A Kickstarter Campaign Followed in Real Time

Our next Crowd Funding post will be on November 9th.

A filmmaker friend of mine and his team behind the film Mulligan is starting a Kickstarter campaign on Friday, November 18th, 2011. We will be looking over his shoulder during the preparation and then during the month of crowd funding and get a behind the scenes look at the mechanics of a campaign. But more importantly we will get a real time peek and a blow-by-blow account of the different phases of crowd sourcing: the successes and the maybe not so smart decisions he and his team made. With, of course, a running commentary from me.

It should be great fun and we can at the same time help him spread the good word (see earlier post from today)…..

Crowd Funding - Your Backers - Part 3

"Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted." — attributed to Albert Einstein

There is much talk about Social Return on Investment, which in a way works brilliantly in tandem with Documentary filmmaking which more often than not comes with a cause attached. Narrative Films have a harder standing here.

If you look at the history of crowd sourcing and funding  you see that the platforms that pioneered before Kickstarter where mostly attractive to investors because they put a personal story and a face to their investments. But still: they were straight money investments. It’s easy to say: you give me $250 now and in 18 months I will return $300 to you: it’s a clean, clear-cut deal, no emotions involved, no room for interpretation. Only: we, as independent filmmakers, know that, but in the rarest cases, we cannot promise a principal plus interest in return on investment.

So we look elsewhere. When you crowd fund a project you engage backers on a totally different level, they do not only support you financially, they also provide encouragement, support, and public validation. Backing through crowd funding creates a stronger bond for better and for worse as the backer supports not only our work, but also you (or your team).

Let’s say our levels of support are:

1. for $1 you get a thank you credit on the film’s website
2. for $10 you get a thank you credit on the film’s website and in the film’s credit roll  
3. for $25 you get all of the above plus a DVD copy of the yet unreleased film and a poster
4. for $250 you are now an associate producer of the film (and get all of the afore mentioned benefits)
5. for $2,500 you get all of the above and a cameo in the film 

As of level 2 you are heavily invested. Your name is now not only on the website (where it can be removed in a flash) – it’s now in the credits of the film and stays there for all eternity. It better be a brilliantly good film – otherwise your backers are going to be embarrassed to see their (potentially) good name associated with a project of dubious creativity (or worse: content). Choose your benefits carefully – give a backer the option of anonymity. Public acknowledgement might be more than backers bargained for.

The more your film is on message and is cause related the easier it will be to reach out and find people willing to back your film. In finding your audience and you might be surprised to find that your audience is not who you thought it was. One group might not like the slant on your message, another might not be ready to ‘hear’ your message, and support might come from a group you would have never thought of.

At the IFP week a filmmaker spoke about a documentary she had produced about a young marine coming back from Iraq. Naturally she thought that the marines would be her first audience. She invited them to a screening with a discussion after to find out how they could help support the film. The scene after the screening must have been very awkward. There were quick good-bye’s and the vaguest promises of support. The marines who saw the film where still on active duty; they were not ready to see the documentary, nor able to acknowledge what happens after deployment. The filmmaker later found great support for her message in the war veteran’s and mental health communities.

What I learned:  the crowds don’t come to you – you need to find them, be it for a Kickstarter campaign or an outreach effort to show and share your film and ideas.   It’s hard work and endless contacts made, but if you are passionate about your film (documentary or fiction) and you have a strong message you will get there (whatever your “there” is) and you will find alliances in the most unlikely places – mark my words.

Abraham’s Children Screening at Park51

We had a wonderful screening of Abraham’s Children at the community center and mosque Park51 on Friday night. The venue is still a work in progress, but with the clean white walls and ample rooms it is rather impressive. Currently Park51 hosts a photo exhibit, called NYChildren by Danny Goldfield and it showcases one photo each of a child from each country around the globe that lives in New York City. Naturally a screening of Abraham’s Children was a good fit.

The Question and Answer session after the screening was expertly moderated by Park51’s Brandon Newton and on the panel with me were Robina Niaz from Turning Point and Samir Selmanovic from Faith House.

