New crowd-funding websites are still popping up, so I’m not going to attempt a comprehensive list of them, but here are the main ones:

Note that most if not all of these sites charge sponsors a Paypal/Amazon fee on top of their donations.

Crowdfunding sites fall into two categories: “all or nothing” and “keep it all”. “All or nothing” sites return the money to the sponsors if you don’t reach your target by the deadline.

So why did Sophie and I choose this kind of site? A good question, and one several sponsors asked me during the campaign. Two reasons:

1. It would have been impossible to make the film for less than £2,000. Even as it is we have to raise further money.
2. A ticking clock motivates sponsors, particularly towards the end of a campaign. Undoubtedly many of the people who donated at the eleventh hour did so because they didn’t want to see us fail and get none of the money. If we would have got the money regardless, I’m sure some of those people wouldn’t have bothered contributing.

And why did we choose Crowdfunder over the other “all or nothing” sites? Mainly because Sophie’s successful Jar of Angels campaign had run on there. Also we were keen to use a site that works in sterling, because we knew most of our sponsors would be British and we thought some of them might be put off by a foreign currency.

It was only when the campaign was running that I realised Crowdfunder could be a little more streamlined. Two or three people contacted me to say they wanted to donate but couldn’t figure out how to do it. There’s no “fund now” button unless you’ve set up an account and logged in – and having to set up an account in itself puts some people off, although Crowdfunder has one of the quickest account set-up procedures I’ve ever seen on a website.

I’ve sent this feedback to Crowdfunder and hopefully they will be able to act on it in the future.

Finally a word about the rewards. We wanted to be able to send out the rewards pretty quickly after the campaign finished, so we didn’t offer anything tied to Stop/Eject itself except a thank you in the credits and a print of Sophie’s living room artwork. Instead we offered downloads and DVDs of my previous films, signed posters, and even 35mm frames from The Dark Side of the Earth‘s pilot.

Coming up with original and enticing rewards is very difficult. I’m not sure the ones we came up with were anything special, but fortunately people don’t tend to donate for the rewards. Most people just want to be part of something and help out, in which case rewards that involve them in the film – visit the set, be an extra, DVD copy, premiere invite, etc. – are probably the best way to go. I think that’s what I’ll offer next time.

I hope you’ve found these evaluation blogs interesting. Let me know how you get on with your own campaigns. Meanwhile, I’ll be back soon with news of the other fund-raising efforts which will soon kick in for Stop/Eject.

Shortly after Stop/Eject‘s crowd-funding campaign launched, I listened to a podcast in which one of the founders of Indiegogo was interviewed. She said many filmmakers target other filmmakers for donations, which is stupid because most filmmakers are broke and will spend any spare cash they do have on their own projects. She reckoned people should target the ordinary man in the street who has never heard of crowd-funding and is excited by the idea of being involved with a film.

That makes a lot of sense but it’s not quite how things worked out on Stop/Eject. So let’s have a look at what type of people did donate.

(Sorry about all the graphs, by the way. I know this site’s starting to look like a maths textbook.)

These charts tell me a few things:

1. Filmmakers are keen to help other filmmakers, but are too broke to contribute more than small amounts.
2. Doing corporate work has many benefits for filmmakers.
3. I don’t have enough social media “friends”.
4. Pie charts are fun.

Okay, I knew all those things already. I think the most interesting point to take away here is that three quarters of the money came from people who already knew me to some degree.

Conclusion: crowd-funding is not so different from any other type of financing.

The Dark Side of the Earth has been repeatedly turned down for financing because it’s not based on an existing book, graphic novel, game, theme park ride, Broadway musical, freak alignment of belly button fluff, etc. Producers didn’t want to take the risk on something without a pre-existing audience.

Similarly, people are generally not inclined to contribute to a crowd-funding campaign unless they have an existing interest in some aspect of the film – i.e. they know the filmmaker, or there is an actor they’ve heard of in it, or it’s shooting in their town, or whatever. You need elements!

So, does how much you can raise from crowd-funding really just come down to how many people you know? No, it can transcend this. The Underwater Realm recently raised more than $100,000 from over a thousand sponsors. They managed this because their project is incredibly inspiring and ambitious. Nothing like it has been done before. Presumably they also tweeted about it until their fingers bled.

Stop/Eject is a much more modest project which was never intended to be crowd-funded. If I were writing a script from scratch to be financed this way, I would make it much…. well, “flashier” is the best word I can come up with.

Finally it’s worth mentioning that some people will have their own unique reasons for sponsoring your project. Several people offered me sponsorship in return for something: donating to a charity, promoting their business, promoting their own crowd-funding campaign. I was happy to do these things where I could.

Next time I’ll discuss the things we did to publicise the campaign and encourage people to contribute.

In this first blog evaluating the recent crowd-funding campaign for my short film Stop/Eject, I’m going to look at how the total developed over time.

It was Sophie Black, Stop/Eject’s production designer, who first suggested I look to crowd-funding to finance the film after the original funding arrangement with a production company fell through. My initial response was sceptical. It seemed to me that crowd-funding campaigns only succeeded when the filmmaker or (in the case of documentaries) the film’s subject had a very large online following already. Although I have been blogging and running websites since 2001 I’ve rarely made any effort to promote these sites, and this fact, combined with my indifference to social media, would inevitably lead to crowd-funding failure – so I thought.

However, with Creative England showing no signs of establishing a short film funding scheme, I could think of no other method of raising the money for Stop/Eject. So I asked Sophie to come on board as producer and bring to bear her experience of successfully crowd-funding Crash Taylor’s short film Jar of Angels. Luckily for me she said yes, and we launched the campaign in November.

Sophie chose to set the target at £2,000. Although we knew that the film would cost more than that to make, she felt that people were more likely to contribute if the target was smaller and thus seemed more attainable. Indeed many websites that give advice about crowd-funding suggest £2,000 as an ideal target for that very reason.

Crowd-funding is quite stressful because you wake up every morning thinking, “What can I do today to make people contribute?” It’s an emotional roller coaster too. When the total sticks for a few days – as you can see it did between Christmas and New Year – it’s incredibly depressing, but when it leaps up like it did on December 20th you feel happy and motivated again.

The two biggest things that steepened the curve were the Midlands Today coverage and the impending deadline. The Midlands Today report went out January 11th but was filmed – and intended to be broadcast – a few days earlier. As a result there were a few days in a row of Facebook activity surrounding it and this transformed the campaign from what looked like a lost cause destined to come in at least 25% under target, to something with a fighting chance.

As the deadline drew close, I was touched by how many people took up the cause and shared the link wherever they could. A lot of people really wanted to see it succeed, and they helped us accelerate towards the target.

In my next post I’ll look at who donated and why I think they donated.