The Socializers | crowdfunding

How To Run a Successful Self-Funded Creative Project

The age of the Creative has fully arrived. We are in times when Creatives have the real possibility of identifying an audience for their work and getting funding from that audience.

Using a combination of creative software, free intelligence solutions and free crowd-funding solutions (here and here), Creatives globally can be up an running within 1-2 months on the creative project of their dreams.

THE VALUE OF COMBINING A TARGETED INTEREST GRAPH WITH A CROWD-FUNDING TOOL: When you identify Key Influencers who are passionate about YOUR niche AND their followers, you will have discovered a fertile field in which to plant your crowdfunding campaign. Why? Because these are YOUR people, the ones who LOVE what you love! When you place a Kickstarter or Indegogo project WITHIN a targeted social footprint chock-full of Passionates, funding and momentum occur that much faster. Your Facebook page is GREAT for family and friends to participate BUT you also need to get this project in front of its tribe!

Following is a simple process for getting going:

1. LEARN: Visit KickStarter and Indegogo. Study the projects that have been funded successfully, read the FAQs and blogs and learn how these easy-to-use crowd-funding solutions work.

2. GATHER: your materials: video, photo, music, text.

3. CREATE a promotional video (this one of the MOST important aspects of successfully funding a crowd-funded project).

4. IDENTIFY YOUR AUDIENCE/FUNDING SOURCE: Once all of your materials are together and are tightly written, edited and scored, it is time to create the interest graph around your offering. An Interest Graph is a term used to describe the tribe of people who are passionate about the content in YOUR creative offering. While the initial funds for any creative project often come from family and friends, it is a great idea to do a little “intelligence gathering” on your potential audience and funders.

How to do intelligence gathering and assemble a tribe:

a. THE AUDIENCE WITH AN AUDIENCE: Go to wefollow.com , Research.ly and listorious.com. Type in keywords related to your niche. In both of these free solutions, lists of key influencers will emerge. Those influencers and their followers are YOUR tribe. They are the ones who will be interested in what you have to offer.

b. STUDY SUCCESS: Go to Amazon.com and Last.fm and study “similar products” or “tracks you might like” to get an idea of how Creatives of your stripe are marketing themselves. Study the successes AND the failures.

c. AGGREGATE THE INFLUENCERS: Create a Twitter account and brand it. This Twitter account should be around YOUR niche interest. Do NOT title it the name of your movie or album. Title it more generically and then follow ALL of the key influencers you discovered in wefollow.com and listorious.com. Their content and their audiences will be a very valuable resource for you in the following ways:

i. – As an idea of what is trending

ii.- As a virtual tribe to “drop” your Kickstarter or Indegogo project into. Once you create your project in one of these two funding solutions, you can announce it into the fabric of this niche social footprint. The way to do this is simply to tweet the video you created with a link to the Kickstarter project.

iii.- Feedback on your offering. You can direct members of this niche tribe to your video and get valuable feedback. Remember, the best part about critics is how they refine a creative offering. The best Critics are actually lovers of Creativity and offer constructive feedback. Even blistering Critics are valuable since these individuals shave away the fluff and help one identify potency. Never fear a Critic. Seek out a Critic and seduce him or her through your offering.

5. CREATE THE CAMPAIGN: After creating the Interest Graph (the GENERIC “social footprint” around a microsite based on that genre), it is time to create the Kickstarter or Indegogo project. Both sites have EXCELLENT instructions and are very easy to use.

6. MARKET THE PROJECT through your interest graph, to family and friends, and on all of your social networks. Let people know about your project with short punchy tweet-length messaging that contains bit.ly or ow.ly links leading back to the video on YouTube and to the crowd-funding solution.

A Seelesorger is the German word for a Soul Carer, one who nurtures the inner person. In the current age, our civilization needs and cries out for experiences which create soul enrichment and cultivate the inner life of the individual. It could be said, in fact, that all of humanity is on a soul searching quest VIA the social fabric of the internet through relationship building and identification with tribes closest to one’s heart and personal passion. Again, social networks are fostering a deeper experience of our humanity on a daily basis for the individual and, increasingly, for the corporate entity.

A NEW MODEL OF COEXISTENCE: Vaclav Havel, first president of the Czech Republic from 1993-2003, spoke in 1994 in Philadelphia upon receiving the Freedom Medal (given the previous year to Mandela and DeKlerk). In his speech, he commented on the giant upheaval within human civilzation:

“The distinguishing features of such a transition are a mixing and blending of cultures, and a plurality…of intellectual and spiritual worlds. These are periods when all consistent value systems collapse, when cultures distant in time and space are discovered and rediscovered…[For us] the artificial world order of past decades has collapsed and a new, more just order has not yet emerged. The central political task of the final years of this century, then, is the creation of a new model of coexistence among the various cultures, peoples, races and religious spheres within a single interconnected civilization.”

