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Kickstarter raises money online for artistic endeavors, tapping into Portland ethos
[May 29, 2010]

Kickstarter raises money online for artistic endeavors, tapping into Portland ethos


May 29, 2010 (The Oregonian - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- It's kind of a high-tech form of passing the hat.

People with a cool idea or cool project, but not enough money, meet people -- local or global -- who can fund it, in small pieces, with the twist that the money they pledge will be collected from them only if the project reaches 100 percent of its funding goal.



It's called Kickstarter, and it has given members of Portland's artistic and technical communities one more itch that they can scratch by firing up their smart phones, iPads and computers.

In essence, Kickstarter allows people with creative projects to build pages on the site to describe the work they hope to do and the costs they face, and, crucially, to offer various rewards and benefits to potential backers in exchange for pledges of support. They share samples of their previous works, describe their new projects with audio or video clips, and provide links to more robust websites related to the project at hand. Naturally, many use their blogs and Facebook and Twitter accounts to help drive traffic to their campaigns. The hope is that their fundraising effort will go viral, providing them with capital and their backers with some nifty goodies and a sense of a communal job well done.


Kickstarter's chief technology officer has a name for it: "crowd-funding." "It leverages social media across the creative community," says Andy Baio of Portland, who also created the calendar site Upcoming.org. He says the New York-based Kickstarter isn't precisely microfinancing, which, as Baio explains, "implies investment. But we don't allow people to offer equity to their backers or promise a return." Instead of a percentage of a new venture, Kickstarter campaigns offer a variety of rewards in exchange for money: goodies ranging from nominal thank-you's for folks who contribute, oh, $5; to such perks as exclusive digital downloads, limited-edition CDs or books or DVDs for more generous backers; to major rewards such as private concerts, screenings or private tuition in various creative crafts. Kickstarter itself is a motivated partner in seeing that projects succeed: It takes a 5 percent cut of all fees received by projects on its site, but, again, only if the projects meet their funding goals.

That may not sound like an easy way to raise the thousands required to, say, fund an independent movie, record or book. But, says Portland filmmaker Andy Blubaugh, who raised $6,000 on Kickstarter to finish his latest, "The Adults in the Room," every investment mattered: "It may look like just $5, but it could very well have been THE $5. Who's to say which was the bit of support that put us over the top?" That question of being put over the top is vital because of a twist in Kickstarter's model: If a project doesn't reach 100 percent of its financing goal in the time designated for the campaign, none of the backers is required to contribute a penny. It's win-or-go-home.

"That all-or-nothing aspect feeds the social momentum," says Baio, who eventually sold Upcoming.org to Yahoo, which has had success with the site. "If your project doesn't succeed, you're not on the hook for rewards. But, in fact, if you get to 20 percent, you succeed 90 percent of the time. As projects get closer to their deadlines, contributors start to promote them independently to their friends, partly to get the rewards, partly to see the project succeed. Huge floods of support start to develop. There are almost zero failures at 50 percent or more of funding." Kickstarter has gained traction in a variety of creative communities, and not just Portland's. After launching in late April 2009, Kickstarter helped people find $60,000 in its first month; by March, that number leaped to $1.5 million. Its most famous campaign has been for New York-based Diaspora, an open-source alternative to Facebook; the four programmers behind the project needed $10,000 to buy time to work on it; people contributed nearly $190,000 -- a startling 1,892 percent -- days before its deadline.

Kickstarter found a natural home in Portland, a town where various creative tribes -- musicians, filmmakers, comic book writers and artists, food cart chefs, knitters and crafters, software developers and more -- have a long history of supporting one another both online and in the flesh.

"Portland and Kickstarter go together really well," says Michelle Anderson, a writer and multimedia producer engaged in a Kickstarter campaign at this very moment. "In other cities, there may be more technology or more offline activities, but here the online activities steer people to the offline activities. And we're really good at joining creative projects and volunteering." Anderson is nearly finished with a genre-smashing semi-autobiographical multimedia memoir, "The Miracle in July," and she needs to visit Denmark to shoot video of some of the most important locations in the story. Her Kickstarter campaign -- she's trying to raise $5,000 -- runs until 11 p.m. Wednesday. She's keeping a keen eye on its progress. And she's used some of her real-world connections to nudge it along, throwing a party that drew on her ties to Portland's tech and music communities.

