I don't know if I'm actually going to make this a weekly post, but I suppose it depends on how much cool and useful stuff I find over the course of the week.
An excellent quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Airman's Odyssey comes to mind as I revise another article: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
Deleting excess words, trimming a piece down to its essentials, can be a very calming exercise. Although I naturally run long, that only makes me more appreciative of simplicity. A message is most effective when it's been pared down to nothing but its core meaning.
Website: https://www.unfurlough.us/
A sort of jobs board for federal employees, consultants, and others affected by the US Government shutdown. It's struck DC hard (although we had a few good days for retail, as furloughed employees and stranded tourists hit the shops October 2 & 3rd. Even this past weekend at a farmer's market I saw a sign offering 20% discounts to anyone on furlough). Since my part-time work is in consulting, my job search has gotten even stickier than anticipated.
In the meantime, this website has been built by veteran-owned tech firm Blen and the 1776 platform using Drupal open-source software to host 'gig's (temp jobs) and available freelancers' information and resumes. Apparently the whole thing started as a Google Doc!
So if you or anyone you know is affected by the shutdown, consider uploading your resume and taking a look at the gigs.
Software & website: http://www.beelinereader.com/
I read onscreen a lot. You probably do, too. Beeline Reader's software claims to make reading onscreen faster by applying a color gradient to lines of text, allowing the eyes to follow along without skipping or backtracking. You can install the extension to use on your computer, tablet, or smartphone, and use it to read on websites, or you can copy & paste from a document or email to their online Pasteboard. I've read a few chapters of my latest PDF review copy on it, and I don't know if it's gone much faster but if nothing else the novelty of the shaded lines kept me entertained. And I don't remember even once rereading the same line, so it does work as advertised.
Website: http://www.autocrit.com/
The Autocrit Wizard is not a substitute for a skillful human editor, nor indeed for your own wordcraft. However, it is an excellent way to get a quick overlook of some common mistakes in your manuscript. It catches commonly overused words (it, had, see, felt, was/were, that), cliches, use of initial pronouns ("He did..." "She did..."), and sentence length (*coughs, shuffles feet*). Sentence length actually includes a cool visual 'map' of the sentences compared to each other. Lots of long lines in a row signals a problem (*shuffles feet harder*). One thing it doesn't seem to do is catch grammar errors, which is a pity because Microsoft Word's grammar check remains unreliable. As does the grammar of pretty much every writer.
Getting on my soapbox here:
"This is how you write dialogue," she said. "Notice the comma goes on the inside of the quotation marks. Furthermore, the 's' in she is lowercase, because it comes after a comma and not a period." She sighed heavily. "This is a mistake everyone makes at first--it took me a full year of writing to figure it out. But the sooner you memorize this rule, the faster all subsequent revisions of your story will be."
(If it helps, take out the quotation marks. It becomes much clearer that This is how you write dialogue, she said is a full sentence.)
Now, even once we figure that out, there are lots of other problems awaiting us--I continue to use comma splices, in a manner I think is stylistic but quickly proves when another person reads it to be just confusing. And sometimes the only way to figure out how the grammar in your sentence should work (especially when you're doing something stylistically creative) is to have another human being read it. Autocrit will not do that for you. On the other hand, human beings may not be as quick to spot repeated words and almost certainly are not going to count the number of words in each sentence for you. The Wizard is a useful part of a toolkit. Even if you don't run your entire manuscript through it--and even if you stick with the freebie package of basic tools--analyzing a few thousand words of your text should be enough to draw some conclusions of your own.
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Showing posts with label websites. Show all posts
Showing posts with label websites. Show all posts
Thursday, October 10, 2013
Friday, August 16, 2013
Say Yes! Women's Crowdfunding Campaign
I am not done with blogging about crowdfunding, it seems. Today my Fair Trade Friday post up at the Amani DC page is dedicated to an awesome new campaign which combines ecofriendly 'upcycling' (recycling in a way that creates a product with greater value than the original) with women's empowerment by supporting refugees in the Austin, Texas area: Open Arms and Blue Avocado's "Say YES!" campaign.
As you might be able to guess, I am also becoming a big fan of the site Moola-Hoop.
As you might be able to guess, I am also becoming a big fan of the site Moola-Hoop.
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Anatomy of Successful Crowdfunding (or, How I made 700% of my Kickstarter goal despite a godawful cover image)
What makes a successful crowdfunding project?
Any number of things, I'm sure. That's the good news. A campaign doesn't need to be 100% successful on all fronts to make its funding goal, it just needs to do enough things well enough. But a lot rides on certain key choices you make for your campaign.
In the spirit of inquiry, I've conducted this--is it called a "postmortem" is it's successful beyond my wildest dreams? -No, a friend reminds me the word I'm searching for is "debriefing"--this debriefing, then, of my Kickstarter campaign for The Starter Guide for Professional Writers.
To start with the most important choice: carefully consider the website you select as your crowdfunding platform. For many, including me, this comes down to the perennial question, "Kickstarter or IndieGoGo?"
At first glance, the major difference between the two platforms is that IndieGoGo has a "flexible funding" option, while allows you to keep all funds raised even if the campaign doesn't make its goal. Meanwhile, Kickstater's approach is a more intimidating, high stakes "all-or-nothing" game.
There are more subtle differences as well, such as the nature or end goal of the projects being funded. Kickstarter's focus is narrower: the campaign must fund a specific project created by the campaign runner, and rewards must also be produced by the creator, preferably in conjunction with the creative project fundraising is for. Ongoing programs that are business as usual, without a set end date or outcome, can't receive funding through Kickstarter.
Because of these distinctions, I think my friend Zahara Hecksher is right to suggest IndieGoGo as the better platform for NGO and nonprofit work, but even then not in all cases. Kickstarter campaigns can aim to achieve charitable goals alongside creative ones, and in fact, Zahara and her co-authors' project looks to me like something that would meet Kickstarter's guidelines, if they'd wanted to go that route. A concern is Kickstarter's requirement that projects meet the full funding goal to receive any funding at all. The effort and inconvenience of a crowdfunding campaign falling through for lack of interest is a setback for a creative project, but might spell disaster for a nonprofit many people are relying on.
However, a Kickstarter "all or nothing" funding goal should be the lowest amount needed to get the project done--if the Kickstarter campaign doesn't meet that minimum funding requirement, the project couldn't happen anyway even with the amount it has managed to raise. This presupposes the Kickstarter campaign is the major or even only source of funding the project will get, and certainly can be argued. In contrast, IndieGoGo's Flexible Funding lets the project get all donations, but the campaignrunner pays a higher transaction fee if it fails to meet its goal (and the minimum goal must be at least $500--much higher than a Kickstarter goal is required to be, if Kickstarter in fact has such minimums at all).
A creative and, to my mind at least, reasonable middle ground is practiced by StartSomeGood, a crowdfunding platform specifically for charitable causes. StartSomeGood campaign runners set a portion of their ultimate goal as a "tipping point." Without reaching the tipping point, the charity couldn't go through with its project. Therefore, if a campaign doesn't raise enough funds to meet the tipping point, no funds are dispersed--so far it's all or nothing. But once the campaign funding reaches its tipping point, it gets to keep all collected donations from there on, even if it doesn't meet its ultimate goal.
Already you can tell the variety of crowdfunding platforms beyond Kickstarter and IndieGoGo: places like StartSomeGood for charitable causes, GoFundMe for more personal fundraising needs (including events, education, and medical expenses), the recently launched platforms Moola-Hoop and NaptimeStartups for women entrepreneurs, and a myriad of sites for Green projects: from Ioby--"in our back yard"--for local causes to Mosaic and Sunfunder which focus exclusively on investments in solar power.
To choose the right platform for you, things like the mechanics of the site and ease of use are certainly helpful to know, and I'll discuss those in the context of my Kickstarter campaign in a few paragraphs. But the most important question first is: Can this platform attract funders for me?
As a writer, the comparison that comes to mind is booksellers. Say I (or, better yet, my publisher) is trying to find a place to sell my books. We intend to market our butts off to spread the word about them, but ultimately we'll want to put our books somewhere interested readers will come across them even if they never notice our publicity efforts. Sure, some of my fans and all my friends and family will buy my book wherever it's sold, just as your crowdfunding campaign should be able to generate some portion of its funding just through the strength of social connections. But past that point, I certainly hope my book is posted on Amazon!
This doesn't mean ruling out niche funding platforms like Mosaic or Moola-Hoop, though. Because if I'm writing a romance book, I certainly want it on Amazon but I also want it on AllRomanceEbooks. ARE doesn't attract as many readers as Amazon in sheer numbers, but the readers it does attract are far more likely to be interested in my book, because it's a romance and that's what they're there for. Many of the millions browsing Amazon might prefer blood curdling thrillers. Quantity or quality, one way or another your chosen site has to bring in enough people who are interested enough to fund your project.
Of course, generating that interest, once you're in funders' sights, is your job. And so after that introduction on crowdfunding in general, here is my dissection of my actual campaign.
Goal: My goal was to raise enough funds to pay for distribution (including shipping) and formatting costs (including cover art) of my self-published nonfiction book, The Starter Guide for Professional Writers. These things are not extraordinarily expensive, but I am extraordinarily broke and appreciated the chance to have some guaranteed income from the project as I continued with it. Because I was nervous of Kickstarter's all-or-nothing approach, I wanted as modest a goal as possible, and would have done less than $100 if my friend Zahara hadn't encouraged me to try harder. In the end, I made my goal $200--and Zahara "bet" that she'd cover any remaining costs if I didn't reach my goal. Spoiler alert: she never had to pay a cent ; )
Secondary goal: I also hoped my Kickstarter campaign would generate some work for me as a Manuscript Doctor.
