Kickstarter Fundraising: Myths, Facts, and Alternatives

Kickstarter.com — a social fundraising tool for creative projects — now has a reputation among social media enthusiasts as THE Magical Way to Raise Money. People have told me it works better than other methods, and it attracts more attention (probably true). I’ve also been told that anyone can use it for anything (not true), and that you can keep all the money you raise even if you don’t reach your goal (nope!). One person even informed me that Kickstarter personally MATCHES and DOUBLES financial contributions (definitely, definitely not true). There is a growing mythology about this tool.

Five facts about Kickstarter

Let’s set a few things straight:

1. It’s smart, attractive, clean, awesome, and the first of its kind [see comment discussion below]. Yes indeed it is.
2. It ONLY allows funding for creative projects. No business funding.
3. You ONLY receive funds if your project reaches its funding goal.  (This a core feature of their service, and an alarming number of “Kickstarter is awesome!” chorus members don’t seem to know this.)
4. Because of their growing popularity, you now have to submit your projects to Kickstarter for review, and wait to be approved or denied before you can start your campaign.
5. At the end of a successful campaign, Kickstarter will take 5% of the total amount you made, and Amazon payments (their payment system) will take an additional 3-5%.  That means that if you raise $5,000, you will pay $400 – $500 in fees.

Consider the Innovations

Most of Kickstarter’s magic mojo is simply that they made a game out of raising money.  Here are the rules to that game:

• Set a deadline. Let people know there is a limited time to this campaign.
• Set a minimum funding goal. “If we don’t reach this number, the project won’t have enough funding to happen.” Figure out what that number is.
• Enforce the deadline and the funding goal. The campaign STOPS at the deadline, and if you didn’t meet the goal, the project DOESN’T happen. (This is where Kickstarter is most valuable: they play bad cop about the rules of the game, while you get to play good cop and try to get people excited.)
• Set up tiered levels of giving, and promise people different thank-you gifts for each level.
• Let the fundraisers keep full ownership of their projects. (It’s not investment; it’s sponsorship. It’s pre-selling. It’s generosity.)

Kids, you can totally try this from home. You don’t actually need to be on Kickstarter’s lawn to play this game. (It just helps. Sometimes. That’s all.)

It’s not the only way.

Personally, I am all for Kickstarter.  I think they’re a good, sexy, internet-loving company that’s doing amazing things for people, and doing them well.  But I also find it disturbing that people are so excited about them that they spread false rumors about their particular form of magic. And I think it’s important that everyone know: there are other ways.

IndieGoGo, for instance, is a blatant Kickstarter clone [see comment discussion below] has three major differences:

1. There is no approval process or waiting period to get started.
2. You can list any kind of project — creative, business, whatever.
3. You get to keep all of the money, even if you don’t reach the goal.

(Note: This doesn’t necessarily make them better. If anything, it removes a lot of the game and heat that makes Kickstarter projects so exciting. But it does make them a solid alternate option — especially if Kickstarter’s rules aren’t working for you.)

Another option is to use a PayPal-based fundraising tracker, like ChipIn or Fundrazr.

I went DIY.

In December, I launched a crowdfunding campaign without Kickstarter. I used the giving widget offered by PayPal Labs to track donations (mostly because I thought it was prettier than ChipIn). I also used a Tumblr site to manage the campaign, and Google Checkout to catch a bunch of contributors who hated PayPal (guess what? There are many).

I set a goal of $5,000 in 30 days and laid out some perks for contributors based on donation amount. At the end of the time period, I had raised about $8500 from nearly 300 people. I had more control over the campaign and I paid lower fees on the money I raised (about 4% instead of 9%) than I would have if I had used Kickstarter.

And I will tell you all about how I organized that fundraiser and why my community made it successful in another post.

[photo credit: "Tip Jar" by Dave Dugdale]

Passing Notes, Playing Dead, Saying Thanks

Last week, like every week, I watched Glee on Hulu, but this episode was different. In this episode, the tough character of Coach Bieste moved from a stone-faced background role to a heart-achingly vulnerable main spotlight, and her performance got me. I was stunned by it. I spent the next two hours researching the actor, Dot Jones, and her fascinating and varied career. (15-time world arm wrestling champion? For reals?) I dug through everything about her that appeared on YouTube. I didn’t stop until 1 AM when I found her on Facebook, hesitantly clicked the “Add as Friend” button, and included a personal note to express exactly how much her performance moved me, and why, and THANK YOU.

At 2 AM, I received an email: “Dot Jones confirmed you as a friend on Facebook.”

