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]

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?

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.

Maymay and ‘Free Culture’ Community Building

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.

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 »

Getting the Whole World to Dance

Here’s about as clear a snapshot as you can get of a Culture Conductor…

Watching this never fails to choke me up, and I wish I could articulate why.

Here’s how he organized it (mostly online)…

You can check out the rest of the project at http://wherethehellismatt.com.

What’s an Online Community and When Does It Need a Manager?

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]