Offering reviews of short stories, opening chapters, and novels along with ebook and print copies of the Starter Guide as rewards, I effectively turned my campaign into a "storefront" for my services. This is in contrast to a "patronage" model where my rewards to funders would be more symbolic than substantive (a model I followed with my charitable IndieGoGo campaign to fund microloans at a small Ghanaian NGO). When it comes to a project I'm undertaking for profit, I prefer to offer people value-for-value. However, several funders did feel strongly enough about the work to give much more generously than required for their reward, including one of my personal friends and mentors who gave without choosing any reward at all. Although I'm not comfortable relying purely on a patronage model, I am very grateful for these funders and appreciate what they've helped me accomplish.
(Note: For tax purposes, crowdfunding donations can be considered either income or a nontaxable gift. While not a tax lawyer and not intending to offer any binding advice, I idly muse that the distinction may involve whether the rewards offered to funders are merely symbolic or operate on a "storefront" model.)
Setting up the campaign: I committed a cardinal sin of Kickstarter. I did not have a video for my campaign. This stems from me doing the project entirely on my own, and not being a person with much filmography or video editing talent (or, indeed, any video camera besides my webcam). I didn't have the necessary skills, equipment, or time.
Perhaps I would have done better if I did use a video, but I'm satisfied with the results of this campaign anyway--over 700% satisfied, you might say.
However, even the still image I used as "cover art" for the campaign, while it communicated what I wanted to communicate, was clearly done by a writer and not an artist in my own humble (very humble) opinion:
To reassure you all, one of the expenses my campaign funding will pay for is professional cover art! The best I can say about this is that it is fairly readable and thematically fitting (several of the books on the shelves, though you can't see it, are my contributor's copies, and the use of Courier font is even meant to reflect the Standard Manuscript Format which most writer's markets require submissions to be in).
But remember what I said about not having to be 100% successful at all things to have a successful campaign! Without much talent at images, and with a project that is based fundamentally on my use of my words, I set about polishing my words as though my life depended on it. Months before launching, I scribbled notes about the campaign in my notebook margins. Then I reshaped those notes into coherent sentences. I typed them up, then reread them onscreen, and then rewrote them. I left the campaign pitch and description of rewards to sit for a few days, then came back and rewrote them once more. And I did a final review as I entered the data into Kickstarter's campaign set-up pages.
Rewards: Given my storefront model, it was very easy for me to tailor my rewards to my prospective audience. There were really only two: the Starter Guide itself and my manuscript critiques.
I offered ebooks at retail value--$5, a early preview deal of the ebook that now retails at $5.99 booksellers like Amazon and iTunes (the final manuscript of the Guide turned out substantially longer than I planned on during the crowdfunding stage). Print copies were $10, which is lower than current retail and includes shipping. Lastly, I offered signed print copies at $15.
My first manuscript critique option, the "First Chapter Review," was listed at $25 and included a free download of the ebook. Kickstarter reports $25 as the most common pledge amount, and it's generally recommended that you have some options less than that, too (like the book copies).
I offered a variety of critiques after that, with funding based on the length of the story, and all including a free copy of the ebook. Here, I've since gained some insight into my audience: critiques could be for short stories, novellas like my own Aqua Vitae, and novelettes (either short novellas or longer short stories depending on who you ask). Nobody took those crits as such. Instead, when they arranged critiques at those levels, what they really wanted was a critique of that number of words. So my novelette critique, meant for a short story of 16,000 words or so, is actually a critique of a 16,000 word excerpt from a longer story. There was some discussion with another funder about reviewing a short story of 4,000 words as a First Chapter, which we in the end decided against because my approach to whole stories is different from opening chapters (an opening chapter must make me want to keep reading. A complete story must make me glad that I read the entire thing. The second takes more effort to both write and review, though neither is easy).
This is not a complaint. These funders' projects are all exciting and I look forward to working with any portion of them (those I'm not already enjoying working on!). I simply forget, being a big novella fan myself, that many other readers and writers prefer the longer novel form. I might have a complaint about the tendency of new writers to write massive first novels (there's an across the board tendency for stories to be significantly above 100,000 words), but that's for the new writer's sake--extremely long manuscripts from unproven authors have a hard time selling. Editing that extremely long manuscript into something shorter is absolutely doable, of course, and part of what I'm here to help with.
Anyway, between the Starter Guide copies and the manuscript reviews there is a very rough breakdown between "low-level" funding and "Big Ticket" funding. As anticipated, most funders signed on at a modest level, while most overall funding came from Big Ticket items. This is epitomized by the fact that 70% of my funding came from one item, the Hero level Exhaustive Novel Edit. I'd designed this (at $350, though in the end it went for more than that because of the scale of the work the funder and I agreed to undertake) to carry the campaign on its own if need be. It did, although even without it I would have made my $200 goal more than twice over.
Strategy: Crowdfunding campaigns can incorporate some very advanced promotional planning, as in this Sample Promotion Plan from StartSomeGood (in PDF). It pays off. Zahara was part of a team of 7 people who enacted a coordinated plan of media appearances and social media participation--along with more personal outreach, including emails--and raised over $10,000 in 60 days.
I'm an identical twin, and I've been known to refer to my stories' characters as part of my working/writing "team," but last I checked there were not seven of me. My promotional plan amounted to lots of scribbled directions in my notebook and daily planner. My planning efforts went mostly towards deciding how to structure the actual campaign, what rewards to offer, and how to phrase my pitch and FAQs. Past that, my social media approach might best be described as "organic."
I made posts to my blog and Facebook after meeting my goal (which happened while I was in a plane home from Vegas...for a funeral), as I approached stretch goals, and as I neared the close of funding. Some of my updates were shared by friends, and this produced a couple of referrals, but the vast majority of my traffic came from people who found me while browsing Kickstarter. Drive-by traffic--the "crowd" of crowdfunding--was vital to this campaign, delivering at least 18 pledges, including some of my most substantial.
In fact, this is worth digressing on: remember how earlier I encouraged you to decide your crowdfunding platform based on the traffic it attracts? Very little is more frustrating to me, as a creative type, an admirer of entrepreneurship, and a passionate supporter of various causes, than to see a crowdfunding campaign crash and burn because someone overlooked a crucial component. I'm especially frustrated when the platforms themselves are the ones to drop the ball. Why load my book on NotAmazonBookseller dot com when I can sell it out of the trunk of my car at flea markets with the same amount of publicity support?
GoFundMe seems to run on a model where the campaigners attract most of the traffic (I say this as someone who has come to GoFundMe with some frequency, but only by following a fundraiser's referral--I never go just to browse). But it tends to raise money for small-scale, personal causes. In general, I want the platform to be attracting some traffic for me.
I've recently discovered a crowdfunding platform with awesome potential, centered around helping women entrepreneurs (who get a disproportionately tiny amount of investment for their startups). This platform not only does crowdfunding but also wants to offer advice and coaching to the women who build campaigns there. They are so new that they haven't yet put any campaigns up on the site, so I've signed up to receive updates. That's fine. But--
They are so new that their website does not appear on the first page of Google results when I search for them--or more precisely, it does, but the site will not allow Google to display its content among the results. That's currently what happens with my old Livejournal when you search my name--because I don't want you to check out my outdated Livejournal, I want you to be here! Presumably Naptime Startups wants me to be on their website, but they do a poor job directing me there.
The next Google result is their Youtube channel. They have a video explaining what they do--Kickstarter would be proud--but when I, not in the mood for a video, clicked their account profile to find their website link, their "About" section was blank. No link. They give the URL in the last frame of their 2-minute video. It's not clickable. I am lazy and do not wish to type out URLs for the websites I visit. Alas, in this case I had to--because I cared enough to bother. An eager potential funder had to jump through far more hoops than she cared to in order to visit this site. This is especially troubling because this platform has employed experts for the purpose of coaching their entrepreneurs in marketing--and their competitor in crowdfunding for women, Moola-Hoop, is doing social media right. Moola-Hoop's YouTube account links to their website. It also isn't their first result, their website is--and their Google search results include much more detail about their mission and method.
Okay, I'll have mercy on Naptime Startups (after all, I have signed up for updates once they start funding, and I do want them to succeed), and on you. Here's their website link: http://www.naptimestartups.com/. And the end of my digression, hopefully with my point well made.
Let's look at the origins of my funders, drive-by and otherwise.
Demographics: During the first days of my campaign I was surprised but delighted at the strength of support from the D.C. area. People who found me after browsing projects by location were generous and interested donors--many of the funders who choose manuscript reviews came from within the D.C. Metro area. Is this because DC has an especially strong literary community? Or are my particular funders especially dedicated to supporting their community, including through crowdfunding? Or were they just browsing local listings out of curiosity, and my campaign description caught their eye? I would assume some combination, although it's worth noting that my most generous funders were people who had already made many contributions to Kickstarter campaigns in the past. As my campaign succeeded based on "drive-by traffic" already present on Kickstarter, this doesn't surprise me. I think it stresses the importance of having a well written description and a clear, attractive pitch (including images) to draw in people who won't necessarily be familiar with you.
The same goes for another segment: I received 3 pledges from users browsing the Nonfiction project listings, including my biggest pledge. I'm not certain how many people do or would search Kickstarter specifically for a guidebook for new writers, although I made sure to feature "writers" and "publish" in my pitch and description to make my campaign easy to find. None of Kickstarter's currently trending #tags seemed relevant, but I would certainly check out trending tags before launching a new project in case there was a serendipitous fit.
From social networks, I received 2 pledges from Facebook referrals, 2 through Twitter, and 3 more through other forms of referral traffic, which I think may include the Absolute Write forums where I frequent, and where I linked to my campaign in my signature. These 7 people included some I knew by name, some who I was recommended to by people who knew me by name, and at least one funder who isn't even from the same country. Word of mouth paid off nicely, if not on the staggering scale of some Kickstarter campaigns.
By far the biggest group of funders was my "Last-minute supporters," who appeared in the final 30 hours. Two pledges came in response to Kickstarter's 48-hour email (which reminded people who had starred my project as of interest that it was about to close), and another 10 came from users browsing the Ending Soon list on the site. Anyone with a struggling campaign should find this encouraging. I should note that all of these last minute pledges were at moderate levels, rather than Big Ticket manuscript critiques. But that hardly matters, given these were all complete strangers believing in my project enough to buy into it! These pledges on their own might have been enough to turn the tide if I was only $100 or so from my goal.
