Crowdfunding in its highest and best form is an expression of community care. It is a way to open up your creative process, product and impact to the participation of the community you wish to serve. It’s knowing the ecosystem well enough to bring in partners, organizations, influencers and stakeholders who will help you amplify your project because they feel served, represented and/or deeply affected by it.
Crowdfunding is successful when the crowd feels like they get to part of bringing something fun/important/exciting/impactful into the world.
Crowd investing is the process of gathering small equity investments into your project. This is exclusively done through online platforms because it has a high regulatory threshold - there are a LOT of very important SEC rules that govern crowd investing to protect the investors. Crowd investing is successful when the project turns a profit and the crowd investors make their money back.
A point of editorial privilege here: you should not entertain crowd investing unless you have a proven track record of making things that make their money back. Since fewer than 2% of feature films and even fewer shorts ever even recoup their budget, crowd investing can simply be an empty promise to audiences. However, crowd investing can be aspirational - meaning you can work up to building a large enough audience who has faith in your work so that this is possible. Here is one such example.
Crowdfunding platforms have built the technology and tools to make a crowdfunding campaign straightforward to set up, go live, gather funds, and build audiences. Crowdfunding platforms do not do the work of crowdfunding for you. You will be responsible for building a great outreach plan and making the most of your campaign. Crowdfunding is hard work — hard enough work that just getting funds from a campaign is probably not worth it. Here is the good news: crowdfunding best practices include everything in the “Your Essential Work” portion of this distribution playbook, as well as many of the strategies for audience acquisition and gathering audience data. So a great crowdfunding campaign can set you up beautifully for a great distribution campaign.
Seed&Spark - Crowdfunding
Kickstarter - Crowdfunding
Essential resources for running a kickass crowdfunding campaign. While these resources come from Seed&Spark, they are applicable to any crowdfunding campaign, whether you use a platform or not!