Crowd Funding

AoDL Meetup
Crowdfunding
17 August, 2012, 6.30pm-8.30pm 
The Photographers’ Gallery
 16-18 Ramillies Street, Soho, London W1F 7LW

http://www.meetup.com/Art-of-Digital-London/events/69796832/

1 About
2 Projects
3 Blogs & Resources
4 Tools

About

Crowd funding has been around on the net for a long time and the WikiPedia page gives an interesting read [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_funding ].

Now in a matured to a state crowd funding is offered by a variety web services offer easy to use campaign tools as a one-stop-shop, that allow you to broadcast your story, collect donations and offer rewards from partners and affiliates.

The hope is that these web services take the headache and cost out of running a campaign and can also help moving away from patrons and friends scheme and making friends with philanthropic bankers.

An early and successful crown funding service was Sellaband [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sellaband ] which worked around the model of pre-funding, allowed donors to fund a band and then the group would record the song and the funders get a reward. Pre-funding is still the dominant model, you pitch your project with a short video, tell your story and set the amount you want to raise and the deadline.

Besides the simplicity and ease of use of the crowd funding sites what seems useful is to work with partners to offer rewards, like training course, artworks and other services to funders.

In the end the crowd funding web services are acting as brokers as its worth noting they want up to 15% of your donations, or pre-funding. It’s also worth a note here that currently in the UK the funds have to be donations and cannot be investment with a promise of a yield or a return on investment. The fall-out of the 1720s South Sea Bubble still mean that you can't promise the earth to unwitting punters on some promise of future riches.

The peer-research will involve profiling the potential crowd funding web services and then building good practice guidelines for running a fund raising campaign.

Projects

Just Do It Crowdfunded documentary film on activism and climate change through Sponsume

The White Review, a quarterly arts, culture and politics journal that has managed two successful campaigns through WeFund

94 Elements, a global filmmaking project that produces a collection of stories by different filmmakers about the endless ways the elements touch our daily lives socially, politically and economically. Sadly it was unsuccessful in reaching it's target through indiegogo.