Kickstarter is a funding website which, well, kickstarts your creative project by finding funding for you. It allows you to publicise what you are doing and find numerous people who like the idea and will pledge a small amount of the funding you need to reach your total. Since starting they have found over twenty million Dollars for projects.
In our current economic downturn, where arts funding is one of the first things to be reduced, any service which will help finance creative projects has to be a good idea. Major government and institutional funders are either reducing their support for the arts or becoming more picky and less speculative. Sites like Kickstarter help reduce the impact of this.
So, how does it work? You sign up to Kickstarter.com for free, put together details about your project, make a video to shout about it, decide how much funding you need and ‘publish’ it on the site.
Visitors to the site find what you are doing and if they like it they can pledge an amount of money (any amount they wish). It seems that the average pledge is around $68 and a common pledge is $25 but you can offer thousands or a few Dollars.
This is an all or nothing process so, if, for any reason, you do not reach your funding target in the time you set, no one pays and you don’t get the funding. As Kickstarter explain, “ ...no one is expected to develop a project with an insufficient budget, which sucks. Remember you set your own funding goal, so aim to raise the minimum amount you'll need to create your vision. Projects can always raise more than their goal, and often do.”
The service is ONLY for creative projects (not charity or loan speculation for example). They believe that “creativity deserves its own space” - and we second that emotion here at WeLikeArtists. The average project raises under $10,000.00, but it seems many have raised more. Take a look at the selection of projects and you will see there are some looking for very small amounts of funding.
Kickstarter take a 5% administration fee from your total funding amount and their payment processor takes a credit card processing fee of 3-5%. You get the rest. You also get to keep 100% ownership of the funded project, which should be an important consideration in any funding process.
The site is US-based, as can be seen by all this talk of 'Dollars' and there is an irritating restriction for the millions of creatives who do not live in the States. To use the service you have to have a US bank account - a restriction placed by Kickstarters payment agency (Amazon payments). They are looking at ways to solve this and, if they do, we will certainly let you know.
In the meantime, you can pledge funding to any of the projects on the site, no matter where you are in the world, using major credit cards. So, get that warm and fuzzy feeling of becoming a patron of the arts and pledge your support (and cash) for one of the projects on Kickstarter. To say there is an interesting selection would be an understatement!
For an interview with Perry Chen, one of Kickstarter's funders, which was recently published one the Economist website, visit here.
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
