into the form for the campaign. The video was a must shoot! If you take nothing from this article, take this — you have to shoot a video! We found out from some pretty casual conversations that there were personal stories of premature birth in our group and people were very open to talking through these. We did a few takes, then settled on a script (Note to self: Do vice versa next time). After recording a bunch of takes, we got the video in one take. Devika did a fantastic job of piecing together her own experiences and we pretty much ran the campaign with her as the figurehead. With the video set, we realized that we now had all the components pieced together. Using our combined creativity and a deep desire to finish the form that Indiegogo laid out for us, we divided and were set to conquer. However, the video would be a lot more informative if it could have an intro and an outro. iMovie — this is where you came in. A high percentage of windows users and iMovie novices did not help our cause (ha ha — see what I did there?). We googled till we could get our iMovie to do vaguely specific things. With some help from Yiyi, we were all set pretty soon. We added an Aussie voice-over thanks to the awesome diversity of the group that we had on hand (hat tip Kuppal). The most serendipitous aspect of this was that Linus Liang — one of the creators (founders? Since we are in the valley) was in the D School at that time. We got to hear some personal anecdotes and were taken aback at his humility and the background to starting the baby warmer. He is in the middle of his MBA right now at Stanford GSB and talked about how the last 5 years were incredibly impactful. He had actually moved to India to be close to the market and manufacturing. The really fun part was designing the perks where you could have the founder autograph perks to incentivize this cause. We put our heads together for the perks, and it was 1 part creative, 2 parts analysis and 1 part cheating — because we asked the Indiegogo team beforehand what would work and what didn’t. After the process of stitching together the videos and getting all the fields populated, we were now ready to hit publish — only 1 problem
In our great enthusiasm, we had started work on one computer, recorded the video on an iPhone, used iMovie on another computer and started Youtube uploads on a windows machine. Even in the world of dropbox and box, file sharing is not exactly a breeze. Especially since the devices are stacked up on top of each other. You would think a thumb drive would actually do the job better. So after sending over the files and waiting for what seemed like a good hour for the high def video to upload, we were all set. We double checked, added pictures and made friends before pressing the magic button that made the campaign come alive. So — the next time you have the opportunity to learn about crowdfunding campaigns — jump in. I drove back taking the correct side of the 101 this time, it was pretty great. I felt accomplished. I felt great. There’s no reason you shouldn’t feel the same.
