The Socializers | Kickstarter

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.

People are moved by stories and drama and hints and clues and discovery. ~Seth Godin

YOUR SOURCE IS A GUIDE: There is a thread of vitality in everyone’s life worth tapping into. It is a stream that has run downhill to you from a great river teeming with YOUR KIND. Do what you can to follow that stream to the river and then devote your life to discovering the river’s source. It is this SOURCE that the human soul seeks MORE than anything else for it holds answers to ALL of our most personal questions (most of which DO NOT even have words).

I would argue that one’s passion IS a powerful resource in facing the world’s winds and waves. ACTION STEP: Discover the tribe around YOUR SOURCE through simple keywords used in the Facebook search window. You will find friends, discussions and groups oriented around YOUR passion immediately upon pushing SUBMIT. Here’s more on how to do this.

BIG BRANDS WILL PAY YOU FOR YOUR STORY: We live in a renaissance period of self-discovery through story. Robert McKee, the author of Story (one of THE best books for screenwriters on the planet!), writes, “Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.” I would submit to the reader that over the course of the last year YOU have written a fantastic STORY through your Facebook status field, Twitter field and YouTube Channel (if you don’t have one, get one!) And I would suggest to you that there is TREMENDOUS value in this story for you and your tribes!

The next big revolution is YOU making money on advertising for BIG BRANDS who spot your channel and want to advertise to your 100’s of millions of subscribers!!!) ACTION STEP: The arrival of big money to invisible, yet super-creative, storytellers revolutionizes the publishing and media industry big time! Watch how YouTube and GoogleTV effectively pull this off over the next 12-48 months. Set up your YouTube channel today and research GoogleTV.

SEE YOUR BIGGEST CRITICS AS YOUR GREATEST ALLIES: Behind the scenes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, there are bean-counters who are interested in the big numbers BUT do they understand or want to understand the dynamics of story and how to weave a tale that wraps even the most pessimistic person into a tale of romance.

Discovering the power of story and the formulas that work on the heart and emotion has been an activity for years in the entertainment industry and in the marketing world. On a human level, stories save lives every day and the advent of social networks/ platforms for telling collective stories allows humanity to transform curmudgeons, pessimists and naysayers into enthusiastic communicators of their passion. I would add that the greatest Critics are my favorite allies for their ability to see through a story to its heart. It has been said that the Optimist created the airplane and Pessimist created the parachute. ACTION STEP: Write down who your greatest critics are and what they say about your creative actions in the world. Then write down how these critiques help you refine your offering.

THE ARABIAN NIGHTS METAPHOR: Perhaps one of the greatest examples in literature of a story wherein the storyteller transformed her audience is that of Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights.

The main frame story concerns a Persian king and his new bride. He is shocked to discover that his brother’s wife is unfaithful; discovering his own wife’s infidelity has been even more flagrant, he has her executed: but in his bitterness and grief decides that all women are the same. The king, Shahryar, begins to marry a succession of virgins only to execute each one the next morning, before she has a chance to dishonour him. Eventually the vizier, whose duty it is to provide them, cannot find any more virgins. Scheherazade, the vizier’s daughter, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly agrees. On the night of their marriage, Scheherazade begins to tell the king a tale, but does not end it. The king is thus forced to postpone her execution in order to hear the conclusion. The next night, as soon as she finishes the tale, she begins (and only begins) a new one, and the king, eager to hear the conclusion, postpones her execution once again.

So it goes on for 1,001 nights.

The tales vary widely: they include historical tales, love stories, tragedies, comedies, poems, burlesques and various forms of erotica. Numerous stories depict djinn, magicians, and legendary places, which are often intermingled with real people and geography, not always rationally; common protagonists include the historical caliph Harun al-Rashid, his vizier, Ja’far al-Barmaki, and his alleged court poet Abu Nuwas, despite the fact that these figures lived some 200 years after the fall of the Sassanid Empire in which the frame tale of Scheherazade is set. Sometimes a character in Scheherazade’s tale will begin telling other characters a story of his own, and that story may have another one told within it, resulting in a richly layered narrative texture. (SOURCE)

YOUR 1,001 NIGHTS: The complexity of the Arabian Nights is a fantastic image of the complexity in social networks. Our stories have stories within stories and nowhere is this more evident as one travels the thread of comments on a Facebook image, a blogpost or a YouTube video. Every comment has the potential through a link to carry one into an entirely new story and so on.

Communities like StumbleUpon are another fantastic example of the “babushka effect” of the Internet. At StumbleUpon, one may enter a variety of keywords and then get link suggestions that lead to further suggestions and so on. Creating a tale from your discoveries on the internet, from mashing up the various universes you visit and personalities you meet on this journey creates value for you and your tribe. I would submit that your Facebook wall itself IS just one place to read your story of the past 1,001 nights. I would also suggest that it contains valuable medicine for transforming whatever you feels threatens you.ACTION:Write down what one year of Facebook statuses or Tweets tell you about yourself. What is the MOST consistent message you are telling yourself OVER AND OVER AGAIN through these fields?

FUNDING YOUR STORY: There are so many options now for finding funding from YOUR donors, Venture Capital that loves YOUR content and from YOUR tribe. Start with the fantastic tool Kickstarter! Check out the ultimate Crowdsourcing wiki here.