Crowdfunding: What You Need to Know to Succeed With Crowdfunding

Do you plan to launch a product, project or business?

Want to learn how to use crowdfunding to support your next venture?

To learn how to succeed with crowdfunding, I interview Emily Best.
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The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Emily Best, filmmaker, publisher of Bright Ideas magazine and founder of Seed&Spark, a crowdfunding solution for the independent film industry.

Emily shares how she stumbled into crowdfunding and what it could mean for your business.

You'll discover what you need to know about crowdfunding campaigns, including how to get started and crowdfunding platforms.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Crowdfunding
What led Emily to become an independent filmmaker

Emily says she was "tricked into being a filmmaker." She was happily making no money as an actor and theater producer in NYC before she took the plunge.

Caitlin FitzGerald (who is now on Masters of Sex) played the lead in Hedda Gabler, a play Emily co-produced. She would come to the set with scripts for big indie films that had embarrassing and dismal parts for women. The largely female production group for the play would have drinks after the show, "rage against the state of women in cinema" and discuss doing something about it.

At the time, Caitlin was making a movie called Newlyweds with well-known DIY filmmaker Ed Burns. Ed shot Newlyweds with a scaled-down crew for $9,000, made possible by the video capacity of D-SLR cameras.

Emily recalls during one of their rage sessions in late 2010, Caitlin said, "Guys, we should make a movie. It's so easy. And I'll prove it to you."

That was the beginning.

Listen to the show to hear what happened when Emily visited Caitlin on the Newlyweds set.

How Emily crowdfunded her film

Caitlin and Caroline von Kuhn, who wrote the script for their film Like the Water, did not write a mockumentary shot in downtown Manhattan like Newlyweds. They wrote a slow, contemplative indie drama about grief and friendship set in Maine in the summer.

Since Emily's film was an entirely different scope, she learned quickly that it couldn't be shot for $9,000; their shooting budget was $85,000. Emily says they had raised $65,000 from a group they affectionately referred to as "friends, family and fools" and were looking at a $20,000 shortfall in spring 2011.

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Most independent films are made by a group of friends getting together when everyone's schedules line up. This was also the case with Emily's film, so they had a very short window to find the rest of their funding. Pre-production through shooting was planned to take place from the middle of June to the beginning of August. It was May, and they had to find a way to communicate the importance of the film to their community and get the rest of the funding.

Emily says it didn't take long for a bunch of women to land on a familiar message for people seeking to crowdfund projects: a wedding registry. At the time, Kickstarter and Indiegogo were new.

They made a list of everything they needed: cameras, car rentals, bug spray, sunscreen, wardrobe, food, coffee and more. Emily typed it into a WordPress blog and put a PayPal link at the bottom. Then, the six of them sent it to everyone they knew. In 30 days, they'd raised $23,000 in cash and hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans and gifts of locations, goods and services. And then they went off to make the film.

The community involvement for this type of crowdfunding offered numerous benefits.