Salon.com > Crowdfunding

Kickstarter might get you audited

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:44:00 +0000

“Crowdfunding isn’t a magic bullet,” Amanda Palmer once told the Daily Dot in regards to her blockbuster $1.1 million Kickstarter campaign.

“You can’t crowdfund without a crowd, and you can’t start a project from scratch and get people interested in it. You need to have some degree of reach and some small starting point. You need someone to send that link to.”

Since launching in 2009, Kickstarter has gone from a last-ditch resort to the method of choice for artists looking to fund their next creative endeavor. The platform has revolutionized the entertainment industry, allowing artists to turn directly to their online audience for financial support and, in doing so, freeing them from the pressure and restraints often associated with major-label contracts. In the last two years alone, more than $55 million has been raised for roughly 8,000 music-related projects.

A crowd-funding role model dies

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 15:42:00 +0000

"The lesson here isn't, 'Social media to the rescue.'" That's what Arijit Guha told me last summer, when I spoke to him about his public battle with Aetna insurance and his efforts to crowd-fund his way through his colon cancer treatment. And when Guha died in his home in Arizona on Saturday at age 32, he had not, in the end, been rescued by social media. But social media was changed for the better by him, in ways that will long continue to embolden and unite other patients dealing with the random viciousness of disease, and the capriciousness of our healthcare system.

In what has become an increasingly necessary strategy, the Arizona State graduate student quickly went into entrepreneur mode when he learned he had Stage 4 cancer. Guha created the cheeky, self-aware Poop Strong site to collect donations and sell merchandise to cover his medical bills and then, later, to support local wellness initiatives. When Aetna informed him he'd reached his insurance cap, he called out the company in an articulate, impassioned Twitter conversation that ultimately brought its CEO Mark T. Bertolini into the fray – and got him results.

Can crowdfunding kickstart struggling cities?

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:34:00 +0000

The belts can’t get much tighter for local governments. As tax bases have shrunk, teachers have been laid off, the number of sheriff’s deputies and jail beds have decreased, and library hours have been reduced.

Citizens feel a need to act to be invested in their communities. Most civic projects led by private citizens tend to be restricted to groups of people with a specific interest—whether they share specific political views or just want to see a tennis court built in their neighborhood. But with crowdfunding gaining ground and companies like Kickstarter thriving, thought has turned to how public projects might be privately funded by a much broader base of donors.

These are the early days of crowdfunding local public projects. (Think of it as holding Internet bake sales for anything from a hiking trail to a bookmobile.) But already a number of organizations and companies have launched funding platforms to allow people with a civic goal to gather money for it online. While the problems with such platforms are many and daunting, some progress has already been made.

“Crowdfunding” brings science back to the masses

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 20:00:00 +0000

On the Good.is website right now is an appeal from Tyler Alterman, a matriculating neuroscientist and self-described scientific detective, seeking cash support for The Think Tank, his lab-on-wheels. This rolling experimentation station will travel the New York metro area to teach the masses about cognition and to draw them into studies about brain function.

Here’s “the plan,” as taken from Alterman’s appeal page at IndieGoGo:

A model, taken from the IndieGoGo appeal page, of what The Think Tank would look like. It was originally going to be dubbed the “Brainmobile.”

The Kickstarter solution

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 17:46:00 +0000

Kickstarter, the creative project crowd-funding site, announced this week that in 2012, "2,241,475 people pledged a total of $319,786,629 and successfully funded 18,109 projects." The numbers represent impressive growth for the 3-year-old company. "The money total blew away 2011 by 221 percent," reported Wired, "and the number of backers grew a corresponding 238 percent."

Almost half the total cash pledged fell into the categories of gaming and "film and video." The emphasis on creativity has led some observers to call Kickstarter "the People's NEA (National Endowment for the Arts)" or, more jargonistically, "an arts organization for the post-gatekeeper era." Meaning: We, the people, decide whose movie or game or funky art installation gets the green light, and not some bean counter in Hollywood or New York, or government bureaucrat constrained by shifting political winds.

Amanda Palmer still doesn’t get it

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 15:48:00 +0000

The generosity and collaborative creativity of the online community are unparalleled. Just don't push your luck.

Earlier this year, the entrepreneurial singer Amanda Palmer made headlines when she drummed up $1.2 million for her new project on Kickstarter, making it one of the most successful crowd-funding ventures ever. Palmer called the enterprise "the future of music" and released her "Theater Is Evil" album to respectable reviews a few weeks ago. And as she prepared for her tour, she called upon the crowd yet again.

In an Aug. 21 blog post, she said she and her band were "looking for professional-ish horns and strings for EVERY CITY to hop up on stage with us for a couple of tunes," and that "we will feed you beer, hug/high-five you up and down (pick your poison), give you merch, and thank you mightily for adding to the big noise we are planning to make."

For a successful artist to offer audiences the opportunity to participate in her show might well be seen as a bold gesture. It could be a chance to create something new and unique every night. As Palmer promised, "its almost as good as the circus." [sic]