The discussion and Q&A revolved much around the fact that as much as the film shows happy and well adjusted children that seem to have no issues being American AND Muslim the reality can be very different. Robina talked about the difficulty to advocate for women and children when there are not only strict confidentiality issues but also many taboos surrounding especially girls growing up in America with traditional foreign-born parents. Samir talked about the ease with which these children in the film practice their faith and how the strong families and their communities help them be rooted and centered and how he hoped some Christian children could learn from that experience.

There were so many great questions in a very respectful and positive setting that I could have gone on for ever talking about the film and its message.

My favorite question was what my personal take away from the film was in terms of what I had learned about Islam. It’s a big question and there are so many possible answers to it, but I would say two things.

Actually the biggest learning moment for me was to realize that Islam is not a religion the way I was taught religion as a child in Christian Europe, where there is a strict separation of church and state; but that Islam is more than a religion, it is a way of life and it regulates and influences ALL aspects of a Muslims live. That I think, is also where most of the misunderstanding and fear comes from between Islam and Western culture. We (western countries) have spent so much time separating state and church, that a total fusion is a novel (or really old) thought that might not be reconcilable with a Western and Christian believe system.

The second part to that question is the human aspect. I learned so much about humanity making this film. The “other” is not other if you get to know “it”. The generosity of spirit and sharing meals and sharing laughter and ideas was at times overwhelming and made me very humble. Sharing of one’s resources in western culture has somehow gone by the way side.

A big thank you to the Park51 team: Katerina Lucas, the executive director, Sadaf Choudhry, Brendan Newton and Sam Chalfin who took the great pictures below.

Samir Selmanovic, Nina, Robina Niaz, Brandon Newton

Both photos by Sam Chalfin

Crowd Funding - Outreach - Part 2

Backers are invested in your project, both figuratively and where it hurts, they are the peels of the onion around your project core and they help you reach out further. Treat them well. But before you can treat them well you have to reach them and you have to have a plan on how to do that and how to SUSTAIN the outreach. Especially on a documentary which can take years to complete.

My guestimate is that for every one in 1,000 social media online backer you get an action; unless you’re a superstar (which if we were we would most likely not be dabbling in crowd sourcing to begin with, or at least hire someone to do it for us – but what would be the fun in that?

A nice episodic anecdote about the film I am I is on Peter Broderick’s blog, the maverick independent distribution consultant. Kickstarter has a hall of fame. The most successful film funded was Blue Like Jazz. Click on the link and see how they set up their project. It’s succinct and funny and it had of course a great head start because it was based on a bestselling book with the same title by Donald Miller who had a big and loyal on line following.

Roughly what you need to get your outreach going is:

Proposal:

• Think about your pitch: 20 seconds, 1 minute, 5 minute versions
• USP – why YOU - what is your unique selling point?
• Think about financing beyond crowd funding
• Prepare several budgets (calculate for different scenarios)
• Time line

Pre-campaign things that you need to have lined up:

• Basic website 
• Graphic element you can use for on-line presence, mass emails, postcards, announcements, etc.
• Teaser video (not a trailer) – talk to your audience directly and get them to donate with urgency

Pre-campaign outreach:

• Align yourself with non-profits and interested groups that can lend you their support to give you credibility and their network of fans, friends, followers and members to help you reach out
• Bolster your twitter following (remember the 1 per mille rule) as well as your FB friends and fans (and if you have good business contacts on LinkedIn and have built your Google+ circles – it won’t hurt either)
• Email outreach list with a distribution channel like Constant Contact with a layout/design that mirrors your website
• Relevant blog
• Having a follow up video for a final push might help too
• Letters and contacts lined up to hit big sponsors the moment you are ready to launch your project on line
• outline of what you will be giving backers in return for their investment (set realistic goals and be original without embarrassment)
• Lots of coffee and RedBull
• Help
• And: give your kids up for adoption and find a loving home for your dog

Before you set a deadline and upload your project:

• You need a firm grasp on what your goals are financially and time wise
• How much are you asking for?
• How much can you expect?
• Do you have a matching/gap donor in the wings should you be close but not at your goal an hour before the deadline?
• How are you sustaining a respectful follow up and communication with your backers after deadline and until you can deliver on Your promised goods?

