STRATEGIZING YOUR CROWDSOURCING CAMPAIGN

By Scott Macaulay

I discovered a couple of excellent posts at the Coffee and Celluloid blog that will help you if you are contemplating or in the process of a crowdsourced funding campaign through a site like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Written by Joey Daoud, the posts chronicle his experience researching and enacting a campaign to raise $9,000 for his documentary on high-school combat robots, Bots High. The campaign was successful — he raised $9,100 — but, as always, the devil is in the details. In the first post, “How to Figure the True Cost of a Kickstarter Project,” he breaks down not only the cost of the commissions (5% to Kickstarter and about 3% to Amazon) but also the costs involved in manufacturing and distributing the various rewards he offered to his supporters. In the second post, “My Kickstarter Experience — the Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” he deconstructs his own success, revealing that he had to appeal to a relative for a loan in order to push himself over the $9,000 barrier and not lose all the money pledged so far. He’s also drawn conclusions from the experience, such as that he should have come up with a lower goal, like $5,000, and that it would have been easier if he had gotten on a high-profile blog. File Daoud’s account next to Miao Wang’s on her Kickstarter campaign and you’ve got a running start on most people launching projects there.

While I’m discussing Kickstarter I’m going to throw some attention on a project I’ve been hearing about for a while from trusted sources, Todd Chandler’s Flood Tide . Here’s how the filmmaker describes it:

It was the summer the gas stations closed. The summer they played music in the old mill. The summer they built a boat. The summer they left.

Flood Tide is a road movie on a river. It tells the story of four musicians who create extraordinary boats out of ordinary junk and set out for open water, fueled by dreams, desperation and a sense of adventure.

The film’s quiet narrative unfolds through fragments of memories, songs,

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