Crowd Funding – Blogadultery

David Mandel warned me that he was cheating on me with a post on Mulligan’s Kickstarter campaign on a different blog. He called it blogadultery! The invention of the word alone deserves a link to it, so here it goes.

A New Year – Yet Again

Like Birthdays and assorted anniversaries, New Year’s Eve has the nasty habit of sneaking itself into the calendar year after year. For years I was looking for the perfect way to spend New Year’s Eve. In the old days there would be fireworks on the frozen lake of St. Moritz in the Swiss Alps at midnight. However the hotels nixed that since guests would go home after freezing their feet off at the fireworks – not good for sales. The fireworks are now on January 1st.

Then I spent a few years ‘running’ the midnight run in Central Park. One year my friends and I left a rather boring party and went for a long walk on the beach in Long Island. The worst year was when we had a nice party until midnight came around and all couples started either making out or slow-dancing and my also-single friend and I sat there feeling a bit left out.

A few years ago my sister and I decided to organize a sledding party with fondue dinner – also near St. Moritz in the Swiss alps (which by the way is where I’m from – so don’t think I’m jet setting around the world to St. Moritz for New Year’s eve – my family is there). We had all organized the evening to a “t” – when I double checked on a hunch with the sledding venue the day of December 31st around noon only to be told that “we’re closed today because of prior issues with alcohol and who ever told you we were open didn’t know what they were talking about”. I nearly fell out of my socks. I had a party of 15 people and no place to go and about six hours to reorganize.

We scrambled and finally saved the night with a combo of an early pizza dinner, sledding without the help of motorized transportation and a vicious game of charades. The night was such a success that this year – five years later - we had to curtail our list of guests. There’s no hangover, much physical activity, all ages (18 months to 80 years - no sledding there) and no slow dancing at the stroke of midnight… – a perfect way to start the New Year, I think.

I hope you have at least half as much fun as I have sliding into the New Year and don’t be shy sharing your favorite way to spend New Year’s eve.

Happy 2012!

Crowd Funding – There Already! – Part 8

Part eight of our Crowd Funding Series co-producer David Mandel talks about reaching the Kickstarter goal - early in this case - and what's next and what could have been done differently (if anything). 

1. You past the all-important 30% threshold in less than two days of your campaign AND reached your goal in 12 days. Did you wish you had set your funding goal higher?

I think there’s been a mix of emotions since hitting our goal. Obviously there’s a ton of joy and relief at how successful it is, and how quickly we accomplished it. But your question gets to the heart of those little nagging doubts we now have in the back of our heads - should we have set a higher goal? Will wrote me on Dec. 9th, at which point we had raised $8,030, or 80% of our goal: “If I may, I think we couldn't have picked a better goal. We definitely don’t want to already have passed it, but we're in no danger of not getting it.”

I think that hits it on the head. We’re really happy that we hit our goal, and although it’s the minimum we needed in order to finish the project, we’re still able to raise more via Kickstarter. As Kickstarter points out on their website: “94% of successful projects raise more than their funding goal.” (source: http://www.kickstarter.com/start.

We’re now trying to do everything we can to keep getting the word out and continue to raise as much as we can. By reaching our minimum, we’re guaranteed to receive the money, and that is a huge win for us.

2. Did you find that there were peaks and lows in the funding cycle? I.e. a lot of backers in the first day or two and then a leveling off?

You can see for yourself the ‘slope’ the donations took in the attached screenshot, which is of the project’s Dashboard - or central control for your Kickstarter project. This user backend of Kickstarter was actually just recently given a major overhaul, and is filled with incredibly useful information - including the various sources of donors (e.g. Google, Twitter, Facebook), and what percentages they make up of the total pledged.

Getting back to your question, we hit a bit of a plateau on Day 5, where we hovered around the $7,500 mark for a few days. On Days 7-8 we had only a couple of small donations. Then things picked back up again on Day 9, and by Day 12 we broke the $10,000 mark!

I suspect that a lot of Kickstarter campaigns have similar-looking graphs. Maybe they’re not quite as steep at the beginning, but I have heard about the plateau and about the sudden rush towards that goal-line as people notice how close you are and want to help you break through. To be honest, this all happened much faster than expected, and so we were still in the planning stages of some of our next steps when we realized they might not be necessary.

3. What is your strategy to keep the momentum going?

We’ve always considered this Kickstarter campaign to have two goals: one is the money, obviously, which is pretty important; the other is to start getting the word out about Mulligan, and now that we’ve hit the financial goal, we can start to focus on this. So we’ve begun to reach out to blogs and other media that cover independent film in the hopes of getting some press coverage for the movie. That would be a big win for us. We’ve also continued to proselytize on Facebook and have focused a bit more on catching up in the ‘Likes’ department.