An unanswered question is whether people were more willing to pledge because both my goal and my "stretch goal" had already been met--they were jumping aboard an already sure thing, which must appeal to the more risk-adverse crowd. I say this as someone risk-adverse myself. I do know the IndieGoGo campaign launched by Zahara's group met its funding goal near or on the final day, but it was being funded by well over a hundred people and under a flexible funding model; in short, the guarantee was there for them, too.
What helped me the most? Aside from the fact that Kickstarter and my campaign description were producing traffic, what helped the most in converting that traffic into pledges--and substantial pledges--was the messaging system.
Whether or not I would describe myself as approachable (like many writers, I am shy; like many shy people, I am quite friendly once you show gentle interest in me), the fact remains that I am not infrequently approached by people on the various writing forums, websites, and social networks I belong to--seeking advice about writing and publishing, mostly. It's part of why I decided to write the Starter Guide. That said, Kickstarter was no exception. Several funders, including my 2 largest contributors, contacted me first though messages to clarify rewards. In both cases the reward as stated didn't quite fit their needs, so we proposed, counter-proposed, and even haggled a bit until we were each offering something the other was happy to accept. These talks with funders were invaluable in giving me perspective on what my audience wanted and helping them get what they wanted. I also love Kickstarter's robust message system for the way it and the fulfillment surveys help me keep in contact with funders. IndieGoGo is not nearly so good at collecting contact information, and it doesn't have a site-based message system either--meaning, if you enter the wrong email address as an IndieGoGo funder, the campaign runner might not be able to contact you afterwards (gulp!). With Kickstarter there's no such risk of disappearing through the cracks; my funders and I can find each other anytime we like.
With the help of funders major and moderate, my campaign neared $1,000, and I decided to add a Stretch Goal: something additional I could offer or accomplish with the extra money. My stretch goal reflects the "storefront" nature of my campaign: I went on sale. Basically, with $1,000 I would have enough financial breathing room to "pay myself" and offer my services as a manuscript doctor for 50% off to Kickstarter funders. This hopefully encouraged more people to sign on, and rewarded those who supported me whether or not they had a manuscript to review at the time.
Part of the reason we made our stretch goal as early as we did (it would have been met with those last-minute supporters in any event) was because I started one of the manuscript critiques a bit early. I sent my Hero funder the first few chapters of her story with my comments, we had a 2-hour phone talk about them, and she was happy enough that she upped her pledge by arranging me to review more of her work. Kickstarter recommends you not fulfill any pledges until funding is dispersed, but in this case it paid off. We already trusted each other thanks to our messages and email exchanges. And, with my Kickstarter linking directly to this blog, she knew where I lived.
Since the campaign raised over $1,500 I'm thinking I should add a "stretch goal" after the fact, probably another sort discount to my campaign funders. Perhaps people ordering print books will also get a chance to download the ebook, and those ordering the ebook might get a discount if they decide to buy a print copy.
After the campaign ended, Kickstarter promptly deposited the collected funds in my Amazon Payments account. For the record, I still prefer IndieGoGo's model (and Kickstarter's model for UK and Canadian campaigns) of depositing funds into your bank account rather than using Amazon as a middleman, and I had some frustration with my Payments setup because of an odd looping glitch. But the glitch was cleared up after two or three distraught emails to tech support, and the swift deposit even outweighs the convenience of IndieGoGo's direct payment, which still takes more than a week to process--when I raised money for microloans using IndieGoGo, I had to borrow several hundred dollars from myself in order to have the cash on hand before leaving for Ghana.
Outcomes:
Link: The completed campaign for The Starter Guide for Professional Writers
Links to the published book can be found here
Total funding: $1585
Number of backers: 31
Ebook orders: 15
Print copies (including signed): 10
Manuscript reviews: 5 (each also included a copy of the book, including a signed, dedicated print copy to my Hero funder)
Where do I intend to put that funding? Well, I'm currently negotiating professionally done cover art. I also have some funding set aside to pay for an expanded distribution plan of the print book through CreateSpace*, as well as some reserved for printing and shipping the books as part of Kickstarter pledge fulfillment. Lastly, while I am not a big believer in paid advertising in general, this campaign has produced enough that I may be willing to experiment with ads--I'm currently considering FaceBook and Ralan.com.
*As I worked on this, CreateSpace changed their terms to offer expanded distribution for free. A pleasant surprise!
Lessons learned:
In a job interview recently, I brought up my crowdfunding experience and my interviewer asked me what one thing I wished I could achieve better results at. The consistent challenge, for me--let's leave video production aside--is generating word of mouth without becoming obnoxious to my followers (or fans, or supporters, or whatever the term for my audience may be in a given forum). With a few exceptions, I haven't managed to create a project or project description enticing enough to get people shouting about it from the rooftops. Perhaps it's a secret sauce. Perhaps there is no secret sauce. Figuring that "Ask not and you shall never receive," I even closed at least one update with an explicit (hopefully polite) call to action for funders to spread the word about the project, but without much result. Perhaps none of us had friends that would be interested in a writer's how-to guide? Writing can, after all, be a lonely job...yet on the other hand writers tend to congregate together.
The real reason I want to know how to generate word of mouth is because I'd like to achieve a rapid growth in scale--after all, doesn't everyone on Kickstarter want our campaign to be the next Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Hamlet? As an aside, one of my friends funded that campaign and she's shared some choice quotes from the book ("To Be or Not To Be: That Is the Adventure") with me--it is wonderful and hilarious! And look, Ryan North just generated another instance of word of mouth advertising...
Additional Outcomes:
As I hoped, this Kickstarter generated several leads for manuscript critique jobs. Not only have I established a track record of pleased clients, but my campaign description also lead to someone contacting me after the funding period was over to ask about a query review.
Lastly, doing this campaign has given me more solid experience in crowdfunding, not to mention a wealth of numbers to crunch. Some of this information is going back into the Starter Guide (which after all wouldn't be complete without a section on crowdfunding for self-published books!), and some is being shared in reports like this one.
I hope this proves useful. Feel free to comment with further questions, your own observations, thought experiments, or perhaps a defense of Naptime Startups' social media approach (they're new, of course, and may even have fixed the problem by the time this post goes live. For their sake I do hope so). You may also point out my hypocrisy in bemoaning new authors' overlong manuscripts while producing a blog post of multiple thousands of words.
Any number of things, I'm sure. That's the good news. A campaign doesn't need to be 100% successful on all fronts to make its funding goal, it just needs to do enough things well enough. But a lot rides on certain key choices you make for your campaign.
In the spirit of inquiry, I've conducted this--is it called a "postmortem" is it's successful beyond my wildest dreams? -No, a friend reminds me the word I'm searching for is "debriefing"--this debriefing, then, of my Kickstarter campaign for The Starter Guide for Professional Writers.
To start with the most important choice: carefully consider the website you select as your crowdfunding platform. For many, including me, this comes down to the perennial question, "Kickstarter or IndieGoGo?"
At first glance, the major difference between the two platforms is that IndieGoGo has a "flexible funding" option, while allows you to keep all funds raised even if the campaign doesn't make its goal. Meanwhile, Kickstater's approach is a more intimidating, high stakes "all-or-nothing" game.
There are more subtle differences as well, such as the nature or end goal of the projects being funded. Kickstarter's focus is narrower: the campaign must fund a specific project created by the campaign runner, and rewards must also be produced by the creator, preferably in conjunction with the creative project fundraising is for. Ongoing programs that are business as usual, without a set end date or outcome, can't receive funding through Kickstarter.
Because of these distinctions, I think my friend Zahara Hecksher is right to suggest IndieGoGo as the better platform for NGO and nonprofit work, but even then not in all cases. Kickstarter campaigns can aim to achieve charitable goals alongside creative ones, and in fact, Zahara and her co-authors' project looks to me like something that would meet Kickstarter's guidelines, if they'd wanted to go that route. A concern is Kickstarter's requirement that projects meet the full funding goal to receive any funding at all. The effort and inconvenience of a crowdfunding campaign falling through for lack of interest is a setback for a creative project, but might spell disaster for a nonprofit many people are relying on.
However, a Kickstarter "all or nothing" funding goal should be the lowest amount needed to get the project done--if the Kickstarter campaign doesn't meet that minimum funding requirement, the project couldn't happen anyway even with the amount it has managed to raise. This presupposes the Kickstarter campaign is the major or even only source of funding the project will get, and certainly can be argued. In contrast, IndieGoGo's Flexible Funding lets the project get all donations, but the campaignrunner pays a higher transaction fee if it fails to meet its goal (and the minimum goal must be at least $500--much higher than a Kickstarter goal is required to be, if Kickstarter in fact has such minimums at all).
A creative and, to my mind at least, reasonable middle ground is practiced by StartSomeGood, a crowdfunding platform specifically for charitable causes. StartSomeGood campaign runners set a portion of their ultimate goal as a "tipping point." Without reaching the tipping point, the charity couldn't go through with its project. Therefore, if a campaign doesn't raise enough funds to meet the tipping point, no funds are dispersed--so far it's all or nothing. But once the campaign funding reaches its tipping point, it gets to keep all collected donations from there on, even if it doesn't meet its ultimate goal.
Already you can tell the variety of crowdfunding platforms beyond Kickstarter and IndieGoGo: places like StartSomeGood for charitable causes, GoFundMe for more personal fundraising needs (including events, education, and medical expenses), the recently launched platforms Moola-Hoop and NaptimeStartups for women entrepreneurs, and a myriad of sites for Green projects: from Ioby--"in our back yard"--for local causes to Mosaic and Sunfunder which focus exclusively on investments in solar power.
To choose the right platform for you, things like the mechanics of the site and ease of use are certainly helpful to know, and I'll discuss those in the context of my Kickstarter campaign in a few paragraphs. But the most important question first is: Can this platform attract funders for me?
