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:
- It’s smart, attractive, clean, awesome,
and the first of its kind [see comment discussion below]. Yes indeed it is.
- It ONLY allows funding for creative projects. No business funding.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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:
- There is no approval process or waiting period to get started.
- You can list any kind of project — creative, business, whatever.
- 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]
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.
Photo by Chris Palmieri
“So, do you wanna help?”
“Yeah, totally!”
When you’re doing something big and interesting (like, oh, say, organizing an online community) and are looking for people to help, please, for the love of niches and all that matters to you, understand that not all yeah totallys are created equal.
Here are some of the ones I’ve come across:
“Yeah, I totally think what you’re doing is great, and I’m going to be super supportive whenever you talk to me about it. I’ll even Twitter about it!”
“Yeah, I totally want to hear more about how I can help. Please give me more info so I can think seriously about the details.”
“Yeah, totally, I’m excited to help in whatever way you need! But you should know that I get excited about lots of things, and something else might be more exciting to me next week, and that might take up some of the time I’m promising you. You understand, right?”
“Yeah, I totally want to help, but only if I find the work satisfying.”
“Yeah, I totally want to help, but only when I’m available.”
“Yeah, I totally want to help, but only if it’s something I’m really good at.”
“Yeah, I totally want you to feel supported. I also know that you know I’m really busy, so by ‘help,’ you’re just asking me to be interested, think about it sometimes, and offer a hand or idea if the moment seems right… right?”
“Yeah, totally. And that job description you just asked me to commit to seems fair enough. But I also know you contacted me because I’m bringing my own skills and interests to the table, so I’m just going to adjust it to fit what works for me. That’s cool, right?”
“Yeah, totally. … and by ‘help’ you mean ‘sleep together,’ right? Oh, I knew you were looking at me that way for a reason. Of course! Just tell me where I ‘sign up’ *wink wink*.”
“Yeah, totally. And that means you’ll help on my project just as much, right?”
“Yeah, totally. I’m committed to your project and I trust your judgment. I’ll let you know if your requests don’t fit what I’m able to do, but overall, yes, I’m in. Tell me where and how.“
That last one is gold. But it’s not the same as all the ones before it, even if you want it to be.
And here’s the real kicker. The person saying “Yeah, totally” probably doesn’t know which one they mean. All they know is that they’re interested. Chances are they need to know what committing will feel like before they can affirm what they’re in for. It’s your job to help them feel it out.
It’s also your job to stay alert to the possibility that their yeah totally might mean something other than what you’re hoping for, and to work with that whenever their real interest is as soon as it becomes evident.
Accept their real interest. Be grateful for it. Don’t get bitter about it.
Unless they’re just trying to sleep with you. Then you can slap them.
The same day we launched this site, I was also a guest on the weekly Internet webcast, Tummelvision. Take a good look at these cuties, cuz I’m gonna be talking about them again around here:
That’s Deb Schultz, Kevin Marks, and Heather Gold — all tummlers who like to talk about tummeling. But first, what’s a tummler?
tumm·ler // (t
m
l
r)
n.
1. One, such as a social director or entertainer, who encourages guest or audience participation.
2. One who incites others to action.
In other words, the person who engages a group. (Kinda like a conductor, you might say…)
Here’s the full show for your listening pleasure:
Tummelvision 28 with guest Sarah Dopp
Tip: The first segment is about current events. If you want to skip to the part where we discuss Culture Conductor, jump ahead to the 39:15 mark.
Here are some more detailed notes on what was discussed in the show, with timestamps:
Read the rest of this entry »
The following interview is with Maymay, a brilliant and experienced online community organizer who operates well outside of traditional systems. His methods are fascinating, and we plan to get into greater detail on some of them soon. For now, here’s the big picture on his work.
Please note: some of the links below will take you to pages that include sexual content. Use your own judgment when you click. ~Sarah Dopp
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Q: What communities have you worked on?