Aside from that there’s our wonderfully original idea of releasing clips of the film on Kickstarter - I think/hope that this is part of the secret of our success. Every backer who pledges any amount gets access to several scenes from the film that we’ll be releasing over the next two months - that’s right, long after the whole Kickstarter campaign is over we’re going to keep sending out these clips. But the only way to access them is if you donate before the deadline. We hope that this, both encourages more people to donate between now and Dec. 31 - and that it allows us to keep in touch with our supporters and build momentum for our festival release(s).

4. How do you feel about over reaching your goal (other than the fact that “it feels good”)? Any reservations about the justification, let’s say?

If anything, it’s a relief that we can focus our energies on the other tasks we need to do for Mulligan. We’ve started submitting to festivals, which is a crazy process because once again we’re trying to meet deadlines and get out DVDs of a rough cut of the film - this was sort of the issue that caused the Kickstarter campaign to delay launching. We’re also starting to coordinate the post processes that the Kickstarter campaign is for: color-correction and sound.

But it’s great to be worrying about this stuff and not be ultra-concerned about Kickstarter anymore. I’ve stopped hitting ‘refresh’ on the Kickstarter page 3,982 times a day - I sometimes go entire hours without checking it now!

We do feel as though we can still raise a decent amount more than what we have now - we’ve raised about $500 in the last week, so we’ve definitely hit another plateau. I’m hoping that with a little bit of media coverage we can hit 150% of our goal - $15,000. We’re only $4,000 away from that, that’s a drop in the ocean compared to what we’ve already accomplished!

Crowd Funding – Why Give? – Part 7

After the launch of the Mulligan Kickstarter page last week – I must confess that I did check their progress for a while obsessively. It was just too cool to witness in real time as donations came in. A day after their launch they had met the 30% threshold, which seems to be the point of near guaranteed success to finish the campaign fully funded, which after all is the only way the moneys pledged will be paid to the fundraisers. Now, ten days later they have surpassed their $10,000 amount! (While writing this I’ve had to readjust this paragraph several times to adjust to their fast accent to the $10K mark and now that they’re safely over I can at least stop worrying about being current!) Ha!

I just finished watching the first four minutes of the feature – a privilege reserved for backers! Smart move.

One reason I’m engaged – other than knowing co-producer David – is that the director, Will immediately friended me on Facebook after I ‘liked’ the Mulligan Facebook page. Then, less than 24 hours later I got a nice thank you email with some fun facts and additional information, as well as an attachment of the Mulligan poster. They immediately made me part of their ‘family’; this of course AFTER I donated. So why donate in the first place?

I know virtually nothing about the film. I didn’t know Will’s work until I watched the pledge video. So, first and foremost I’m a backer, because of David. I abused him for a few years at Clock Wise Productions, first as intern and then as assistant editor and editor (the abuse was fully mutual, by the way, including my favorite David story – more on that some other time). Secondly, David ASKED for my support in a private email.

The thinking goes, I guess, that if we all support the project with a relatively small amount, say $25 which is what we might spend on an evening going to the movies and having a drink (ok, half a drink in New York), we do some good and support independent art. As my mother always says (this in German: auch Kleinvieh macht Mist): Also small farm animals produce shit. This is to say – much small shit also piles up to a big pile of dung.

In other words: prepare your lists of people to ask for support – personally - and give them something to get excited about. And we’re back to the all important preparation. The selling points are: ask, great video, decent backer give a-way’s. As for the give-a-way’s: I think they are quasi inconsequential to friends and family, but super important if the video should go viral and attract an outside your inner circle following – these are now people who don’t know you personally and will support on the basis of, ‘cool’ and ‘passion’ factor, or ‘activism’ factor (more for docs) AND who really want a piece of the pie. I.e. get to see advance footage, get an advance peek at the final project, or get a DVD at a good price break, etc.

Bye, bye, I’m back to their website to watch them go over 100% - follow me! Mulligan Kickstarter.

Crowd Funding – Kicking off the Process – Part 6

In our Crowd Funding series we've now - finally - have had lift off.  David and his team on Mulligan launched their Kickstarter Campaign yesterday and they're doing great!  And you can help them do even better by going to their Kickstarter page.

I'm as a tough an audience as it gets and I loved - absolutely loved - the video they put together.  Special mention to the music - what I heard was outstanding.  The animations are very cool and the video does a great job in telling what they need the funds for AND getting you excited about wanting to see the movie.  (The only thing in need of improvement: for a non-film person is, that it might be hard to understand the muffled voice of the director when he explains some technical terms).