As a writer, the comparison that comes to mind is booksellers. Say I (or, better yet, my publisher) is trying to find a place to sell my books. We intend to market our butts off to spread the word about them, but ultimately we'll want to put our books somewhere interested readers will come across them even if they never notice our publicity efforts. Sure, some of my fans and all my friends and family will buy my book wherever it's sold, just as your crowdfunding campaign should be able to generate some portion of its funding just through the strength of social connections. But past that point, I certainly hope my book is posted on Amazon!
This doesn't mean ruling out niche funding platforms like Mosaic or Moola-Hoop, though. Because if I'm writing a romance book, I certainly want it on Amazon but I also want it on AllRomanceEbooks. ARE doesn't attract as many readers as Amazon in sheer numbers, but the readers it does attract are far more likely to be interested in my book, because it's a romance and that's what they're there for. Many of the millions browsing Amazon might prefer blood curdling thrillers. Quantity or quality, one way or another your chosen site has to bring in enough people who are interested enough to fund your project.
Of course, generating that interest, once you're in funders' sights, is your job. And so after that introduction on crowdfunding in general, here is my dissection of my actual campaign.
Goal: My goal was to raise enough funds to pay for distribution (including shipping) and formatting costs (including cover art) of my self-published nonfiction book, The Starter Guide for Professional Writers. These things are not extraordinarily expensive, but I am extraordinarily broke and appreciated the chance to have some guaranteed income from the project as I continued with it. Because I was nervous of Kickstarter's all-or-nothing approach, I wanted as modest a goal as possible, and would have done less than $100 if my friend Zahara hadn't encouraged me to try harder. In the end, I made my goal $200--and Zahara "bet" that she'd cover any remaining costs if I didn't reach my goal. Spoiler alert: she never had to pay a cent ; )
Secondary goal: I also hoped my Kickstarter campaign would generate some work for me as a Manuscript Doctor.
Offering reviews of short stories, opening chapters, and novels along with ebook and print copies of the Starter Guide as rewards, I effectively turned my campaign into a "storefront" for my services. This is in contrast to a "patronage" model where my rewards to funders would be more symbolic than substantive (a model I followed with my charitable IndieGoGo campaign to fund microloans at a small Ghanaian NGO). When it comes to a project I'm undertaking for profit, I prefer to offer people value-for-value. However, several funders did feel strongly enough about the work to give much more generously than required for their reward, including one of my personal friends and mentors who gave without choosing any reward at all. Although I'm not comfortable relying purely on a patronage model, I am very grateful for these funders and appreciate what they've helped me accomplish.
(Note: For tax purposes, crowdfunding donations can be considered either income or a nontaxable gift. While not a tax lawyer and not intending to offer any binding advice, I idly muse that the distinction may involve whether the rewards offered to funders are merely symbolic or operate on a "storefront" model.)
Setting up the campaign: I committed a cardinal sin of Kickstarter. I did not have a video for my campaign. This stems from me doing the project entirely on my own, and not being a person with much filmography or video editing talent (or, indeed, any video camera besides my webcam). I didn't have the necessary skills, equipment, or time.
Perhaps I would have done better if I did use a video, but I'm satisfied with the results of this campaign anyway--over 700% satisfied, you might say.
However, even the still image I used as "cover art" for the campaign, while it communicated what I wanted to communicate, was clearly done by a writer and not an artist in my own humble (very humble) opinion:
To reassure you all, one of the expenses my campaign funding will pay for is professional cover art! The best I can say about this is that it is fairly readable and thematically fitting (several of the books on the shelves, though you can't see it, are my contributor's copies, and the use of Courier font is even meant to reflect the Standard Manuscript Format which most writer's markets require submissions to be in).
But remember what I said about not having to be 100% successful at all things to have a successful campaign! Without much talent at images, and with a project that is based fundamentally on my use of my words, I set about polishing my words as though my life depended on it. Months before launching, I scribbled notes about the campaign in my notebook margins. Then I reshaped those notes into coherent sentences. I typed them up, then reread them onscreen, and then rewrote them. I left the campaign pitch and description of rewards to sit for a few days, then came back and rewrote them once more. And I did a final review as I entered the data into Kickstarter's campaign set-up pages.
Rewards: Given my storefront model, it was very easy for me to tailor my rewards to my prospective audience. There were really only two: the Starter Guide itself and my manuscript critiques.
I offered ebooks at retail value--$5, a early preview deal of the ebook that now retails at $5.99 booksellers like Amazon and iTunes (the final manuscript of the Guide turned out substantially longer than I planned on during the crowdfunding stage). Print copies were $10, which is lower than current retail and includes shipping. Lastly, I offered signed print copies at $15.
My first manuscript critique option, the "First Chapter Review," was listed at $25 and included a free download of the ebook. Kickstarter reports $25 as the most common pledge amount, and it's generally recommended that you have some options less than that, too (like the book copies).
I offered a variety of critiques after that, with funding based on the length of the story, and all including a free copy of the ebook. Here, I've since gained some insight into my audience: critiques could be for short stories, novellas like my own Aqua Vitae, and novelettes (either short novellas or longer short stories depending on who you ask). Nobody took those crits as such. Instead, when they arranged critiques at those levels, what they really wanted was a critique of that number of words. So my novelette critique, meant for a short story of 16,000 words or so, is actually a critique of a 16,000 word excerpt from a longer story. There was some discussion with another funder about reviewing a short story of 4,000 words as a First Chapter, which we in the end decided against because my approach to whole stories is different from opening chapters (an opening chapter must make me want to keep reading. A complete story must make me glad that I read the entire thing. The second takes more effort to both write and review, though neither is easy).
This is not a complaint. These funders' projects are all exciting and I look forward to working with any portion of them (those I'm not already enjoying working on!). I simply forget, being a big novella fan myself, that many other readers and writers prefer the longer novel form. I might have a complaint about the tendency of new writers to write massive first novels (there's an across the board tendency for stories to be significantly above 100,000 words), but that's for the new writer's sake--extremely long manuscripts from unproven authors have a hard time selling. Editing that extremely long manuscript into something shorter is absolutely doable, of course, and part of what I'm here to help with.
Anyway, between the Starter Guide copies and the manuscript reviews there is a very rough breakdown between "low-level" funding and "Big Ticket" funding. As anticipated, most funders signed on at a modest level, while most overall funding came from Big Ticket items. This is epitomized by the fact that 70% of my funding came from one item, the Hero level Exhaustive Novel Edit. I'd designed this (at $350, though in the end it went for more than that because of the scale of the work the funder and I agreed to undertake) to carry the campaign on its own if need be. It did, although even without it I would have made my $200 goal more than twice over.
Strategy: Crowdfunding campaigns can incorporate some very advanced promotional planning, as in this Sample Promotion Plan from StartSomeGood (in PDF). It pays off. Zahara was part of a team of 7 people who enacted a coordinated plan of media appearances and social media participation--along with more personal outreach, including emails--and raised over $10,000 in 60 days.
I'm an identical twin, and I've been known to refer to my stories' characters as part of my working/writing "team," but last I checked there were not seven of me. My promotional plan amounted to lots of scribbled directions in my notebook and daily planner. My planning efforts went mostly towards deciding how to structure the actual campaign, what rewards to offer, and how to phrase my pitch and FAQs. Past that, my social media approach might best be described as "organic."
I made posts to my blog and Facebook after meeting my goal (which happened while I was in a plane home from Vegas...for a funeral), as I approached stretch goals, and as I neared the close of funding. Some of my updates were shared by friends, and this produced a couple of referrals, but the vast majority of my traffic came from people who found me while browsing Kickstarter. Drive-by traffic--the "crowd" of crowdfunding--was vital to this campaign, delivering at least 18 pledges, including some of my most substantial.
In fact, this is worth digressing on: remember how earlier I encouraged you to decide your crowdfunding platform based on the traffic it attracts? Very little is more frustrating to me, as a creative type, an admirer of entrepreneurship, and a passionate supporter of various causes, than to see a crowdfunding campaign crash and burn because someone overlooked a crucial component. I'm especially frustrated when the platforms themselves are the ones to drop the ball. Why load my book on NotAmazonBookseller dot com when I can sell it out of the trunk of my car at flea markets with the same amount of publicity support?
GoFundMe seems to run on a model where the campaigners attract most of the traffic (I say this as someone who has come to GoFundMe with some frequency, but only by following a fundraiser's referral--I never go just to browse). But it tends to raise money for small-scale, personal causes. In general, I want the platform to be attracting some traffic for me.
I've recently discovered a crowdfunding platform with awesome potential, centered around helping women entrepreneurs (who get a disproportionately tiny amount of investment for their startups). This platform not only does crowdfunding but also wants to offer advice and coaching to the women who build campaigns there. They are so new that they haven't yet put any campaigns up on the site, so I've signed up to receive updates. That's fine. But--
They are so new that their website does not appear on the first page of Google results when I search for them--or more precisely, it does, but the site will not allow Google to display its content among the results. That's currently what happens with my old Livejournal when you search my name--because I don't want you to check out my outdated Livejournal, I want you to be here! Presumably Naptime Startups wants me to be on their website, but they do a poor job directing me there.
The next Google result is their Youtube channel. They have a video explaining what they do--Kickstarter would be proud--but when I, not in the mood for a video, clicked their account profile to find their website link, their "About" section was blank. No link. They give the URL in the last frame of their 2-minute video. It's not clickable. I am lazy and do not wish to type out URLs for the websites I visit. Alas, in this case I had to--because I cared enough to bother. An eager potential funder had to jump through far more hoops than she cared to in order to visit this site. This is especially troubling because this platform has employed experts for the purpose of coaching their entrepreneurs in marketing--and their competitor in crowdfunding for women, Moola-Hoop, is doing social media right. Moola-Hoop's YouTube account links to their website. It also isn't their first result, their website is--and their Google search results include much more detail about their mission and method.
Okay, I'll have mercy on Naptime Startups (after all, I have signed up for updates once they start funding, and I do want them to succeed), and on you. Here's their website link: http://www.naptimestartups.com/. And the end of my digression, hopefully with my point well made.
Let's look at the origins of my funders, drive-by and otherwise.
