{"id":23,"date":"2012-02-27T16:21:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-27T16:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/spblog\/2012\/02\/27\/fundraising-questions-no-answers\/"},"modified":"2015-05-29T04:28:04","modified_gmt":"2015-05-29T04:28:04","slug":"fundraising-questions-no-answers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/fundraising-questions-no-answers\/","title":{"rendered":"Fundraising questions &#8211; no answers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Should an artist be fundraiser for herself? Are grants or individual supporters a better approach? How does an artist to do a successful fundraiser?<\/p>\n<p>I started the Spindrift Commissioning Guild because I believe support from many individuals is a democratic, broad-based way to connect with my community, current and potential fans, and people willing to support my new music on a small, realistic scale. I became interested in crowd-funding platforms like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kickstarter.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Kickstarter<\/a>, since they were a practical implementation of my Guild idea. I was excited and pleased to find out that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fracturedatlas.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Fractured Atlas<\/a>, my fiscal sponsor <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fracturedatlas.org\/site\/fiscal\/profile?id=2878\" target=\"_blank\"> (Sp Guild at Fractured Atlas)<\/a>, started a partnership last year with two crowd-funding sites, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rockethub.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">RocketHub<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.indiegogo.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">IndieGo-Go<\/a>. I did a 60-day online fundraiser at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rockethub.com\/4144\" target=\"_blank\">RocketHub for my Spindrift Commissioning Guild 2012 projects<\/a> ending in January 2012.<\/p>\n<p>So how did it work out? I\u2019m left with more questions than answers.<\/p>\n<p>First, very few people I talked to knew what Kickstarter or online crowd-funding was. So my personal community didn\u2019t overlap with a very big online community of supporters. I needed to rev up my online social networking. During my fundraiser,\u00a0 I spent a lot of\u00a0 social-networking time connecting with more people and figuring out what to say on Facebook and starting up with Twitter (@SpindriftMusic). I wasn\u2019t too interactive before I started the campaign. I trained myself to pay more attention online;\u00a0 I enjoyed seeing more of what my friends are doing, and I sprinkled Likes onto interesting ideas and projects and commentary. Now, can I keep up some amount of online participation?<\/p>\n<p>I did raise a good amount in my fundraiser, half of my ambitious goal. However, offline contributions from two generous patrons made up 4\/5ths of the total. I didn\u2019t achieve the broad-based support of many donors making small contributions. What does this mean? Did I not have the right message? Do friends not know enough of my music to care about it? Are people not interested in making small donations, or any donations? There are a lot of projects clamoring for support when you start looking for them.<\/p>\n<p>My first reaction was that I wanted to do a survey to find out how people want to support art-making. These questions nipped at me:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>How do people find new music experiences<\/li>\n<li>How do people support music with their dollars (e.g. buy tickets, buy recordings, donate, don\u2019t support)<\/li>\n<li>Are people interested in dealing with artists directly<\/li>\n<li>Do people prefer a curated experience &#8212; donating to arts organizations and buying from record labels<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>There\u2019s a lot of variation in ways to ask these questions. Putting a survey out there wouldn\u2019t really help. I\u2019d need the reach of a big randomized sample for it to really tell anything, and that wouldn\u2019t tell me anything about how I personally interact with my community.<\/p>\n<p>So what do I do? First, I keep writing the music I want to write, in partnership with performers who want to play it. I\u2019ve also done a web site redesign so people can find music more easily.\u00a0 Then I get the new music performed and recorded so more people can hear it. Maybe I apply for some grants, but I must spend some more time in the recording studio!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Should an artist be fundraiser for herself? Are grants or individual supporters a better approach?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[131,129],"tags":[2,43,44,42],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-music-business","tag-crowd-funding","tag-fractured-atlas","tag-rockethub","tag-spindrift-commissioning-guild"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":243,"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions\/243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spindrift.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}