What did I forget?

Enjoy and let me know how it went….

Crowd Funding - The Basics - Part 1

For a few months now I’ve been saving links (in the not so old days it would have been news clipping slowly yellowing in a folder) about crowd funding and on Kickstarter in particular. I have enough material (and opinions) at this point to start a series. And you guessed right: here’s a (mini) series on the general topic of crowd funding. I’ve known about Kickstarter and its counterpart IndieGoGo since 2009 and I have used IndieGoGo for a distribution outreach for my film Abraham’s Children with mixed results. 

Both online platforms have gotten press of late with new investors for IndieGoGo and the announcement that Kickstarter was chosen by the World Economic Forum as one of the technology pioneers of 2012. For the WEF report click here.

To set crowd funding into context, Bill Clark (@austinbillc) wrote a recap of the history of crowd funding on Mashable‘s, September 15th, 2011 issue. I highly recommend reading this short article.

Yesterday Kickstarter announced on their blog that they have as of last week 1 million backers and Mashable announced today that Kickstarter surpassed $100 million in pledges. To put this into context the fiscal year 2011 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts is $154 million. At the current pace of more than $2 million in pledges each week, Kickstarter backers are pledging more than $100 million a year!

Let me give an example for those who are not following and are about to bounce off: on either website you can choose to support any project you like. Most likely you’re there because someone sent you a heart throbbing email asking for your support. Let’s say you choose to support an independent documentary with $25 that gives you in return a DVD of the film once it’s finished. The film (project) is looking to raise $10,000 to pay for music licensing rights and has a fundraising deadline of January 24th, 2012. Your credit card only gets charged after the deadline passes and if the project has raised at least its proclaimed goal of $10K by the deadline. Otherwise your pledge goes uncollected (and the project does not get made and you do not get the DVD). Each project has different levels of support. It can be $1 for your name to be listed as a supporter on the project’s website, to $5,000 for a cameo in the film or a singing part on a music album. The sky is the limit. 

The statistics that Kickstarter put out yesterday are very interesting: most notably that the biggest contributions happen in the $11 -$25 range (nearly half of the 100 million raised to date – 30 months since inception). The number that really interested me however is how many projects were successful. Note: on Kickstarter (unlike IndieGoGo of the old days) your fundraising has a time limit set to it, which seemed counterintuitive to me at first and was the reason why I chose IndieGoGo over Kickstarter in 2009 for Abrahams’ Children – but, the urgency that a time limit creates is of great value when raising funds (this for all the procrastinators out there). Of $100 million pledged, about $84 million where successful and about $12 million failed and $5 million where given “live” meaning off line. Unfortunately there are no stats on how many actual projects that translates into.

This fund raising model does two things, it a creates the above mentioned urgency and secondly protects a supporter from giving money to a project that will never happen for lack of having reached a fundraising goal. The challenge for the filmmaker in our example is to make sure that the limit set for the raising of funds is realistic but not so low that several campaigns are needed to deliver on the goods promised to backers. And this is the biggest challenge with films; documentary or fiction: our budgets are not in the single digit “K” range, but mostly in the 100K plus range. How much do we rely or have to rely on crowd funding?

Do we fundraise in many different steps and run the risk of stressing our welcome with friends, fans and followers, or do we run the risk of setting our goal too high and not reaching it by the deadline? Not to speak of the fact, that these campaigns are a huge amount of work. Uploading your project on either Kickstarter or IndieGoGo does not mean anybody is going to support it. There are entire social media outreach strategies behind these campaigns in conjunction with old fashioned ways of communicating, like email, and – yikes - phone calling. You need to produce at least one pledge video and a plethora of ancillary graphic, writing and other creative materials – which are all fun to create but can cost money and definitely will add the ‘time sink’ called independent movie making.

What is your experience? Care to share?

Next: reaching out to those backers of yours.