Demographics: During the first days of my campaign I was surprised but delighted at the strength of support from the D.C. area. People who found me after browsing projects by location were generous and interested donors--many of the funders who choose manuscript reviews came from within the D.C. Metro area. Is this because DC has an especially strong literary community? Or are my particular funders especially dedicated to supporting their community, including through crowdfunding? Or were they just browsing local listings out of curiosity, and my campaign description caught their eye? I would assume some combination, although it's worth noting that my most generous funders were people who had already made many contributions to Kickstarter campaigns in the past. As my campaign succeeded based on "drive-by traffic" already present on Kickstarter, this doesn't surprise me. I think it stresses the importance of having a well written description and a clear, attractive pitch (including images) to draw in people who won't necessarily be familiar with you.
The same goes for another segment: I received 3 pledges from users browsing the Nonfiction project listings, including my biggest pledge. I'm not certain how many people do or would search Kickstarter specifically for a guidebook for new writers, although I made sure to feature "writers" and "publish" in my pitch and description to make my campaign easy to find. None of Kickstarter's currently trending #tags seemed relevant, but I would certainly check out trending tags before launching a new project in case there was a serendipitous fit.
From social networks, I received 2 pledges from Facebook referrals, 2 through Twitter, and 3 more through other forms of referral traffic, which I think may include the Absolute Write forums where I frequent, and where I linked to my campaign in my signature. These 7 people included some I knew by name, some who I was recommended to by people who knew me by name, and at least one funder who isn't even from the same country. Word of mouth paid off nicely, if not on the staggering scale of some Kickstarter campaigns.
By far the biggest group of funders was my "Last-minute supporters," who appeared in the final 30 hours. Two pledges came in response to Kickstarter's 48-hour email (which reminded people who had starred my project as of interest that it was about to close), and another 10 came from users browsing the Ending Soon list on the site. Anyone with a struggling campaign should find this encouraging. I should note that all of these last minute pledges were at moderate levels, rather than Big Ticket manuscript critiques. But that hardly matters, given these were all complete strangers believing in my project enough to buy into it! These pledges on their own might have been enough to turn the tide if I was only $100 or so from my goal.
An unanswered question is whether people were more willing to pledge because both my goal and my "stretch goal" had already been met--they were jumping aboard an already sure thing, which must appeal to the more risk-adverse crowd. I say this as someone risk-adverse myself. I do know the IndieGoGo campaign launched by Zahara's group met its funding goal near or on the final day, but it was being funded by well over a hundred people and under a flexible funding model; in short, the guarantee was there for them, too.
What helped me the most? Aside from the fact that Kickstarter and my campaign description were producing traffic, what helped the most in converting that traffic into pledges--and substantial pledges--was the messaging system.
Whether or not I would describe myself as approachable (like many writers, I am shy; like many shy people, I am quite friendly once you show gentle interest in me), the fact remains that I am not infrequently approached by people on the various writing forums, websites, and social networks I belong to--seeking advice about writing and publishing, mostly. It's part of why I decided to write the Starter Guide. That said, Kickstarter was no exception. Several funders, including my 2 largest contributors, contacted me first though messages to clarify rewards. In both cases the reward as stated didn't quite fit their needs, so we proposed, counter-proposed, and even haggled a bit until we were each offering something the other was happy to accept. These talks with funders were invaluable in giving me perspective on what my audience wanted and helping them get what they wanted. I also love Kickstarter's robust message system for the way it and the fulfillment surveys help me keep in contact with funders. IndieGoGo is not nearly so good at collecting contact information, and it doesn't have a site-based message system either--meaning, if you enter the wrong email address as an IndieGoGo funder, the campaign runner might not be able to contact you afterwards (gulp!). With Kickstarter there's no such risk of disappearing through the cracks; my funders and I can find each other anytime we like.
With the help of funders major and moderate, my campaign neared $1,000, and I decided to add a Stretch Goal: something additional I could offer or accomplish with the extra money. My stretch goal reflects the "storefront" nature of my campaign: I went on sale. Basically, with $1,000 I would have enough financial breathing room to "pay myself" and offer my services as a manuscript doctor for 50% off to Kickstarter funders. This hopefully encouraged more people to sign on, and rewarded those who supported me whether or not they had a manuscript to review at the time.
Part of the reason we made our stretch goal as early as we did (it would have been met with those last-minute supporters in any event) was because I started one of the manuscript critiques a bit early. I sent my Hero funder the first few chapters of her story with my comments, we had a 2-hour phone talk about them, and she was happy enough that she upped her pledge by arranging me to review more of her work. Kickstarter recommends you not fulfill any pledges until funding is dispersed, but in this case it paid off. We already trusted each other thanks to our messages and email exchanges. And, with my Kickstarter linking directly to this blog, she knew where I lived.
Since the campaign raised over $1,500 I'm thinking I should add a "stretch goal" after the fact, probably another sort discount to my campaign funders. Perhaps people ordering print books will also get a chance to download the ebook, and those ordering the ebook might get a discount if they decide to buy a print copy.
After the campaign ended, Kickstarter promptly deposited the collected funds in my Amazon Payments account. For the record, I still prefer IndieGoGo's model (and Kickstarter's model for UK and Canadian campaigns) of depositing funds into your bank account rather than using Amazon as a middleman, and I had some frustration with my Payments setup because of an odd looping glitch. But the glitch was cleared up after two or three distraught emails to tech support, and the swift deposit even outweighs the convenience of IndieGoGo's direct payment, which still takes more than a week to process--when I raised money for microloans using IndieGoGo, I had to borrow several hundred dollars from myself in order to have the cash on hand before leaving for Ghana.
Outcomes:
Link: The completed campaign for The Starter Guide for Professional Writers
Links to the published book can be found here
Total funding: $1585
Number of backers: 31
Ebook orders: 15
Print copies (including signed): 10
Manuscript reviews: 5 (each also included a copy of the book, including a signed, dedicated print copy to my Hero funder)
Where do I intend to put that funding? Well, I'm currently negotiating professionally done cover art. I also have some funding set aside to pay for an expanded distribution plan of the print book through CreateSpace*, as well as some reserved for printing and shipping the books as part of Kickstarter pledge fulfillment. Lastly, while I am not a big believer in paid advertising in general, this campaign has produced enough that I may be willing to experiment with ads--I'm currently considering FaceBook and Ralan.com.
*As I worked on this, CreateSpace changed their terms to offer expanded distribution for free. A pleasant surprise!
Lessons learned:
- Set your goal modestly. Get funded quickly! Stop worrying about all-or-nothing funding! Then move on to your stretch goals!
- Have some 'guarantees' on hand before launching your campaign. It's just embarrassing to go through all the trouble of setting up a campaign page only to raise $5, especially if it's an "all-or-nothing" site model (yes, I have seen campaigns that only raised $5, particularly on less-trafficked crowdfunding sites). I had my bet with Zahara, whose belief in me paid off. In the end she didn't have to pay up--wise woman! As my campaign neared the $1,000 stretch goal, but also the end of the funding period, my Hero funder and I had a tacit agreement that she would step up with the rest of the funds if no one else did. I stress, though, that the latter case wasn't a "bet" but rather a fortuitous arrangement--we'd already agreed that I would take on another of her stories provided we both liked each other's work. And we did.
In a job interview recently, I brought up my crowdfunding experience and my interviewer asked me what one thing I wished I could achieve better results at. The consistent challenge, for me--let's leave video production aside--is generating word of mouth without becoming obnoxious to my followers (or fans, or supporters, or whatever the term for my audience may be in a given forum). With a few exceptions, I haven't managed to create a project or project description enticing enough to get people shouting about it from the rooftops. Perhaps it's a secret sauce. Perhaps there is no secret sauce. Figuring that "Ask not and you shall never receive," I even closed at least one update with an explicit (hopefully polite) call to action for funders to spread the word about the project, but without much result. Perhaps none of us had friends that would be interested in a writer's how-to guide? Writing can, after all, be a lonely job...yet on the other hand writers tend to congregate together.
The real reason I want to know how to generate word of mouth is because I'd like to achieve a rapid growth in scale--after all, doesn't everyone on Kickstarter want our campaign to be the next Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-Hamlet? As an aside, one of my friends funded that campaign and she's shared some choice quotes from the book ("To Be or Not To Be: That Is the Adventure") with me--it is wonderful and hilarious! And look, Ryan North just generated another instance of word of mouth advertising...
Additional Outcomes:
As I hoped, this Kickstarter generated several leads for manuscript critique jobs. Not only have I established a track record of pleased clients, but my campaign description also lead to someone contacting me after the funding period was over to ask about a query review.
Lastly, doing this campaign has given me more solid experience in crowdfunding, not to mention a wealth of numbers to crunch. Some of this information is going back into the Starter Guide (which after all wouldn't be complete without a section on crowdfunding for self-published books!), and some is being shared in reports like this one.
~*~
I hope this proves useful. Feel free to comment with further questions, your own observations, thought experiments, or perhaps a defense of Naptime Startups' social media approach (they're new, of course, and may even have fixed the problem by the time this post goes live. For their sake I do hope so). You may also point out my hypocrisy in bemoaning new authors' overlong manuscripts while producing a blog post of multiple thousands of words.
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
I propose Arkenberg's Law of Blogging
Arkenberg's Law of Blogging goes thus: The number of blogworthy items occuring in one's life exists in inverse proportion to the amount of time one has to blog, resulting in less blogging the more there is to blog about.
I suppose this could even deserve the name of Arkenberg's Paradox of Blogging.
Unless someone else has observed it first, in which case I am highly embarassed.
So, what's going on in my life that is blogworthy, but I have no time to blog on it?
I suppose this could even deserve the name of Arkenberg's Paradox of Blogging.
Unless someone else has observed it first, in which case I am highly embarassed.
So, what's going on in my life that is blogworthy, but I have no time to blog on it?
