Crowdfunding – Where is the money? (by Lukas Palm)

We have been asking ourselves how to reach the people who'd love to support our project. Where are they? What kind of interests could they have and how do we get them to spend money on our venture? Two weeks from now, we will start our engines and hit the road to Eastern Europe. Money is one of our fuels. Money means gas, acommodation, insurance, technical supplies and vans. All projects need money to get started. We are just one of them. So the question is: What makes us special? What makes us memorable?

All you need is love

Our passion is what drives us - our passion for performing music that evokes emotions, for building a community that cannot wait to catch us live and our passion for making an awesome movie out of our adventures. By sharing our passion online with people they can join the tour online and follow the whole process, instead of just getting a finished film.

What's the story, morning glory?

So how can we motivate these people to support us? FilmTiki says: tell a story, tell it to the right people and tell it well!

One of the most important elements of a story is a well-outlined arc. This doesn't only include the timeline for our tour, but also the complete development of the project. We tell our story online, but the rules of engagement are the same as in movies or books. But we are using a variety of means to tell our story – music, text, film, pictures - the main challenge for us is to combine these media. In order to create a community, our story and characters have to fascinate our visitors. They have to feel the urge to continually be informed about the progress of the tour and the characters. It is essential that they can identify with the band and the team. To achieve this, we need to be personal and authentic.

Reach out!

However, telling a story is only one thing. We have to tell it to people who want to listen and engage with us. Finding our audience is our second challenge! Students and musicians could be interested in our tour. To reach them and other people we are building a community via blogs, twitter, facebook, myspace, etc. We are inviting everyone who we know, friends, groups, other projects. Then we look for special blogs and pages that discuss music or other related topics.

And we always have to stay on the ball. New information and updates are keeping the project alive. The most effective way is to get other people to talk and blog about your project.

Show me the money!

But how can our community support us? What is the most effective way to donate money? FilmTiki’s advice is: It has to be easy. The easier it is to donate; the more likely we'll get a donation. FilmTiki uses indiegogo, a great crowdfunding platform. We can embed the link on our blog and link it to indigogo and we don’t need a American bank account. Furthermore, indigogo is kind of a community itself, which makes it likely that people stumble over our project just by visiting indiegogo.

We are offering our potential supporters different perks as a thank you for their donation. We also made a small crowdfunding video. With this we hope to encourage people to donate. We are not anymore an anonymous group of guys, and people can get a better picture of us.  This might just be the main ingredient to a good crowdfunding strategy. We are excited to see how it works out…

For more crowdfunding information check out Emu's post on our blog.

For my next post I'll make you a small making-of video. Stay tuned!