Crowdfunding in the Digital Age

By Yi Chen

I was spending ten hours a day going through over a hundred hours of footage in the fall of 2012.  Like many independent documentary filmmakers, I was working on a project I felt so passionate about that I was determined to share it with the world.

But there was one more thing left for me to figure out.  How would I finance the rest of the project?  With help from friends and my own time, the cost of production was manageable.  I was able to cover it with a small grant and a handful of donations.

However, post-production turned out to be a different story.  I planned to edit the film myself but still needed to hire professionals to do audio mixing, motion graphic, color correction, music composing, and other things.  I was lucky enough to have negotiated discounted rates with people that were going to work on the project.  I had a talented team and a relatively reasonable budget.  A multi-thousand dollar check was the only thing that stood in my way.

Where could I get the money?  Well, things don’t look so promising with federal and state arts agencies.  Their annual appropriations have continued to decline in recent years.  I also live in the District, where the number of grantmakers with funding interests in arts and culture is less than 1% among the entire country, according to the Foundation Center’s research.

Even if the project were awarded a grant, the process would take many months and I might be required to raise additional matching funds.  On the other hand, the film’s premiere had already been scheduled, which was less than five months away.  It seemed that I was running out of time and options.  It was emotionally draining.

Is every problem an opportunity in disguise?  I don’t know, but I started looking into crowdfunding after unsuccessfully raising money through grants.  I talked to a bunch of folks who had funded their films through Indiegogo or Kickstarter.  I spent a lot of time reading articles, checking out projects and trying to understand how this crowdfunding thing works.  I even made a few pledges myself.

I learned a ton.  Back in 2007 when I was working on my first film project, crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter didn’t even exist.  Now Kickstarter has become the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects.  10% of the films at Sundance are Kickstarter-funded and 63 Kickstarter-funded films opened in theaters last year.

I began to feel hopeful in late 2012 when I decided to do a Kickstarter campaign.  Nevertheless, I was uncomfortable with the idea.  The “all-or-nothing” funding model seemed scary.  What if I didn’t reach my funding goal by the deadline?  According to the data published on Kickstarter website, about 44% of projects have reached their funding goals.  That’s less than half.

So I planned and planned.  I spent many days writing the project description, which included information about the project, what I would do with the money, what the rewards were, why it was important to tell the story and how Kickstarter works.  I then worked on the video.

Putting myself in front of the camera was not the easiest thing to do, but as I was working on it, I realized it was not about me.  It was about the characters and their stories.  It was about bringing to life a film that many people want to see exist in the world.

Finally, on January 14, 2013, I launched the campaign on Kickstarter.  I emailed as many friends as possible, and announced it on Facebook.  Pledges started to come in.  I kept building the momentum on social media by sharing the funding progress and thanking each backer.  The project was 54% funded in the first week and even got featured on Kickstarter’s homepage.

It takes a lot of work to run a Kickstarter project.  As the funding progress slowed down in the next two weeks, I had to come up with new strategies.  I posted updates, pitched to bloggers, and added pictures of the rewards.  The “all-or-nothing” funding model turned out to be amazingly effective in rallying people around a project.

Hawaii based filmmaker Robin Lung raised $18,744 for “Finding KUKAN,” a feature documentary about the Academy Award winning film KUKAN and the Chinese American woman behind the making of it.  As a donor herself, she found herself more engaged with projects on Kickstarter because “I had a stake in whether the project is successful or not.  I even increased my pledge so that people could reach their goal.”  She felt Indiegogo wasn’t as engaging because she knew the filmmaker was going to get her donation whether the goal was reached or not, and she “never checked back to see how the projects were doing.”

Crowdfunding is more than just giving someone money.  It’s also about building a community.  A New York based filmmaker Ursula Liang, who was also making a Chinatown related documentary, raised $40,591 for her documentary just a month before I launched mine.  She came across my project on Kickstarter and decided to share her experience with me.  I found it really valuable to have people who care about the story and want to see it made as much as I do.  If people like a project, they can make it happen.  That is crowdfunding.

On February 15, 2013, 128 backers made my documentary project happen.  You cannot imagine how excited I was.  In 1784, Mozart took a similar path.  He offered manuscripts to those who pledged to fund his concerts in a Viennese concert hall.  176 backers made enough pledge to bring his Lenten concerts to life.  Mozart thanked the subscribers in his manuscript.  Kickstarter is a reinvention of that in the digital age.

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