- I have found a new apartment and am moving there. As an aside, to anyone considering intern housing at a DC University campus over the summer--don't. Head to Craigslist or Padmapper first. The place you find will be cheaper, quieter, and provide more amenities and probably less construction. (I'm currently bitter because it's unclear whether I'll be able to have my mail forwarded from American University to my new address, and if it isn't then the Swiss Army Knife I had confiscated on my flight home from Vegas will probably never make it back to me. It's a knife with sentimental value, so...yes, bitter feelings right now).
- Really though, Padmapper.com is an awesome site to use when trying to find a place in a particular part of town. I wanted a neighborhood I was fairly familiar with and close to where I work--so spotting it 'on the map' was much more helpful than scrolling through endless Craigslist listings.
- On which note, I might do an entire blog post on Padmapper, complete with screenshots, because it's been a while since I've done a website review (as for Challenge Accepted/GetYeDone) and they are quite fun.
- I also have a blog post planned on my recent Kickstater, which was wildly successful, thanks for asking! I am really thrilled about it, and furthermore, have gone from an IndieGoGo fan to a Kickstarter convert.
- Some of that information is going into the Starter Guide for Professional Writers, which is currently in the editing stage--as it has been for a while. I take a long time to edit and, as you can see, I haven't had as much time to dedicate to the book as I would like. But it's nearing completing and I am arranging for cover art as we speak, hurray!
- During my rare downtime, I finished all the books I picked up at WisCon in May. I'll get a rapidfire round of reviews posted over the coming weeks with my thoughts.
- Reviewing my Facebook photo album from Ghana in a fit of nostaliga, I realized I never actually did the writeup on my experiences traveling abroad. I'm still weighing what I did that was interesting, useful, or otherwise worth writing about (and there are definitely things I want to share!). Because there are also paragraphs in my journal that are just "college student experiences culture shock, not even in a particularily funny way." Suffice to say, I'm well aware that I still know next to nothing about Ghana, so I'm not at all ready to be a tour guide to someone else. But I can share what I did and saw personally, which may be valuable to others and will certainly help me sort my thoughts out.
- Lastly, my job search is underway and bearing some spectacular fruit! The author I've interned for and assisted ("been an assisstant to"; I got a title upgrade this summer ;D) shared my job search statement and her own endorsement of my work with a consulting women's network she belongs to, which has lead to a number of requests for my resume and interviews with some fascinating agencies. Because I got my position as an intern with her in the first place in part because of Aqua Vitae, if I get an offer and accept it (not to get too far ahead of myself) I will have found a job thanks to writing a science fiction novella and getting it published. I can't be the only one to find that awesome, right?
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Fair Trade Blogger Bragging
As a college sophomore, I first realized I was interested in international advocacy. A great goal but initially hard to accomplish in a small, friendly town smack dab in the middle of the North American continent.
Except I was lucky, because I went to school in Waukesha, home of the Plowshare Center--an organization that hosts educational forums on social, economic, and environmental justice issues globally, and also runs Wisconsin's first Fair Trade store. They welcomed me on board and for my last year in Wisconsin I helped set up events, staff the booth of Fair Trade products that popped up at Fair Trade Fairs (say that ten times fast) and the Waukesha Farmer's market on weekends, and spent three memorable days repainting the inside of the store the most gorgeous shade of blue.
I was also entrusted to help stock the books for sale in the Learning Center, at last achieving my dream of running a tiny bookstore (after a fashion).
The Plowshare ladies, as I called them to my friends and family (despite the men who are very much a part of the center, too) were wildly supportive of my writing (they probably knocked Aqua Vitae up several thousand Amazon ranks the day they discovered I wrote a book ;D) and asked me to write some articles for the biannual newsletter. Those articles now have their own page on Plowshare's newly redesigned website!
This summer, I'm now working with another Fair Trade and peacebuilding organization--Amani, which has five centers run by women throughout Eastern Africa and a retail storefront in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C. There I've been helping at pop-up shops, scheduling more offsites at DC festivals (we're especially excited about the Green Festival in September), and writing some of the posts on the Amani DC blog.
So even if you're not always hearing from me on this blog, I reassure you I am still blogging! And now you know where else to find me (and if you're looking for a place to pick up gifts, jewelry, or some adorable kid's toys, you now know 2 places to look--Amani even has an online store for anyone not currently near its stores in Washington, Kenya, Rwanda, Liberia, Uganda, or Burundi).
Except I was lucky, because I went to school in Waukesha, home of the Plowshare Center--an organization that hosts educational forums on social, economic, and environmental justice issues globally, and also runs Wisconsin's first Fair Trade store. They welcomed me on board and for my last year in Wisconsin I helped set up events, staff the booth of Fair Trade products that popped up at Fair Trade Fairs (say that ten times fast) and the Waukesha Farmer's market on weekends, and spent three memorable days repainting the inside of the store the most gorgeous shade of blue.
I was also entrusted to help stock the books for sale in the Learning Center, at last achieving my dream of running a tiny bookstore (after a fashion).
The Plowshare ladies, as I called them to my friends and family (despite the men who are very much a part of the center, too) were wildly supportive of my writing (they probably knocked Aqua Vitae up several thousand Amazon ranks the day they discovered I wrote a book ;D) and asked me to write some articles for the biannual newsletter. Those articles now have their own page on Plowshare's newly redesigned website!
This summer, I'm now working with another Fair Trade and peacebuilding organization--Amani, which has five centers run by women throughout Eastern Africa and a retail storefront in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, D.C. There I've been helping at pop-up shops, scheduling more offsites at DC festivals (we're especially excited about the Green Festival in September), and writing some of the posts on the Amani DC blog.
So even if you're not always hearing from me on this blog, I reassure you I am still blogging! And now you know where else to find me (and if you're looking for a place to pick up gifts, jewelry, or some adorable kid's toys, you now know 2 places to look--Amani even has an online store for anyone not currently near its stores in Washington, Kenya, Rwanda, Liberia, Uganda, or Burundi).
Sunday, June 30, 2013
What's GetYeDone been doing lately? Glad you asked!
You might be a writer if your to do-list goes:
-talk to X about aprt
-Pay credit card balance (!!!)
-Aurmid has never had a family or given her daughters one--there is only the Empire.
Revisions of One Hundred Days are going very well after this most recent Staycation, and as I'm thinking more about the story I keep encountering new insights.
But writer or not, most people have to-do lists, and if you have a to-do list, the odds are it's near unmanageable. Back in March, I first posted my review of the interactive, RPG style to-do list Challenge Accepted.
Since then, I've continued using it with only a bit of a lapse while I was traveling at the end of the semester. While a few complications have come up, the site also shows a lot of promise for growth.
The lapse proved to be less of a problem than I thought--I just return to the site after a week or so and check off all the tasks I've accomplished in my absence. Score! Not only do I sweep up the points (at higher levels you earn more points per task, but also need more points to move on to the next level, in standard video game XP inflation style), but this also means GetYeDone serves as a record for things I plan to do, but forget to write on my paper lists and planner.
GetYeDone also serves as a way to record what I have done, because completed tasks are saved in your account as well. When I added my internship experience to my resume I consulted my GetYeDone to-do list for Therese Arkenberg: Intern to see what my primary jobs and accomplishments were.
The main complication is that, while Challenge Accepted (url: getyedone.com) allows hierarchical lists in the form of tasks within quests within odysseys, a 3-level list is proving inadequate to my needs. I want to further refine my tasks. Partially because it's my nature to enjoy crossing off many small items rather than one big one (although Challenge Accepted gives you great fanfare for completing gigantic 'boss monster' tasks), and partially it's because I try to sort my to-do lists by all my various identities: Therese Arkenberg the intern at FINCA, Therese Arkenberg the assistant of Zahara Heckscher, Therese Arkenberg the science fiction writer, Therese Arkenberg who needs to clean out the fridge. This adds up quickly!
However, speaking of interns, I see Challenge Accepted now has several. It looks like a lot is going on with social media outreach on the blog and FaceBook page, some updates to the party system (I haven't yet joined any parties, but the new 'open party' options look encouraging), and in what was especially interesting to me, and invitation to submit your own ideas for the flavor text 'adventurous happenings'. Which I promptly did.
So what else is left on my to do list after Staycation? A surprising amount! There's the apartment search, the remaining revisions to One Hundred Days (of course it'd take more than a week--but I got more done in that week than I did in years), lots of intern tasks, and completion of the Starter Guide for Professional Writers which also went very well. I gave a presentation over lunch Friday on steps to getting work published, which has generated yet more insights and FAQ-type tidbits to add to the guide.
-talk to X about aprt
-Pay credit card balance (!!!)
-Aurmid has never had a family or given her daughters one--there is only the Empire.
Revisions of One Hundred Days are going very well after this most recent Staycation, and as I'm thinking more about the story I keep encountering new insights.
But writer or not, most people have to-do lists, and if you have a to-do list, the odds are it's near unmanageable. Back in March, I first posted my review of the interactive, RPG style to-do list Challenge Accepted.
Since then, I've continued using it with only a bit of a lapse while I was traveling at the end of the semester. While a few complications have come up, the site also shows a lot of promise for growth.
The lapse proved to be less of a problem than I thought--I just return to the site after a week or so and check off all the tasks I've accomplished in my absence. Score! Not only do I sweep up the points (at higher levels you earn more points per task, but also need more points to move on to the next level, in standard video game XP inflation style), but this also means GetYeDone serves as a record for things I plan to do, but forget to write on my paper lists and planner.
GetYeDone also serves as a way to record what I have done, because completed tasks are saved in your account as well. When I added my internship experience to my resume I consulted my GetYeDone to-do list for Therese Arkenberg: Intern to see what my primary jobs and accomplishments were.
The main complication is that, while Challenge Accepted (url: getyedone.com) allows hierarchical lists in the form of tasks within quests within odysseys, a 3-level list is proving inadequate to my needs. I want to further refine my tasks. Partially because it's my nature to enjoy crossing off many small items rather than one big one (although Challenge Accepted gives you great fanfare for completing gigantic 'boss monster' tasks), and partially it's because I try to sort my to-do lists by all my various identities: Therese Arkenberg the intern at FINCA, Therese Arkenberg the assistant of Zahara Heckscher, Therese Arkenberg the science fiction writer, Therese Arkenberg who needs to clean out the fridge. This adds up quickly!