I was elated to get that little gesture of attention and acceptance, but even more pleased to know that she probably — like, really, in all likelihood — actually read my letter. And appreciated it.

The next day, I went to the beach with my friend, Will, and recapped the story. He told me of a similar experience recently. A song at the end an album had moved him in a shocking and probably life-changing way, and he sought out the artist (on Facebook, too!) to tell him so, and why, and THANK YOU.  He still hasn’t heard back, but that wasn’t the point. Will knows what I know because we’ve both gotten them: those letters matter.

Back in September, I assisted Will in coordinating the Gender Spectrum Kids Camp. Together (and with the help of a bunch of other volunteers), we organized a fun, supportive weekend for kids ages 4-11 while their parents attended a conference downstairs.  I knew Will had been too tied up with registration and scheduling to ever really play with the kids, so that night at the beach, I asked him what the most satisfying part of that experience had been for him.

He thought for a moment and said it was when a kid played dead on the floor at the end of the day.  One child had had so much fun — and was so unwilling to leave — that she went as completely limp for as long as she could stand it to stop her parents from taking her home.  That moment of 8-year-old melodrama put everything into perspective for Will, and he knew he’d made an impact.

Later that night, I lamented that we don’t get the same kind of feedback from Internet community organizing. Everything is photos and text. There are no hugs. There are no facial expressions. There is no kid on the floor. And then Will reminded me of the letters.

“I just wanted to say that I love this site. I check it every single day. It brightens my mood and gives me the support, advice, and empathy that I can’t get in the world I live in.”

I get letters like that, and comments, and little notes — sometimes directed at me and sometimes directed at my projects — every single day. And you know what? Sometimes I’m so distracted with the details that I flat-out forget they are there. But as soon as I remember to listen, those letters become my kid on the floor.  They tell me I’m on the right track.  They are the loudest, most sincere, most compelling feedback my teams and I can possibly get to keep building and organizing and putting ourselves out there.

Whoever you are reading this, whatever your role is in your communities, I have two pleas for you:

1) Listen for the letters where you might not be hearing them, and look for your kid on the floor. Somewhere, in some form, you’re probably getting positive feedback about the impact you have on the world. Focus on it, absorb it, and let it fill you up. Let it guide you.

2) Go write those letters. Go be the kid on the floor for the person who is changing your world.  Go. Do it. Now. Play dead if you have to. Just make sure they know what you mean.

That feedback makes a difference. THANK YOU.

When is it okay to publish other people’s content?

A college student who is developing a new community resource site just emailed me with the following question:

“What are the logistics of taking info from other websites (and of course “citing” the source?)  A lot of good [relevant materials] are in pdf format on other websites. But, who really wants to click a link on my website to go to another website to click another link to be directed to the pdf, when i could cite the source and make it available on my website?  (a one-stop-shop sort of thing…)  What are the special permissions involved in appropriating some of these materials?”

I wrote back…

Here’s my rule of thumb:

- If it’s obvious that they’re fine with having it reused (e.g., they outright say “please reuse this,” or they have a Creative Commons copyright statement that says it’s fine to reuse it as long as you attribute it and don’t profit off of it), then you can use it.

- If it’s not obvious, but you think they might want you to use it, it’s wise to contact them directly and ask for their permission to post it. Most people will be honored and flattered, and might even link to your site if they like what you’re doing. And in the worst case scenario, they say no, and you just saved yourself from a public kerfuffle (people do get cranky about their content being reused without permission… depends on the person or org).

(In either case, if you do reuse the content, be sure to provide a link back to the original. This lets visitors verify the accuracy of your reposting, and also lets them visit the source site for related content.)

- If it’s not obvious that you have permission to use it, and contacting them isn’t working out, your safe option is to link to just the page it appears on at their site. Visitors will totally understand.

These guidelines have served me well and kept me out of trouble.  Anyone else follow a different set of rules?

What’s up with the new Facebook groups?

A few weeks ago, Facebook launched a new set of features for Facebook Groups.  In fact, it’s kind of a whole new “thing.”

Opt-Out is the new “I Love You”

Facebook groups have some interesting features. They have group chat! And the ability to share docs! (Nicely done, Facebook!)

They also bring two radically culture-changing features to the table:

1. The person who creates the group (along with any member of the group) can add as many of their friends as they want to it.
   • That’s add, not invite. Your friend thinks you should be in their group? Boom. You’re in a group.
   • Don’t want to be in the group? You need to go into the page and click a button to leave it.  Because otherwise…
2. You will receive email notifications for every single post, doc, and comment that appears on the group.
   • …until you turn them off.