A lot of my projects have had community-like aspects. When I was 14 or so, I made a website called “Ups and Downs: The Personal Story of a Bipolar Teen,” through which I received upwards of approximately 33,000 personal emails. That was very much “a community,” with forums and everything, but for me it was very different because most of the communication was private, that is, between one reader and myself.
Similar things have happened with my personal “sex blog” (mostly about sexuality and politics) at maybemaimed.com [sometimes contains sexually-explicit content], as well as my other blog where I curate and critique erotic imagery at malesubmissionart.com [contains graphic sexual content], although by the time I started Male Submission Art in 2009 there was much more intentionality on my part. While maybemaimed.com sort of functions like a forum through its comments, with people responding both to my writing and other people’s comments, I specifically opted not to include comments on Male Submission Art so that interested readers of that project would need to disperse their thoughts across the Internet. I wanted Male Submission Art to start a conversation that migrated into a lot of other spaces, rather than flock to a single, localized point.
“We held the event in New York but organized it from Australia, with no previous experience of how to do such a thing.”
To a certain extent, the weekly podcast I co-host with the very cool Emma Gross at KinkOnTap.com has engendered a community in that some listeners regularly participate in the live chat room, communicate with us and each other on Twitter (notifying us of relevant news stories), and even help us maintain show notes on our wiki. But what I would call the “Kink On Tap community” is much smaller than our general listenership.
Far and away, though, the project I work on that has most engendered what can really be considered a “community” is the KinkForAll unconference series I founded with my then-partner Sara Eileen in 2009.
Q: I’ve heard you describe your communities as “free culture.” Can you tell me what that means?
Sure. Free culture communities are fueled largely by passion, personal interest, and self-motivating forces other than money. Wikipedia is a great example.
Read the rest of this entry »
A community is a group of people who recognize that they have something in common. An online community is what they get when they interact with each other on the Internet.
Unlike blogs which have a mostly-standardized format, online communities show up in lots of different structures. These include:
- Forums and message boards
- Chat rooms
- Email discussion groups
- Blog posts
- Blog comments
- Wikis
- Community areas (groups, fan pages) within a big social networking site
- Community-specific social networking sites
- Any number of custom-feature websites, widgets, applications that let people do stuff
- Interactions happening anywhere on the Internet
Really, if you think online communities usually come in formulaic cookie-cutter websites, please go read that list again a few times. What we’re talking about here is how people want to interact — not how we think they should.
There are three other quirky things about online communities that I want to make absolutely clear:
1) The levels of commitment people have to them vary wildly. More often than we want to admit, it’s just a fleeting interest, and that’s okay. (Example: If I have a question about my HP printer and go digging through Internet forums for answers, I become part of the HP consumer support community for about an hour. And then I don’t care anymore.)
2) The levels of interaction people get into also vary wildly. See the 90-9-1 Principle: in any online community, about 90% of the people involved are just there to read (and please don’t demean this group as “lurkers” — think of how many websites you visit that you don’t say a word on!). 9% will respond to or improve the content that’s already there. And 1% will generate new content from scratch. Yes, this is an über-simplification and will vary by structure, but I can tell you from my own experience that it’s accurate enough.
3) The uniting factor for a community can be pretty much anything. Pick any combination of people, places, things, identities, experiences, and ideas. If people have it in common, there’s a potential community there. This isn’t to say that every topic is worth putting energy into, but please: if you have a limiting idea in your head about what people actually care about, now’s a good time to ditch it.
Now this leads us to the next question: “When does an online community need a manager?”
Not always. But sometimes.
If you or your organization created the space that the community is using to interact, and if it’s important to you that the community maintains a certain level of focus or respect, then you probably need a manager.
A manager is someone who smooths out the edges, advocates for what’s most important, encourages participation, and helps people get what they need. They are not dictators. If a manager’s unchecked goal and approach is to control a community, the community will find a way to mutiny. But if they’re just there to guide it in ways that meet the goals of the group, pretty much everyone involved will be grateful.
[Originally posted on my other blog, Dopp Juice]
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