However, speaking of interns, I see Challenge Accepted now has several. It looks like a lot is going on with social media outreach on the blog and FaceBook page, some updates to the party system (I haven't yet joined any parties, but the new 'open party' options look encouraging), and in what was especially interesting to me, and invitation to submit your own ideas for the flavor text 'adventurous happenings'. Which I promptly did.
So what else is left on my to do list after Staycation? A surprising amount! There's the apartment search, the remaining revisions to One Hundred Days (of course it'd take more than a week--but I got more done in that week than I did in years), lots of intern tasks, and completion of the Starter Guide for Professional Writers which also went very well. I gave a presentation over lunch Friday on steps to getting work published, which has generated yet more insights and FAQ-type tidbits to add to the guide.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Dancing to Replace PowerPoint: A Modest Proposal
I confess it, I'm a TED Talk fan--the videos are short enough to appeal to my attention span, interesting enough to make me feel smart of watching them, and free--and this is now one of my favorites.
If you also enjoy modest proposals, the Onion Talks are excellent, too.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
On IndieGoGo Campaigns
This week, my student team finished mailing out perks to the sponsors of our IndieGoGo campaign, which raised funds for a community-level organization in rural Ghana to extend microloans and scholarships to local women. We were able to deliver $1,290 to Capacity Rural International during our class visit, over $900 of which came through IndieGoGo.
The IndieGoGo campaign actually raised $1,085, but the site takes a fee. Although we knew that going in, there are some other things we discovered over the course of the campaign that would have been helpful to be aware of beforehand. Since I know IndieGoGo (and its sibling rival Kickstarter) are popular crowdfunding platforms, not only for charitable causes but especially for creative ones--and I suspect a lot of this blog's readers are creative types--I'm writing this post to share key points of our experience.
First off, it’s crucially important that you build in lead time for planning your campaign. Kickstarter suggests you spend 2 weeks tinkering with your campaign page before going live. This time can also be used to set up and polish the webpages and social media you’ll be connecting with the page. Breathing room is important, because among other things it lets you take your hands from the keyboard and rest, not to mention allowing those insights in your brain to percolate in case you wake up at 3 am one night having found the perfect way to explain that perk you're offering which involves your Cousin Fran's goat ranch and your personal recipe for caramel swirl cake in such terms that nobody could pass up donating $350 in exchange for it.
If you're wondering what perspective I approach this from, my group's IndieGoGo campagin was set up in 4 hours. We had planned ahead of time--for weeks, actually--and had some idea what perks we'd offer and what sort of narrative we were making, but next thing we knew we had a fundraiser to complete before midterms (and more importantly, our flight to Accra which came right after Sprin g Break) and there was nothing for it but butt-in-chair and go. We set up the campaign and made it live in the same afternon, as soon as our plan was approved by the powers-that-be of our university course. We may have hit the ground running faster, or sooner (even deciding to be less timid about seeking approval from the powers-that-be, who found nothing to sanction in our plan after all) if we'd known about IndieGoGo's dispersal time.
Which is, to say it bluntly, long. In fact, if funding closed on your Indie campaign and you sat down to think of a sequel on Kickstarter, you'd have that Kickstarter alive and--ahem--kicking by the time you saw your IndieGoGo funds. We were leaving for Ghana on the 20th, so I set the fund dispersal for me recieve the funds on the 15th--about as close as I dared cut it with travel preparations. Except I did not recieve the funds on the 15th. IndieGoGo sent the funds on the 15th (despite the weeks elapsing between that date and the time our fundraising had to close) and they arrived in my bank on the 22nd. By which point I was safely in Ghana. I managed by borrowing against myself, which was more stress and inconvience that I'd have hoped. In short, if you want to fund something through IndieGoGo, make sure you won't need the money on short notice, and when they ask you "When you do want the money?" they're not promising they'll give it to you by then.
Also think carefully about how much money you ask for, and remember the impact of IndieGoGo's fees. Deciding to reach for the stars, my group set our fundraising goal at $2,000, figuring with the "Flexible Funding" option that let us keep whatever we collected even if we failed to meet that goal, nothing could go wrong. And it's true, things did work out. But IndieGoGo collects a 9% penalty fee for Flexible Funding campaigns that don't meet their goal. We could have made a more modest attempt of $1,000, met it, and paid only 5% in fees.
Other student groups within our class had other issues, including one group that used a fundraising platform incompatible with PayPal. On the bright side, IndieGoGo allowed donors to give in various ways, and we had a parallel PayPal donations button running. Making things easy for the people who want to give you money is always the best practice.
Images and media for the campaign are crucially important. Though the number of photos we had, which came from previous semesters' visits to the villages, was limited, we were lucky in that we had a wonderful spokeswoman. Her smiling picture spoke a thousand words for us at the top of the page. Longer-running or larger-scale campaigns generally incorporate video, where a more dramatic appeal for the project can be made. I've overlooked this in the past because I personally don't watch a lot of videos (unless it's an IndieGoGo campaign funding, say, an Indie movie), but I do see how it would help draw in interested potential funders.
We linked our IndieGoGo page to Facebook, but not to other sites, deciding in the end that a Twitter account wasn't worth running for the brief duration of our campaign. There was some trouble coordinating between the websites, as different people were in charge of running each. Longer lead time and more explicit planning would have cleared this up. If we'd done videos, linking to YouTube would have been an obvious second move, as would connecting a website if we had one. According to IndieGoGo and Kickstarter's guides, each additional social network connected and each piece of media added increases the odds of a project meeting its funding goal. While the FaceBook account was enough to get our project going and give all of us some experience with coordinating social media and crowdfunding, in a larger campaign I would go all-out. That 2-week lead time is perfect for collecting photos and polishing a short video as well.
The major attraction of IndieGoGo to us was the chance to offer perks, which seemed like a fun way to reward our donors. However, because it did take some effort to acquire and send our main physical perk (a handcrafted gift purchased during our trip in Ghana), we set the giving level to earn it rather high, at $100. I think this encouraged people who already wanted to give to give at a higher level than they might have otherwise, as the $100 level, which I first worried might be too much, proved our most popular.
But it didn't encourage people not already familiar with us to give (at least not many of them--we did have one donor from Australia! Who, if she's reading this--thank you very much! Your perk is on its way! I hope the attached customs form doesn't spoil you for what's inside; the Post Office wanted me to be very specific!).
Finding donors is a struggle for all crowdfunding sites (I think Kickstarter's success rate hovers around 60%), and it's especially difficult for charity causes. I didn't see any charitable campaigns that did particularly well on IndieGoGo, and none of the projects I found when searching 'microfinance' met their goal. In making a bit over 50% we in fact did outstandingly well. Some of the problem is establishing the legitimacy of a cause through the Internet, and another part is the fact IndieGoGo is oriented more towards artistic and inventive projects than redistributive giving (though not to the extent of Kickstarter, which forbids any non-artistic projects). Lastly, and perhaps the greatest challenge of all, is that if people want to crowdfund microfinance they already have an established, legitimate site with a thriving community: Kiva.org. When describing this project I tried to differentiate it from Kiva loans, but competition wasn't really possible. Simple shared interest in microfinance wasn't enough to draw donors to us, and in hindsight it was overconfident of me to think it might, or to expect the campaign to go viral. Just as well it didn't. The perks were very fun to shop for, but you have to be careful to budget money and time to fulfill them, even in small numbers!
Managing the level of information we offered funders was another challenge in hindsight. I wanted to be perfectly clear, brilliantly persuasive, and share my passionate interest in microfinance services with the world. The world listened politely to me but just could not get that excited about the walls of text I threw at it. Looking at the pitch I made before posting my pledge-story, "The Family"...it looks like there's two short stories there, and you had to read through one to get to the other, or even to the PayPal donations box. I fear I may have talked some of my dear audience to death. "Less is more" is a lesson I'm still learning, after years of academic writing and novel writing and the joy I take in shaping a narrative--which a fundraising pitch is. These women begin in poverty and, with a little bit of help from donors and a lot of their own effort, they expand their production, hone their skills, improve their businesses and livelihoods and emerge more empowered and with greater income and resources. A sort of rags-to-riches story without an unbelievable level of glitter. The reality is not always quite so neat, of course (they don't always start in rags, for one thing, nor of course end by dripping with diamonds for another). But when I even tried to engage with the complexities of the issue, both to indulge my interest and to head off any possible criticism I feared might come (none did), it lead to Walls of Text (TM). I would have done well to remember the classic advice to revising authors: Resist the Urge to Explain. You need to explain a little more when making a persuasive statement, to show people how what you're seeking is possible, and microfinance isn't a concept intuitively grasped by everyone, but it doesn't help to strain the reader's patience by writing a master's thesis when they wanted a simple outline.
(Yes, I delivered the money in cash. Our trip took us through many rural areas where ATM machines were not readily available. On the one hand, I got to enjoy physically holding multiple Ben Franklins and realizing this was the amount I'd helped raise for a cause I believed in. On the other, making sure I kept a hold of that envelope through my travels was a bit nerve-wracking).
That said, I am very proud of my team's hard work and our success! $1,290 is very close to our private goal of $1500 (we upped it for the Indie campaign because we figured reaching for the stars couldn't hurt, a position we've since, as I've mentioned, gently adjusted) and enough to fund an entire round of loans to the 50 women in the villages' microfinance project, or to fund 5 youths pursuing vocational training. Ultimately how much goes to loans, and how much goes to scholarships (and if they men of the village wish to rent a tractor for this growing season--under the blanket of 'microfinance, business, and empowerment' we were actually fundraising for a lot of things, only adding to the length of my explanations) will be decided by the leadership of Capacity Rural International itself, based on its knowledge of needs on the ground in the community it serves.
For a creative IndieGoGo project, thinking about the target audience and how to frame the narrative pitch, as well as choice of media to add and what sort of goal to reach for, would be different, but the general pointers about having a long lead time for preparation, linking your websites together and developing them into a coherent campaign, and being careful about finances and timeframe hold true. I really enjoyed the chance to try out a crowdfunding campaign, am glad and grateful at the amount of good it did, and hope I'll have the chance to launch one again someday.