If you’re the kind of Facebook user who regularly receives app invites, event invites, and fan page invites that you don’t actually care about, this is highly concerning.  It means that your broad Rolodex-style social network now has extra super-powers for adding noise to your inbox. Any well-intentioned, loving, talkative, self-promoting friend can now spam your butt off until you stop them.

I guess, in that sense, it’s a step up from email. On Facebook, you can actually stop them.

Old Groups Aren’t New Groups

What about the old groups? Here’s the official word from Facebook’s FAQ:

• If you had a Group before these features were launched, your Group remains unchanged. No new features, but it’s still there.
• All new Groups will have the new features.
• There is no way to change your old Group into a new Group.  (Sucker.)

Maybe they acknowledged that the new Group features are so radically different from what was there before that implementing them in the existing Groups would be a violation of trust, and throw a lot of communities way out of whack.

Or maybe they wanted to create an old-schoolers vs. new-schoolers dynamic among Groups, providing badass street cred to any group that existed before October 6, 2010, and making sure those darned newfangled groups are extra shiny for contrast.

Maybe they’re just lazy.

How to Win at Facebook Groups

The new Group features are ideal if your group meets the following criteria:

• Everyone wants to be there.
• Everyone wants to hear from everyone else in the group.
• No one will try to bring in a member who doesn’t belong.

In other words, Facebook Groups is a great platform for a small, closed group with a contained scope.  Everyone feels included; discussion and sharing is easy.

How to Create a Group

Want one? Here’s how:

1. Go to facebook.com/groups
2. Click “Create Group”
3. Choose your group name, your initial members, and whether it’s Open (anyone can see stuff and join), Closed (people who can see who the members are, but they can’t see the content), or Secret (If I told you more, I’d have to kill you).
4. That’s it. Now go forth and nurture your brand new Facebook community.
   

“Our Internet,” a new Community Links Feed

We’ve been drumming up lots of community advice and insights here at Culture Conductor, but we also know we’re not the only ones obsessed with this subject. Then again, unless you know where to look, you can miss all the juicy, distributed conversation that’s happening everywhere else.

We want to make the “finding it” part easier, so we’ve started a community links feed. We call it, “Our Internet,” and it’s an attempt to aggregate all the useful news, advice, and stories an online community builder wants to see.

You can benefit from this New Thing in two ways:

1) Keep an eye on the links feed to find out what people are recommending. It’s over here, and you can also subscribe to the RSS feed.

2) Suggest sites for the feed to share and highlight material you find useful. All you need is a delicious.com account — just bookmark a page you want to recommend, add a description explaining why it’s useful, and tag it “CultureConductor“. It will show up in our publishing queue, and if we agree it’s a good fit, we’ll post it and give you credit.

Kind of neat, huh? We borrowed the idea from Kink On Tap, a weekly webcast about politics and sexuality, which also maintains a community links feed, though they have a slightly different setup.

For those who are interested in how we built our particular setup (and we encourage you to keep borrowing and improving the idea), here’s how we handled the techie bits:

Read the rest of this entry »

Group Voting by Email List: Now with more nuance!

About a year ago, I needed to ask the volunteer staff at Genderfork to start making group decisions about certain issues.  Our staff had been growing, some members were becoming more talkative than others were, and I wanted to make sure everyone had an equal say in final decisions. We needed a way of voting.

I wasn’t excited about the voting method I’d seen on tech community mailing lists in the past (“+1″ means yes, “-1″ means no). It seemed a bit too flat — missing all of the enthusiasm or hesitation you’d be able to gauge if your group were all in a room together. But, I hadn’t heard of any other options.

“0 – 5″: More than just yes and no

Stuck, I ran the issue by my friend Melissa, who had just started a new job at a nonprofit organization. She told me about a method they used in meetings to “take the temperature of the room” before a final vote: asking everyone at the table to hold up a number of fingers, 0 – 5. Here’s what it means:

Holding up four or five fingers is a green light. It indicates you approve of the idea, and you don’t have any major concerns. (Five fingers shows a bit more excitement than four.)

Holding up one, two, or three fingers is a yellow light. It means you have reservations about the plan, but you won’t try to stop it from happening. Everyone who holds up fewer than 4 fingers is asked what changes they’d like to see made to them plan, in order to take their vote to a 4 or a 5.

Holding up no fingers (a fist) is a red light. It’s a signal that you want to block the plan. In the case of Melissa’s organization, if two people hold up a fist, the plan is vetoed and will not happen.