Clearly the team put a LOT of effort into this and it seems to be paying off handsomely. I expect them to totally exceed their goal! They did their homework and I give it an A+.

Here a few questions I asked David:

1. What was your to-do list for the kick off day?  Lead-up was mostly about getting the video done. There were a few last-minute changes to the ‘Story’ section - basically the main part of the Kickstarter page where you describe the project, explain what you’re trying to raise money for, and other details. So we added some extra info to that section and once we had the video in its final format, we launched - at approx. 11am EST yesterday.

Will, the director, also launched the Facebook page late last night. There wasn’t much setup involved, and he’s fairly active on there (he frequently chides me for not being on Facebook). Our strategy is to treat the Kickstarter page as our biggest face/front for the movie right now, with Facebook a close second. The thinking is that we don’t want to bog people down with a website, Twitter, etc. Just get them to the Kickstarter page and let them learn about the movie through there.

2. How many emails/letters/solicitations did you ‘save’ for the kickoff?  It’s hard to count, because between the three main people involved, I’d guess close to 1,000 emails were sent yesterday. Some were based on lists of people who are fans of the web series ‘Reception’ that Will and and Graham, the producer have been working on for a year. That has a sizable following, and those fans had been getting emails in the lead-up to today because a new episode of ‘Reception’ gets sent out every week.

I’m sending out personal emails one-by-one, so I’ll probably be doing that whenever I have time for the next four weeks. I think it helps to do it that way if you have the time and resolve. Getting a Facebook poke or whatever wouldn’t necessarily get me to a website and to fork over dollars, so I’m hoping to seduce people the way I’d want to be seduced. :)

3. Where did Kickstarter make your life easy and what drove you nuts?  Kickstarter’s interface is very slick and easy to navigate. Uploading photos and videos and making text changes and descriptions is very easy, and done in a way that allows you to make changes without the fear that everything will blow up. They really nailed that, and I think it’s probably a big key to their success. Only have one minor gripe about Kickstarter - they don’t give you much direction in terms of what’s the proper format/specs for the video, so I think we were a little concerned we’d upload it and it wouldn’t look/sound right. Fortunately it’s not the case, and I think it’s hard to just blame Kickstarter for lack of guidance - there are just too many damn video formats floating around nowadays.

What really drove us nuts was making the video, which I’ve discussed in the previous post and which is in no way Kickstarter’s fault. They actually have really great suggestions and guidelines for making a video and - wisely - encourage every project to make one as a way of increasing the chances of a successful campaign.

4. What was the unexpected?  Nothing was unexpected, which I suspect is a result of lots of planning and agonizing over every last detail. :)

5. What was the ‘this sucks’?  Nothing really sucked. OK, so one small thing. Apparently, shortly after launching, a stranger came and made a comment on the Facebook page about the pricing of our rewards. Not a disaster or anything, and I guess someone else came along and deleted the comment. Whatever, it’s part of being on the internet. “Haters gonna hate,” as they say. We spent a lot of time thinking about our rewards and our pricing, and for someone to just come along and make some idiotic remark… alright, I’m over it.

6. And what was the “this is awesome” moment?  Well, that first donation felt pretty good. So did the 22 after it. It’s been less than 12 hours, and we’ve raised over 1/8th of our total goal! (Note: by now, 36 hours later they are nearly 1/3 there). That’s pretty exhilarating. I’ve had to resist staring at the page and clicking ‘refresh’ every 30 seconds. We’re really proud of the video (me especially, since I edited it). It took weeks and weeks and lots of starting from square one. But when I try to step back and be objective about it, I’m pretty convinced it’s a great pitch video. I wish there was a way to quantify the effect it has on people - friends, strangers - when they see it and decide whether or not to donate. I can’t, but I can semi-confidently tell myself that that video is a big reason they choose to give us money.

7. What was the first contribution? How does it feel?  Haha, the first donation was from my brother, Jon, who was one of the first people I emailed. The next two came from very close friends of mine and Will’s. The most wonderful feeling is to see a donation come in, and immediately Will or I email one another (and Graham) and ask “Who is this? Is this someone you know?” and then finding out it’s a stranger. It’s a lot more validating to see someone who has no ties to you and is therefore much more objective about making a gift. That’s a real confidence-booster, and definitely makes you feel as though someday that same effect is going to happen when a random person sees a trailer or a poster for the movie at a movie theater. We’re so grateful for all the friends and family who have come out so far to support it, but at the end of the day you can’t pack a movie theater with them. Unless you’re a polygamist.