What Makes an Engaging Crowd Funding Campaign?

By Jessica King

As artists (film makers, writers, poets, painters, baby makers, etc), we have to be in love with our own stuff. It’s the thing that propels us to make more stuff.  However, in order to gain some perspective, sometimes you have to stop and listen to what other people are saying.

While we were in the midst of our Kickstarter fund raiser for TILT, we thought we were doing a good job (“Is this good? It’s good, right?”), but we were pleased to get some feedback that validated our gut feelings. Here’s just one example:

Congratulations, TILT team! This campaign was a joy to back and totally rewarding to follow. I’m so fortunate to have become aware of so many of the other backers as a result of Phil, Julie, and Jessica’s tireless social media outreach. You worked hard to get the message out there and it paid off. I’m a fan till the end. — Christopher Harley

Why, thank you, Christopher!  Now – how did we do that?

Collective Community

Engagement is a big buzzword in the social media world as well as in education- which is where I spend a lot of my time and energy.  There is a time and a place for lectures, but for optimal learning and team-making, lectures don’t work, people (be they kids, teenagers, or adults) need to be engaged and active.  People don’t generally want to be “talked at.” They want to feel like they’re a part of something.  They want to be active participants.  If I want my students to really learn, I need to get them to engage collectively as a community around a group of key concepts, skills, and questions.  We then practice working with those concepts and skills until we’re proficient in many different contexts.  Of course, when building an audience, you don’t have to make your audience proficient at anything, but you do need to engage them in a similar way.

So, as a filmmaker or an artist, how do you create a community?  Easy: involve people.  Ask them questions.  Invite them to play, both with you and with each other.  People like to play; it makes them happy.  When we play with each other, we feel invested in one another.  When we feel invested in one another, we feel happy, important, and safe. And happy. (Have we said happy yet?)

How do you not create a community? Only talk about yourself.

Who’s the Beef?

If you look closely at our campaign, it was never about us.  More importantly, it was never about money.   It was about being a part of something special and, again, not about OUR something special – just something special out in the world.  Instead of just saying “Hey, our movie is special,” we decided to create an experience related to (but separate from) the movie that gave (gives) our audience something to explore and rally around.  That experience is TILTtheTown.

Being part of TILTtheTown is special.  Why?  Because we created a character for every eligible backer (over 200), a character lovingly crafted to delight, surprise, and intrigue, a character that could interact with other characters… and, boy, did they interact.  From Mari Kivisto’s raucous interactions with director Juliane Block about whether or not Juliane could teach her some burlesque moves from her job at TILTtheTown’s Carnival Burlesque, The Spice Rack, to Paul Barrett and Justin Hedges’ hilarious banter back and forth about their positions on the TILTtheTown “gnome issue”:

Actual #TILTtheTown messages from Twitter:

@producerpaul @debaucheddiva I especially enjoyed the lap dance I got from the #gnome in #TILTtheTown

@booksbelow @mojave44 I put No Trespassing signs all over the island! But of course I’m just a squatter! #TILTtheTown

@JustinWHedges #TILTtheTown BREAKING NEWS: Gerald ‘Gnomey’ Gnomeberger was released by the Elven Peoples Front 30 minutes ago w/out comment.

@kingisafink I bet @grking‘s on it. RT @shericandler #TILTtheTown Tattler headline: “Mayor Barrett (@producerpaul) in Misconduct Scandal. With Goats.”

Because there was such a flurry of activity in and around TILTtheTown, we focused on promoting that and eventually didn’t even have to because our backers were doing it for us. Free advertising in exchange for tickling their fancies? Sign us up!

“Getting to Know YOU. Getting to know all about YOU.”

Engagement also means providing regular updates and insight into who you are as an artist.  Early on we made sure to give 1-2 updates per week.  Why?  To show our appreciation, to show that we’re invested, and to show our backers that they matter.

We also searched for other ways for people to really become invested in our project.  People tend to forget that this new model is really quite bizarre. We’re pre-selling our work.  People who contribute are taking a huge leap of faith that we’re going to deliver on our promise (which we absolutely will).  So when you’re embarking on a project like the TILT fund raiser, you have to think to yourself: “What can I give them right now to keep them active and interested?”

The answer: give them the only thing that no one else can… yourself.  Phil did this beautifully with the daily “Coffee with Phil” updates. (Scroll back to see Phil’s videos here.)  This was a way to let our backers get up close and personal, which led to even tighter connections to our project. Why was Phil perfect for this? Because he’s is incredibly down to earth and personable. Also, he’s easy on the eyes.

But we didn’t go overboard with the “get to know us” stuff, because we knew that there was something even more important…

“Getting to Know THEM, Getting to Know All About THEM.”

One-way communication is NOT engaging.  One-way communication is a turn off.  Too often, people in the middle of their own fund raising campaigns will provide update after update on what he’s doing, who he’s added to his team, what he’s eating for breakfast, and this can leave people cold.   Sometimes you can get away with only talking about yourself if you’re REALLY famous or REALLY entertaining.  However, even if you fit one of those two criteria, we still think you’re missing the boat. One of the things that the internet has really done is open up possibilities for communication.  And now people expect (and, quite frankly, deserve) to participate in the communities they find interesting.

In order to make sure our backers got a chance to participate in TILT fun, when people backed us, we tried to learn about them. Every time we got a new backer, there was a burst of sleuthing activity on our end.  We checked out their Kickstarter profile to see if they’d listed websites and Twitter accounts, or if they’d backed other projects. If we could find something to promote, we’d try to promote it. If they were on Twitter, we’d play with them.  Our goal: to personally thank anyone who contributed and touch base with them in case they wanted to be part of the fun.

Not everyone wants to participate in online fun, by the way. Some people backed TILT but didn’t provide contact info. These kind souls were happy to boost our project and then sit back and watch from the side lines.  And that’s okay.  We didn’t try to drag anyone out onto the TILTtheTown dance floor or make them do anything they didn’t feel comfortable doing.  Hooray for the quiet backers, the wall flowers, the lurkers, and the silent supporters.  We hope we’re entertaining you.

Do YOU have any thoughts (as a backer, a lurker, a film maker, a fellow crowd funding fundraiser runner, etc.) on what a successful crowd funding campaign should include? Please share!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 10:32 am. It is filed under FILM and tagged with crowd-funding, engagement, Kickstarter, TILTtheTown, transmedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.