For a not-too-large group, this method creates a nice hybrid of two kinds of decision-making: consensus and majority rules.  It’s not really majority rules because the plan can be blocked by a minority. It’s not really consensus because not everyone has to agree. It is efficient (like majority rules) and it considers the needs of each individual (like consensus), and it seems to get things done.

Shifting the Method from Meatspace to Mailing List

I carried it over to the Genderfork mailing list and explained the method.  Instead of fingers, volunteers can just send in emails, each with a number, 0 – 5. If they put down anything less than 4, they need to explain what would make the plan better for them.

An unexpected result was that it provided the less-talkative members an easy way to share their input without needing to engage in the full conversation.  If they approve of the idea, all they need to send out is an email saying “4″ or “5″.  One character, “send”, and they’re done.

The other nice result is having a sense of how much enthusiasm there is for an approved plan.  An all-fives group is offering a different level of support than an all-fours group, and that’s useful information to have.

Since our group is mostly in alignment with each other most of the time, votes for less than 4 are rare, but they do happen — usually because a proposed idea seems underdeveloped.  These are usually requests for us to work out more details and then come back for a new vote.

The result of using this method, for us, is that it allows us to our gauge level of agreement while still getting things done.  It works.

Have you also put this method to use? Do you have other voting methods that allow people to express degrees of enthusiasm? Tell us below!

Online Community Platforms: Your Options

So you want to build an online community, and you don’t know what platform to build it on. The good news is that you have a lot of options. The bad news is that (probably) none of them are perfect. Here are the likely candidates.

Sites People Already Use

These are great options when your main goal is to facilitate conversation and networking. These are not good choices when you need a lot of technical and design control over your community space.

Facebook — is more or less ubiquitous right now, so there’s a good chance your community members are already using it. You can either create a Page or a Group (look at examples of each to decide). The upside of Facebook is that you won’t need to ask people to sign up for a new account anywhere, and you’re using a system they’re familiar with. The downside is that Facebook has been known to change how they do things without warning.

Other Big Sites – Most large-scale social networking sites will allow you to make groups and foster your own community space. MySpace, for example, is still going strong. (And oh hey, remember Friendster? Okay, never mind.) Twitter, unfortunately, doesn’t have much to offer in this area besides general organic conversation (I don’t think “Lists” count as a community structure), but some of its third-party app providers might, if you dig.

Niche Sites – If your community is topic-oriented, go find out what other large sites exist to gather people to that topic. It’s entirely possible that it supports the creation of groups, and that your community members are already in the system. DeviantArt (arts) and LinkedIn (careers) are great examples.

Open Source Community-Oriented Content Management Systems

That title’s a mouthful, but it’s worth understanding: Open Source usually means free software that’s constantly being improved by the people who actually use it. A Content Management System (otherwise known as a CMS) is website software that lets you manage your content in an admin panel without touching code or your website’s design. And Community-Oriented is the kind you’re looking for (though they might not call it exactly that).

A word of warning: these systems require you to have a decent amount of technical knowledge, or to hire a developer. They may tell you they work properly straight out of the box, but most non-programmers I’ve talked to have been frustrated with the setup process. On the other hand, this software does come with a lot of functionality for free, and they’re constantly being improved by huge communities of volunteer programmers, so if you can get over the tech configuration hurdles, you have a good chance of success. Consider…

Drupal – The running favorite.

BuddyPress – Built on WordPress to act like Ning (more on both those names below), but still young and under-developed. I have high, high hopes for this software, but please don’t approach it without a fearless programmer at your side — preferably one who’s dealt with the system before.

OpenSourceCMS.com – for demos and ratings on the (literally) hundreds of other options out there.

Growing Your Own

If you’re very particular about the functionality you want — and you have the cash to back it up — you may want to hire a reliable development team to build it from scratch. It will cost you an arm and a leg (and you’ll need to keep an ongoing budget for maintenance and growth), but it’s really the only way to get exactly what you want. And if you do it right, (and you have a significant community to support,) (and your business goals can validate the expense,) then it’s absolutely worth it.

Classic Forums

Great for high-volume conversation spaces. Not great if your community doesn’t exist yet — it will feel like a large, cold, empty room. Bring in a forum when a community calls for it. Consider…

phpBB – the old-school favorite.

Simple Machines – the other old-school favorite.

Vanilla Forums – the younger and slightly cuter cousin.

Mailing Lists

Who needs a website for community when you live in your inbox? Mailing lists, if you can keep them small enough or establish some practical etiquette for them, are a great platforms for building community. The usual suspects right now are…

Mailman – an old-school software program that comes included with many web hosting plans.

