Six projects in, how’s my crowdfundathon going?
As part of an experiment I’m calling The Year of Giving Dangerously, I’m supporting a new crowdfunding project every week. Why? In large part to support interesting projects — I’m a successful crowdfunder myself, and want to try and pay back some of the good will that helped me out.
More importantly, though, I want to try and get some actual insight into what makes crowdfunding projects work and what makes them fail. There is no secret recipe that will make any project successful, but there is a lot still to be learned about what happens and why people support some ideas and not others.
So, I’m six projects in. How are they going?
Chinese Copy Towns
This project to complete a film about copycat architecture in China raised £1,716 of a target of £11,700. I loved the idea. However, since it’s a flexible funding campaign on Indiegogo, the campaign creators — artists Sebastian Acker and Phil Thompson — get the money despite not reaching the total they were aiming for. What now? “Thank you so much for your support. With the money we have raised so far we have already booked our flights and hotel for our trip to Hallstatt, where we are meeting the mayor and the local priest.”
Pixel Press
This small game studio was pitching for $100,000 to develop their “build your own game” app that was at aimed at helping kids design their own platform games. As their campaign came to a close, with the target in sight, these guys sent out a lot of updates and really opened up parts of the process: behind the scenes photos, elements that documented what they’d done to launch the campaign, information on important backers such as schools. It was great to watch, and in the end the hit their target with a few days to go and ended up raising $108,950. Since then, they’ve sent out updates on their trip to the E3 games conference, and explained how they’re organising delivery of rewards. I’m looking forward to the next step.
BRCK
When I supported this project, to build a box that helps people in places with patchy connectivity to get online, it felt like a heavy hitter: and I wasn’t wrong. It ended up making $172,107, surpassing the target of $100,000 with ease. Since then I’ve filled out a survey, they’ve opened up a pre-order page on their website, and things seem to be ticking over.
Full Page Ad for Turkish Democracy in Action
As I noted in my original post on this, the campaign had actually achieved its total — and deployed its ad in the New York Times — before I even became a backer. In the end it raised $108,371: double its original goal. What happened next? They opened up the remaining money to a series of votes and proposals. After several rounds of voting, the overwhelmingly supported a package including: more ads on Facebook, Twitter and so on, a small stipend for a team of experts to keep working on the project, and a reserve.
His Heavy Heart
When I wrote about this film project written by comics genius Alan Moore, I wondered whether they’d quite got their message right. As I write, it’s still got 10 days to go but it’s only raised 63% of its £45,000 target. There have been a lot of updates, featuring a bit more detail on the film (“strippers and clowns,” says Moore, with a wicked smirk) and the rewards (signed screenplays). It still seems to be aimed at the small number of people who are fans of the other films, rather than those who might be supportive of the bigger idea. Let’s see where they go in the final week.
Kickstarted
This one, for a meta documentary on the crowdfunding revolution, went close to the wire: 92% with 10 hours to go. In the end it just about scraped over the line — $86,935 of an $85,000 goal. The updates felt like fairly heavy going towards the end, but since the film seems to be basically already made I am pretty sure the rewards will be delivered soon. The more I see of this project, the less I am sure I really wanted to back it. But I’m interested to see how deep this film really goes into why crowdfunding works, and why it’s not perfect… or whether it just focuses on the excitement of new funding for independent projects.
I’m actually a week or so behind. Over the next week I plan to find a couple of projects to back that will help me to understand some different aspect of crowdfunding.
