In 2009, Isabel Draves created Leaders in Software and Art (L.I.S.A.), a membership organization for artists who use technology in their work in an original way. She began by hosting a monthly speaker series on topics related to the convergence of art and technology. The success of those events spurred her to think about organizing a full-day conference to showcase the artists and introduce them to others who might want to work together. To test the viability of the idea—and to generate start-up funds—Draves turned to Kickstarter.
Her campaign was a success. By the time it closed in mid-September 2012, nearly 200 donors had contributed more than $18,000, exceeding her goal of $13,000. Draves hosted the first L.I.S.A. Conference one month later at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and she says the experience of using Kickstarter to fund her conference taught her many things. “It’s kind of like a free billboard that allows you to show off what you have planned. But that doesn’t mean you don’t still have to sell your product,” she says. “And it doesn’t mean there’s not still a whole lot of work involved.”
For Draves, the work began about a year before she wanted the campaign to open, starting with scripting, shooting, and producing a video that she could post on her Kickstarter page to explain the conference concept. She also developed a tentative agenda with speakers, which she detailed on the page, to give donors confidence that she had already invested time and thought into how she would produce the conference. “You need to show your customers what they are buying. And you have to actually be prepared fulfill what they bought,” she says. “I think sometimes people underestimate the amount of work it takes to do all that.”
But the critical factor in her success, she says, was that she had a clear understanding of her potential audience and they had already demonstrated an interest in her monthly gatherings. Crowdfunding consultant Rose Spinelli says knowing one’s audience and what matters to it is the first step in developing a successful campaign. “And you need a content strategy, giving people valuable information so that when it’s time to build an actual event they see you as a source of something of value,” she says. “I tell people, if you want to run a crowdfunding campaign, it’s at least a three- to six-month process of building an audience. You can’t just blow in and ask for money.”
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The value of having strong connections with her target audience became apparent to Draves in the final days of her effort. A crowdfunding campaign is only funded if the funding goal is fully met; otherwise none of the donors are charged and the organizer gets nothing. (According to Kickstarter, about 40 percent of all projects on its site reach their funding goals.) When Draves realized she was about $3,000 shy of her goal, she began making calls and sending emails to potential donors asking them to “dig deep,” she says.
She also learned what she calls her most valuable lesson: timing is everything. Draves had scheduled her campaign to close in mid-September, meaning she was trying to make that critical push for donations while many people were on vacation around Labor Day weekend. “It was so stupid. When the thing is closing, that’s when you need to put in the time, that’s when you need to be able to make phone calls and be on social media and say, ‘Hey, I need you.’ I remember trying to tell people over Labor Day and nobody was around.”
But her last-minute effort ultimately worked, funding the conference that attracted nearly 300 people that first year. The following year, Draves created a second Kickstarter campaign, but with a different strategy. “I was doing the conference no matter what. I used Kickstarter as a vehicle for raising money and selling tickets, and not as a way to figure out whether to have the conference or not,” she says. While she met her funding goal again—and hosted the conference in November 2013 at the Tishman Auditorium at the New School in New York—she also concluded that crowdfunding is most appropriate for a new event. “It feels more like an invention platform than a sustainability platform,” she says. “You are capitalizing on that excitement of the first time you are putting something out there. The first time you go out to your community they think it’s awesome. The second time they’re like, ‘We funded your Kickstarter last year.’”
For existing events, crowdfunding can be an effective way to fund a specific aspect or a new feature. Jesse Horwood, program development coordinator for the Victoria Ska Festival, created a campaign on Indiegogo to ensure the festival could continue to keep two days of the five-day event free for attendees. “We do free shows every year, and we are dependent on grants to maintain them, and last year we had some that never came through that we were expecting,” he says. “So we did this sort of as a way to protect ourselves in the future against grants and scholarships not coming in. Our paid concerts are sustainable and pay for themselves, but our free concerts cost us a lot of money.” Most crowdfunding campaigns provide perks, such as T-shirts, recognition in event materials, V.I.P. access, or discounted tickets, that are tied to specific funding levels. Horwood says he added new perks each week of his eight-week campaign to give people a reason to keep visiting and sharing the site.
Indiegogo founder Danae Ringelmann says perks help planners to create better engagement with donors. “The perk infrastructure allows people to have that sense of emotional ownership. They maybe can’t do a $2,000 package that a company could do, but they can do $50 and that gets their name on the entryway. Suddenly anyone can be a sponsor,” she says. In addition to perks, Ringelmann suggests planners clearly explain how the money will be used. “Build optionality into it. For example, if we raise $5,000 we’ll bring this many more speakers, or we’ll do it this many more days,” she says. “It puts the power of what type of event this will be into the hands of the attendee, and that makes them more loyal and more engaged in coming because they feel like they are part of the creation process. That’s a compelling thing and that’s how you build virality.”
With most crowdfunding systems, the monetary goal cannot be changed once a campaign is live, so planners need to understand exactly how much money they need to host their events. “Some will set it too low or too high and both ways it may fail. If it’s too low, you may meet the goal but it’s not enough to really create a successful event. Or it’s too high and unattainable,” says Robbie Simpson, community manager for Picatic, an online ticketing company.
Spinelli says there are about 1,000 crowdfunding platforms in existence, so planners should allow time to look for a system that will fit their needs and make the process as easy as possible. Some offer additional event management features, such as Tilt, which has partnered with EventJoy to provide ticketing and mobile check-in at events funded through its system.