Google Groups – my personal favorite. You can also view archives and interact with the discussion directly on the Google Groups site instead of receiving emails.

Blogs

Blogs aren’t always the first thing people think of when they talk about building an online community, but there are absolutely opportunities here. You can…

• have a group blog where all community members are authors
• accept and post content submissions from your community
• maintain a lively discussion area in the site comments

The major players for blog software right now are…

WordPress – There are two ways to do WordPress. One is to get the free software from WordPress.ORG, install it on a hosting plan with some basic tech skills, and customize the heck out of one of the thousands of themes available. The other option is to get an account at WordPress.COM, which is faster and easier to get started with, but can be very limiting in the long run.

Blogger - Easy to get started with, but very limited options for configuration.

Typepad – Lots of features, a long history, and likely to cost money if you plan to make it fit all your needs.

Hosted Community Software

If you’re short on cash and tech skills but want a full-featured community, your best option may be to use a hosted service. Take a look at…

Ning – a service that lets you build a stable, standard-featured community site (profiles, groups, discussions, photos, etc) about whatever you want, branded however you want, for a monthly fee. Those who use it tend to have complaints — little things that bug them that they can’t change — but to be fair, it’s probably the best service we have available right now.

What else?

Here’s where I need your input. Have you found other affordable (or better yet: free!) solutions that seem reliable and functional, and don’t require advanced tech skills to set up? Let’s pool our research. Please comment below with your findings.

Dopp’s Guidelines for Managing Volunteers (Community Expression Blog Edition)

As I built and grew a volunteer staff for Genderfork, a community expression blog, over a period of about six months, I worked out a set of informal guidelines for managing a staff.  Here are the pieces that were most critical for me.

1. Get to know them first, but not aggressively. I need a sense of a volunteer’s motivations, personality, relationship to the project, and social presence on the Internet before I will work with that person — but only on a very general level. If a person goes by a pseudonym, I don’t actually need a real name. I just need to know if and how the person behind that pseudonym earns respect online, and why they want to help.

2. Keep the critical task lists small. No one on my team has a required workload of more than two hours a week (most have less than that), even if someone asks for more. Volunteers can put in extra hours whenever they wish, and that’s up to them. I know life eventually gets busy, and I want everyone’s minimum commitment to be reasonable no matter what.

3. Let volunteers set their own schedules. Everyone should be able to batch-process a pile of work (do a bunch of it in advance) whenever it makes sense.  Whether a volunteer wants to work every day, once a week, or once a month should be flexible, and up to the individual.  (There are sometimes exceptions to this rule for us, but for the most part it’s possible.)

4. Make it concrete. All volunteers have concrete, realistic assignments paired with clear expectations.  They know when they’re done, and they have a way of assessing if the work they did was good.

5. Access granted on a need-to-break basis. Everyone gets enough access to do their jobs effectively, but not enough access to break the site.  (Tip: In WordPress, get a role/capability plugin for better control over account types.)

6. Interdependence works. I tie tasks to things other people care about — usually another volunteer’s job, or the public-facing content, or both. Volunteers need to know that when they don’t do their work, someone else will feel it.

7. No one owns the content pipelines. Volunteers get access to submissions and content in shared spaces.  I can check in and see how things are going at any time. If a volunteer stops working, we don’t lose any content.

8. Be extra clear about the few things that matter, and let go of the rest. I set a handful of clear guidelines based on what I feel is critical to the health of the project. I let the volunteers use their own editorial judgment, personality, and work style to get the job done within those guidelines. I don’t micromanage.

9. Expect them to be human. Volunteers are allowed to change. They’re allowed to flake before we even get started. They’re allowed to quit, to go quiet, to ask for help, and to need something different than I thought they needed, at any time.  It’s my job to support them, to be flexible with them, and to make sure their changing needs are unlikely to hurt the project.

10. Let them help each other. Our volunteers all have access to a private discussion list, and are encouraged to ask for the group’s input on content decisions when they want advice (instead of going to me for everything).

12. Praise loudly and often. Volunteers need recognition and appreciation — publicly, privately, in front of the rest of the staff, and from the community itself — in order to stay healthy and engaged.

13. Honor their insights, opinions, and ownership. Since they are in the most direct contact with our project, I also treat the volunteer staff as an advisory board for the direction of the site, and I get their input on any major changes or decisions before I make them.

In Other Words:

Volunteers are wonderful. Find the ones who really want to help. Give them clear, concrete ongoing tasks. Give them enough freedom to feel ownership, and enough guidelines to feel that their work is part of something bigger.  If something’s not working, it’s time to change something.

Remember to treat them like gold.