THE SINGLE INTERCONNECTED CIVILIZATION: Mr. Havel, the single interconnected civilization you spoke of in 1994 has arrived in the form of the internet, accessed from ports near and far, North, South, East and West, liberal and conservative, animated and static, mobile and hard-wired. Humanity has woven through the social fabric of the internet an image of itself, with all persuasions and orientations present and full of voice in images, video, music and text. We are weaving this tapestry, this fabric, together for the good of our children…as a kind of patchwork-quilted net for them to rest in and communicate through…to one another for the good of the planet and the future. The projects to save the eco-system, the economy and our very existence as humans have become multitudinous and far reaching.

Some of our projects are listed here, Mr. Havel:

http://bit.ly/crowdsourcing_examples_innovators

EVERYONE HAS A PLACE BY THE FIRE: We concur with Aaron Kipnis, who writes, “You belong. You are welcome. You have magic. You don’t know how to use it yet. You will learn. There is a place for you by the fire.” This statement by Kipnis applies to the phenomenon of what Clay Shirky meant by titling one of his recent books “Here Comes Everybody”. Mr. Shirky wrote recently in an essay entitled “The Shock of Inclusion” that “…the Internet could easily become Invisible High School, with a modicum of educational material in an ocean of narcissism and social obsessions. We could, however, also use it as an Invisible College, the communicative backbone of real intellectual and civic change, but to do this will require more than technology. It will require that we adopt norms of open sharing and participation, fit to a world where publishing has become the new literacy.”

In this single interconnected civilization of the social fabric of the Internet, the time has come when single voices will reverberate through carefully woven and connected networks to penetrate the soul of humanity and inspire needed change. The quality of this change contains a mystery so deep and enlivening one can hardly find time OR energy to plum its depth.

TRACKING THE GODS: James Hollis, in his book “Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life”, writes, “Paradoxically, never have humans been more free. Yes, the loss of mythic grounding has tossed souls on the high seas and left them neurotic, addictive and adrift. Yet the threat of the abyss also brings a radical openness to the experience of being. Ironically, to experience this life in new ways it is necessary to recover what myth has represented historically.” I would submit to the reader that the building of social networks is truly a deeper group delving into the collective unconscious than mankind has EVER experienced or participated in. We truly have the opportunity to track the gods in this medium. But it takes an ability to listen and read between the lines. It takes a psychological and spiritual mindset.

LISTENING TO THE ORACLE: Dianne Skafte, author of “Listening to the Oracle: The Ancient Art of Finding Guidance in the Signs and Symbols All Around Us” writes, “I understand now that oracles never really left the world. They went on speaking through the cries of birds, the patterns of light upon a wall, and the thousands of other little signs showing us the way…It is we, carriers of modern culture, who have turned away from the oracles. Bird calls mingle with the airplane roar overhead, but we pay no attention. Strange coincidences urge us forward or caution us back, but we see no meaning in them. Our society harbors a great fear of anything that ushers the mind into dark, unknown regions of psychic life.” I submit to the reader that the Internet and our accessing of it and use of it HAS ushered in a possibility of spiritual renaissance, the likes of which we cannot begin to comprehend. At the forefront of social business best-practice, the number one action IS to listen, listen, listen. The amount of listening tools that have come onto the market at the advent of social business is truly astounding: http://bit.ly/listening_tools_news Using these tools to not only discover an audience for one’s product and service BUT ALSO for one’s own heart goal…to discover one’s tribe and their conversations…this is the REAL potential in these tools.

BRIAN SOLIS, author of ENGAGE, writes, “Gathering intelligence to inspire meaningful and actionable social programs is priceless.” The art of listening is re-emerging and this is a crucial entrance point to spiritual experience and life. The path of meditation is just one spiritual practice wherein the individual hears himself/herself and then the world around AND within. Deep listening is a vital activity in all realms and the basis for weaving humanity together through understanding. RACHEL NAOMI REMEN, Clinical Professor of Family and Community Medicine at the UCSF School of Medicine and one of the early pioneers in the mind/body health field, has said of listening, “The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.”

To repeat, for many individuals and even corporate entities the social networks are fostering a deeper experience of humanity and the soul on a daily basis. A single interconnected civilization is emerging and its missions can be seen in group activities called Crowdsourcing or Crowdfunding. There has never been more potential for humanity to act as a group to accomplish a single unified task than the present.