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]
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:
- 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…
- 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:
- Go to facebook.com/groups
- Click “Create Group”
- 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).
- That’s it. Now go forth and nurture your brand new Facebook community.
image by Kyle Wegner, used via Creative Commons
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 »
Photo by Veesees, used by Creative Commons license
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.
Photo by Laurie White
Denise Tanton is the Community Manager for the women’s blogging network site, BlogHer.com. She’s been rocking this role at BlogHer throughout some major growth and changes at the company, and has picked up a great deal of patience and wisdom in the process. I hope you enjoy her reflections as much as I did. ~Sarah Dopp
Q: How would you explain BlogHer to someone who’s never heard of it before?
BlogHer.com is an online community for women who blog, enjoy reading blogs, want to discuss (and debate) topics that are important to them, or are looking for a community of women to connect with.
Q: How would you describe your role in the community?
Oh good (and complicated) question! My role is to make sure that BlogHer.com reflects the diversity of our community.
“Talk to bloggers — a lot of bloggers — and listen to every word they say.”
Q: How do people interact with each other and express themselves at BlogHer.com?
Community members have a lot of different tools that they can use to connect with each other or showcase their writing. Members can create blog posts, join groups, create discussion posts, and comment on all of the BlogHer.com content. We also provide a 140 character on-site microblogging tool called Chatter that allows small groups of BlogHer members to talk to each other (filtering out some of the noise of Twitter) or promote their work quickly on BlogHer.com, while at the same time also sending their message out to Twitter.
Q: What are some things you do as a community manager that help keep the space so supportive and interesting?
Way back in the early days of BlogHer.com, I read every single word that was published on the site – every comment, every blog post, every link – to make sure that members (and potential members) were confident that they were participating in a site that was welcoming, inclusive and free from spam or hate speech. I still read almost every word but now I’ve got a wee bit of help so I can skip a few words here and there.
I answer a ton of email – every email that comes across the Help Desk is answered by a real person and that person is generally me, especially if it involves questions about how to use BlogHer.com tools, or serious questions about our Community Guidelines.
Answering questions posted by members, on BlogHer.com, is one of the most important things that I can do for the community, so I monitor areas where members most often ask them. I also try to interact with members of the community by responding to blog posts that they write, by visiting blogs that they list in the HerNetwork directory, and talking to them in Chatter.
As part of the editorial team, I’m always the first person to ask, “Where’s the alternative point of view?” when we’re talking about assigning or syndicating content. We aren’t just moms, we’re also childfree by choice. We don’t all love bacon, a whole lot of us are vegan. We aren’t all straight, we’re GLBTQ and polyamorous too.
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