Emerging artists aren't the only ones benefiting from Kickstarter. A number of Portland creatives have used Kickstarter to seek support for projects you might not necessarily think required outside financing.

Chloe Eudaly is the owner-operator of Reading Frenzy, the famed alternative publishing house and zine-and-book shop. She recently raised $14,752 for a new issue of the legendary underground zine "Crap Hound" -- $2,202 more than she sought.

"We've been around for 15 years and have a large and loyal customer base," Eudaly says. "But we still struggle. In the last few years we've put out calls for support and there have been some really generous efforts to raise money for us with rock shows. But those have only raised a few thousand dollars. Kickstarter allowed us to connect with support that was out there but we had no means of accessing." The variety of Portland projects that have succeeded or are currently in progress: several filmmaking and music-recording projects (including new works by bands 3 Leg Torso and Pancake Breakfast), a pair of enterprises devoted to new clothing lines (Viong and Wear Your Veggies), a series of comic books depicting Oregon history (Oregon History Comics), a meat-curer smoking specialized flavors of bacon (The Ethical Butcher), and a combat robot being built by a pair of high schoolers (Wonderblend).

If this all sounds a little idealistic, it's important to note that not every project on Kickstarter succeeds. Dave Vahey, a Washington filmmaker, sought $24,000 for a documentary about three climbers who died on Mount Hood last December. His campaign netted $345. But he doesn't blame Kickstarter for the project's failure. "It's an amazing tool," he says. "But we knew we couldn't rely on any single tool to make or break things. We always knew it wasn't going to be essential to our project. But it would have been nice." Gil Luna, a Portland filmmaker whose campaign for $1,000 garnered only $100, says the experience has taught him things. "I see it has some really good potential," he says. "I am still examining where I went wrong in marketing my project. ... I'm willing to try it again, but I need some answers first." Kickstarter can also give creators feedback -- positive or negative -- about their projects. "It's a great way to test out ideas," says Reading Frenzy's Eudaly. "Browsing through the site is like an ad-hoc think tank from all over the world." Of course, if it's your idea out there on the vine waiting to be favored by backers, some of the exhilaration of using Kickstarter can be laced with terror. As Portland filmmaker Blubaugh learned, even if you don't need the money, the momentum of a Kickstarter campaign brings its own joys and intensities.

"At the beginning, the drama was pretty low," he recalls of his campaign to raise completion funds for his film, "because we didn't have a vital need. And we didn't invest a lot of work in it, not compared to what goes into a grant application, where you're one of many people competing for a finite number of slots. But when it got down to one week to go and we were nearly there, we were looking at kissing more than $4,000 goodbye, and that was nerve-racking." In the end, Blubaugh's campaign exceeded its $6,000 goal by $420.

Sometimes the best intentions don't mean much compared with the reality that you are, in fact, trying to get strangers to fund what is often a small, personal project. In Eudaly's case, an initial burst of funding for "Crap Hound" slowed when the Haitian earthquake diverted its potential backers to another sort of charitable giving.

As in other forms of social media, participation is a two-way street: It's very common for people seeking funding to learn about -- and then become backers of -- the projects of others. "It was really attractive to discover a whole new philanthropy-minded community," says multimedia memoirist Anderson. "Soon after I started my project, I backed two different projects, and one of them was a band who gave me a free MP3 that I wound up using in 'The Miracle in July.'" That sort of person-to-person effort is, according to Kickstarter's Baio, the essence of the site: "It lets you leverage your online communities for your project. You start with your friends and their friends, and if you're lucky it can go viral from there." --Shawn Levy To see more of The Oregonian, or to subscribe the newspaper, go to http://www.oregonian.com. Copyright (c) 2010, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.

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