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.

The Trash Trend

To be filed under: “We must be the change we wish to see” Gandhi

I’ve always wondered how trends start, who instigates them and how they spread. A few years ago I read “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference” by Malcolm Gladwell, but don’t remember much hands-on ‘how to’ advice. I’m the last person to set a fashion trend and I’m afraid I’m not going to start any kind of visionary or intellectual trend either.

But now, inadvertently I might have started a trend after all – it might be wishful thinking, but here it goes: let me call it the Trash Trend. Very sexy, I know.

Sunday I got back from a quick bike ride in Central Park and as I pulled up to my condo I noticed a few big ticket trash items strewn around our entrance. As I did at my old home which was a brownstone without a super in attendance I started picking up the trash and walked it over to the trash bin at the curb and since I was at it I picked up a few more items there. The result was much easier on the eye. I went home, took a shower never thought of it gain.

Two days later I get an email through our building’s Google group: a forward of a guy who had posted on http://www.everyblock.com/ an exact description of what I had done and how great it was and he had never seen anybody but himself pick up trash off the side walk in Harlem. I was flabbergasted that anybody would have noticed, let alone write about it. What ensued was an on-line conversation about the merits of picking up after others. And our discussion got quite a few “thanks” – that’s akin to the FB “like”.

Here’s my take on it. I firmly believe in the broken windows theory. Quote: “The broken windows theory was first introduced by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, in an article titled "Broken Windows" in the March 1982 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. The title comes from the following example: Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside. Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars.”

Littering is a one of my (many) pet peeves (can you tell I’m Swiss?). I have asked strangers in my neighborhood over and over again to pick up their trash when I see them litter. The guy who commented on my action noted in the email exchange that he was taking to a friend, walking down 116th Street, commenting on the trash, when he got a nasty stare from a person walking in front of them. And I must add that 116th street between Freddie and Adam C Powell is notoriously “trashy”. I think there’s a big difference between ‘commenting’, sic: criticizing and doing.

I have never had anybody give me hard time for picking up trash on the street. Mostly I get thank you’s and the occasional stare of disbelieve. And most of the people I ask to pick up their trash do so and apologize. And the cool thing about getting older is that kids actually listen and pick up after themselves when I tell them to.

Now: every now and then there’s a person who will litter in front of a house to spite the occupants. So be it. I’ll gladly keep picking up their trash too and take the high road and if I catch them I will (politely) tell them to use a trash bin. Littering is a lack of education and respect for oneself and others.

I come from a culture where littering is a major no-no. Every kid, every tourist, every person who has ever littered in Switzerland will know what a swift and forceful reaction they get from total strangers and will think twice the next time. Policing a strict no-litter policy citizen driven and self-regulatory, no intervention by authorities needed. I think it's a matter of respect for oneself and ones surroundings; a matter of self-esteem and taking pride in one's street, block or neighborhood.

Somewhere in a New York City park I saw a sign that read something like: don’t litter, use the trash receptacles: they’re free and easy to use. Are you with me?

The Big Unfollow - For All The Idiots (Keep Reading)

A few weeks ago Chris Brogan posted a story on being “unfollowed”. I read it, thought it was very interesting (as I think about 98% of his writing is and I have no clue where all his information and ideas come from; he’s either got a huge head or very dedicated and smart people working for him).

A few days later, as I’m preparing to write an email to a friend I’ve not heard of in a long time I go onto FB to make sure I have his new (and ever changing) physical location right, not to ask him how Florida is when in effect he’s moved on to California. I type in his first name, and…. nothing. Strange I think. Type his name again … nada. YIKES. He’s un-friended me! I have a bit of a gut reaction and think immediately: “what have I done wrong”?…. “is he mad at me”? Alas – it turns out he’s un-friended us all – no more profile on FB. Uff.

Chris Brogan unfollowed everybody on Twitter to take care of a spam issue. The reactions he writes where at times visceral, even hostile and some just plain strange. I’ve noticed that I have about the same amount of Twitter followers every time I log on, which is three to four times a week (I know not enough, or too much – depending on who you are), but I do average a new follower daily. That means seven people think I’m boring enough to drop me from their Twitter list every week. That’s a sobering thought.

When I started my Twitter account I would follow everybody in an account that was similar to mine, hoping I might find an audience (back then mostly for my film Abraham’s Children). It mostly worked like a charm until I went to unfollow the lot to make space for new conquests. “Retaliation” was often very swift.

I use FB, LinkedIn and Twitter to reach out and to communicate my thoughts on what I think is newsworthy. News coming to me: I’m not so good with. With (still) only 24 hours a day is there ever enough time to digest but the tip of the social media iceberg, let alone interact and react?

What are the rules of politeness around a friend or a follower? How do people see themselves in the numbers of their friends and followers? Who is actually reading Tweets and status updates of all their followers? Who even notices if you ditch them? Are the numbers of followers and friends the currency of our social networking self-worth? Are we all communicating out but not across or between? How much are we taking IN?

In the old days of email marketing (about a month ago), a 15% click rate was great. With Twitter and FB I think we’re not even touching 1% but racing right into 1 per-mille. In every one in a thousand follower I have a potential customer or client. That’s another sobering thought.

Dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t. Read: time-sink-run-with-the-crowd-idiot if you do and dinosaur if you don’t. I choose idiot. And you? (If you’re reading this my money is on idiot…).

One More

So much is being said and will still be said on the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York. And as a New Yorker there are so many thoughts, memories, emotions and questions that do come up in these days as the coverage of the anniversary is steering towards a media overload. And here I am feeding the beast.

My personal story is thankfully rather dull – despite this there is a very nice article in a Swiss magazine that talks to eight Swiss New Yorkers who experienced the 9/11 tragedy and are still in New York. The journalist, Ralf Kaminski did an outstanding job recording and writing the eight stories. And reading them – in their simplicity - they are so revealing and relevant. For those of you who speak German here goes a link to the Migros Magazine article.

I would love to write about the broader scale of the changes in the past ten years and how we all have to move into this or that direction and make this a better and safer and smarter city and country, but I won’t.

The ten year anniversary ways heavy on my heart and I just want to say that I’m thinking of those who have lost loved ones and still are struggling and congratulate those who have had the strength and courage to move on and rebuild.

I know many who woke up a few weeks and months after 9/11 and changed their lives for the better, who stayed strong for their children and those who needed it the most. You are the real heroes in my mind. And like the small stories in the Swiss Magazine, it’s all the small stories here in New York and everywhere that make the difference. One day at a time and one action at a time. Onwards and upwards.