By now you’ve heard about Kickstarter, the on-line “crowd-sourcing” tool that asks you and me to kick in a little for all sorts of projects…and then ask your friends to kick in a little, too. Well, it seems like it’s moved out of the realm of novelty and become di rigeur in the world of little films and indie radio. Click the name below to go to some of my favorite projects…note that some of these campaigns may officially be “closed” at this point…but you can still give!
KCRW’s amazing Sonic Trace Soundbooth!
An African Caravan for the fantastic doc “An African Election”
A documentary about the New Beverly Cinema
The Spanish-language “This American Life”
A feature called “Missing Miranda”
The awesome “99% Invisible” podcast about design and architecture
Of course, there will come a point when the number of projects using Kickstarter will begin to degrade it’s effectiveness.
When I got one or two requests a month from people I knew, I always gave generously. When I starting getting requests from Facebook friends about their friends’ projects, I started to become more selective and more conservative in my largess, wanting to spread the wealth, as it were. And you can see where this is going….as requests become more frequent and more distantly related to you the donor, the less response they’ll get. At some point, Kickstarter requests will become a kind of spam.
But like spam, if you reach a giant mass of people and even a small percentage of people respond, you’re still doing OK. Of course, the people making indie movies and thoughtful radio will have to go back to the drawing board to find another new way to get the word out about their their wonderful work.
Stay tuned for my Kickstarter Campaign: Send Matt to Tahiti!
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