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.

“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:

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FIRST POST! How the First Comment Sets the Tone for the Entire Conversation

Back in the early days of blogging, readers of especially popular blogs started competing with each other to see who could be the first to comment on a post.

“FIRST POST!” would come the digital shout, the equivalent of a big of blog commenting graffiti, sort of like a tagger plastering his name on a wall. Nothing actually was said. It doesn’t relate to the post at all. The poster has just established that they were here first.

Folks typing FIRST POST miss a huge opportunity, because as the first commenter they have a lot of power. It’s important to understand how the first comment on a post has the ability to define the mood of the entire conversation. It’s the first comments that I tend to watch most closely in my moderation process.

Here’s one example: A couple months ago, we wrote a sponsored post on Offbeat Mama about an online baby registry tool that allows parents to register for cash they can use for services and experiential gifts. The very first comment was from someone who simply wanted to say that they hated the idea of registries. They had no opinion about this specific registry tool, but were against the whole concept of registering for gifts anywhere.

Every commenter after that first comment felt the need to weigh in on how THEY felt about baby registries. Were they ok for the first child? What about the fourth? Was a cash registry any less tacky than any other registry? Because the first comment was A) negative and B) focused on a meta-issue, the discussion was completely derailed from the specifics of the product we were talking about … of into a sneaky spiral of snarking over big picture issues.

The very first comment was not in accordance with our commenting policy, but since we didn’t catch it in time, the entire thread of comments slid off track. (both my editor and I were busy for a few hours that afternoon — that’ll teach us to EVER leave our laptops! Heh.) The first commenter effectively said, “I don’t really care about this specific post, but I’d like to use this comment section to debate a larger issue.”

When you’re publishing a post on a topic you know is going to be controversial, you can actually step in and make the first comment yourself. On Offbeat Bride, we recently ran a guest post criticizing the state of many wedding photographer’s websites. The post was constructive, but I anticipated and negative pile-on in the comments, and so immediately after the post went live, I left the first comment myself:

Offbeat Brides, you know we’re not about bashing anyone here. So please keep your comments constructive. Photographers are our friends, and we want to help them make their websites better — not bitch about them.

In this way, I made it clear in the context of the comments exactly what kind of discussion we WEREN’T looking for. (Of course, after 100+ comments, the discussion eventually went there anyway … but at least we got in 100 comments before the inevitable snarking began!)

As I’ve mentioned in past posts, comments on my sites are moderated aggressively — they’re high traffic sites, and the positive tone of posts and comments is part of my branding. This is all to say, not every blog will need to watch their FIRST POST! comments quite as closely as we do on Offbeat Bride and Offbeat Mama … but especially if you’re posting about something controversial, watching that first comment carefully is a worthy use of your time.

How to write your blog’s comment policy

Long-time internet community participants may be familiar with the tongue in cheek concept of Godwin’s Law, which states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” As Wikipedia summarizes, “given enough time, all discussions—regardless of topic or scope—inevitably wind up being about Hitler and the Nazis.”

As a blogger and moderator, one way to inadvertently accelerate Godwin’s Law is to delete or edit a reader’s comment. Even if the comment or post you’re moderating is completely off-topic or offensive, chances are decent that if you moderate someone’s comment, they’ll lash back with a predictable “Why are you being such a NAZI? What about free speech?”

These retorts are irrational of course — comparing online moderation to the genocide of millions is preposterous and offensive. When you delete a comment, you’re not silencing a person’s first amendment right — you’re saying “Not on my website,” which isn’t the same as “you can’t say this anywhere, ever.”

Trying to make these points after-the-fact is challenging, because it’s easy to bog yourself down in the specifics of the particular situation and discussion. The best way to sidestep Godwin’s Law is to have a carefully written commenting policy linked prominently.

Many of your commenters likely won’t actually read it, but by having your policy explicitly stated, when you do have to moderate comments, you can provide an easy link to your rules — making it less likely that commenters will quibble over the details of the specifics of the particular situation. In other words, instead of having to explain, “It’s not that I’m offended by your comment about apples,” you can just say, “I have a standing stated policy about fruit, which applies to your apple statement.”

On my two sites, Offbeat Bride and Offbeat Mama, I’ve create two slightly different versions of my commenting policy. Here’s Offbeat Bride’s and here’s Offbeat Mama’s comment policy. They’ve proven remarkably effective in dealing with comment drama, and while I would never suggest that your policies should be the same as mine, I can offer some general tips for creating a commenting policy that’s a good fit for your site:
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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.

A List Apart: Articles: Anonymity and Online Community: Identity Matters

This older article provides an understanding of why online identity matters and offers six steps to help you build stronger online communities. In the world of Facebook and Twitter integration, this may not hold as true but many mainstream sites still wrestle with the anonymity question.

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.