The author I'm interning with, Zahara Heckscher, has just launched a creative Indie campaign of her own for a nonfiction book on international volunteering. To see how they incorporate video and balance a somewhat complicated (even controversial) issue with a clear narrative, check it out here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/improving-volunteer-travel-through-education/x/447089
The IndieGoGo campaign actually raised $1,085, but the site takes a fee. Although we knew that going in, there are some other things we discovered over the course of the campaign that would have been helpful to be aware of beforehand. Since I know IndieGoGo (and its sibling rival Kickstarter) are popular crowdfunding platforms, not only for charitable causes but especially for creative ones--and I suspect a lot of this blog's readers are creative types--I'm writing this post to share key points of our experience.
First off, it’s crucially important that you build in lead time for planning your campaign. Kickstarter suggests you spend 2 weeks tinkering with your campaign page before going live. This time can also be used to set up and polish the webpages and social media you’ll be connecting with the page. Breathing room is important, because among other things it lets you take your hands from the keyboard and rest, not to mention allowing those insights in your brain to percolate in case you wake up at 3 am one night having found the perfect way to explain that perk you're offering which involves your Cousin Fran's goat ranch and your personal recipe for caramel swirl cake in such terms that nobody could pass up donating $350 in exchange for it.
If you're wondering what perspective I approach this from, my group's IndieGoGo campagin was set up in 4 hours. We had planned ahead of time--for weeks, actually--and had some idea what perks we'd offer and what sort of narrative we were making, but next thing we knew we had a fundraiser to complete before midterms (and more importantly, our flight to Accra which came right after Sprin g Break) and there was nothing for it but butt-in-chair and go. We set up the campaign and made it live in the same afternon, as soon as our plan was approved by the powers-that-be of our university course. We may have hit the ground running faster, or sooner (even deciding to be less timid about seeking approval from the powers-that-be, who found nothing to sanction in our plan after all) if we'd known about IndieGoGo's dispersal time.
Which is, to say it bluntly, long. In fact, if funding closed on your Indie campaign and you sat down to think of a sequel on Kickstarter, you'd have that Kickstarter alive and--ahem--kicking by the time you saw your IndieGoGo funds. We were leaving for Ghana on the 20th, so I set the fund dispersal for me recieve the funds on the 15th--about as close as I dared cut it with travel preparations. Except I did not recieve the funds on the 15th. IndieGoGo sent the funds on the 15th (despite the weeks elapsing between that date and the time our fundraising had to close) and they arrived in my bank on the 22nd. By which point I was safely in Ghana. I managed by borrowing against myself, which was more stress and inconvience that I'd have hoped. In short, if you want to fund something through IndieGoGo, make sure you won't need the money on short notice, and when they ask you "When you do want the money?" they're not promising they'll give it to you by then.
Also think carefully about how much money you ask for, and remember the impact of IndieGoGo's fees. Deciding to reach for the stars, my group set our fundraising goal at $2,000, figuring with the "Flexible Funding" option that let us keep whatever we collected even if we failed to meet that goal, nothing could go wrong. And it's true, things did work out. But IndieGoGo collects a 9% penalty fee for Flexible Funding campaigns that don't meet their goal. We could have made a more modest attempt of $1,000, met it, and paid only 5% in fees.
Other student groups within our class had other issues, including one group that used a fundraising platform incompatible with PayPal. On the bright side, IndieGoGo allowed donors to give in various ways, and we had a parallel PayPal donations button running. Making things easy for the people who want to give you money is always the best practice.
Images and media for the campaign are crucially important. Though the number of photos we had, which came from previous semesters' visits to the villages, was limited, we were lucky in that we had a wonderful spokeswoman. Her smiling picture spoke a thousand words for us at the top of the page. Longer-running or larger-scale campaigns generally incorporate video, where a more dramatic appeal for the project can be made. I've overlooked this in the past because I personally don't watch a lot of videos (unless it's an IndieGoGo campaign funding, say, an Indie movie), but I do see how it would help draw in interested potential funders.
We linked our IndieGoGo page to Facebook, but not to other sites, deciding in the end that a Twitter account wasn't worth running for the brief duration of our campaign. There was some trouble coordinating between the websites, as different people were in charge of running each. Longer lead time and more explicit planning would have cleared this up. If we'd done videos, linking to YouTube would have been an obvious second move, as would connecting a website if we had one. According to IndieGoGo and Kickstarter's guides, each additional social network connected and each piece of media added increases the odds of a project meeting its funding goal. While the FaceBook account was enough to get our project going and give all of us some experience with coordinating social media and crowdfunding, in a larger campaign I would go all-out. That 2-week lead time is perfect for collecting photos and polishing a short video as well.
The major attraction of IndieGoGo to us was the chance to offer perks, which seemed like a fun way to reward our donors. However, because it did take some effort to acquire and send our main physical perk (a handcrafted gift purchased during our trip in Ghana), we set the giving level to earn it rather high, at $100. I think this encouraged people who already wanted to give to give at a higher level than they might have otherwise, as the $100 level, which I first worried might be too much, proved our most popular.
But it didn't encourage people not already familiar with us to give (at least not many of them--we did have one donor from Australia! Who, if she's reading this--thank you very much! Your perk is on its way! I hope the attached customs form doesn't spoil you for what's inside; the Post Office wanted me to be very specific!).
Finding donors is a struggle for all crowdfunding sites (I think Kickstarter's success rate hovers around 60%), and it's especially difficult for charity causes. I didn't see any charitable campaigns that did particularly well on IndieGoGo, and none of the projects I found when searching 'microfinance' met their goal. In making a bit over 50% we in fact did outstandingly well. Some of the problem is establishing the legitimacy of a cause through the Internet, and another part is the fact IndieGoGo is oriented more towards artistic and inventive projects than redistributive giving (though not to the extent of Kickstarter, which forbids any non-artistic projects). Lastly, and perhaps the greatest challenge of all, is that if people want to crowdfund microfinance they already have an established, legitimate site with a thriving community: Kiva.org. When describing this project I tried to differentiate it from Kiva loans, but competition wasn't really possible. Simple shared interest in microfinance wasn't enough to draw donors to us, and in hindsight it was overconfident of me to think it might, or to expect the campaign to go viral. Just as well it didn't. The perks were very fun to shop for, but you have to be careful to budget money and time to fulfill them, even in small numbers!
Managing the level of information we offered funders was another challenge in hindsight. I wanted to be perfectly clear, brilliantly persuasive, and share my passionate interest in microfinance services with the world. The world listened politely to me but just could not get that excited about the walls of text I threw at it. Looking at the pitch I made before posting my pledge-story, "The Family"...it looks like there's two short stories there, and you had to read through one to get to the other, or even to the PayPal donations box. I fear I may have talked some of my dear audience to death. "Less is more" is a lesson I'm still learning, after years of academic writing and novel writing and the joy I take in shaping a narrative--which a fundraising pitch is. These women begin in poverty and, with a little bit of help from donors and a lot of their own effort, they expand their production, hone their skills, improve their businesses and livelihoods and emerge more empowered and with greater income and resources. A sort of rags-to-riches story without an unbelievable level of glitter. The reality is not always quite so neat, of course (they don't always start in rags, for one thing, nor of course end by dripping with diamonds for another). But when I even tried to engage with the complexities of the issue, both to indulge my interest and to head off any possible criticism I feared might come (none did), it lead to Walls of Text (TM). I would have done well to remember the classic advice to revising authors: Resist the Urge to Explain. You need to explain a little more when making a persuasive statement, to show people how what you're seeking is possible, and microfinance isn't a concept intuitively grasped by everyone, but it doesn't help to strain the reader's patience by writing a master's thesis when they wanted a simple outline.
(Yes, I delivered the money in cash. Our trip took us through many rural areas where ATM machines were not readily available. On the one hand, I got to enjoy physically holding multiple Ben Franklins and realizing this was the amount I'd helped raise for a cause I believed in. On the other, making sure I kept a hold of that envelope through my travels was a bit nerve-wracking).
That said, I am very proud of my team's hard work and our success! $1,290 is very close to our private goal of $1500 (we upped it for the Indie campaign because we figured reaching for the stars couldn't hurt, a position we've since, as I've mentioned, gently adjusted) and enough to fund an entire round of loans to the 50 women in the villages' microfinance project, or to fund 5 youths pursuing vocational training. Ultimately how much goes to loans, and how much goes to scholarships (and if they men of the village wish to rent a tractor for this growing season--under the blanket of 'microfinance, business, and empowerment' we were actually fundraising for a lot of things, only adding to the length of my explanations) will be decided by the leadership of Capacity Rural International itself, based on its knowledge of needs on the ground in the community it serves.
For a creative IndieGoGo project, thinking about the target audience and how to frame the narrative pitch, as well as choice of media to add and what sort of goal to reach for, would be different, but the general pointers about having a long lead time for preparation, linking your websites together and developing them into a coherent campaign, and being careful about finances and timeframe hold true. I really enjoyed the chance to try out a crowdfunding campaign, am glad and grateful at the amount of good it did, and hope I'll have the chance to launch one again someday.
The author I'm interning with, Zahara Heckscher, has just launched a creative Indie campaign of her own for a nonfiction book on international volunteering. To see how they incorporate video and balance a somewhat complicated (even controversial) issue with a clear narrative, check it out here: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/improving-volunteer-travel-through-education/x/447089
Monday, April 29, 2013
Friendly Reminder: Get Thee to LinkedIn
This one's mostly for my friends and peer group, but applies to anyone really who hasn't yet built up their LinkedIn and is wondering if they should get one. Yes, you should. Come join me.
As my job search starts off, I’m spending at least an hour a week going over my LinkedIn profile—adding classes and experiences, updating and linking my network to my current projects, and just staring at my completed resume going, “Hmm…not bad, actually.”
As my job search starts off, I’m spending at least an hour a week going over my LinkedIn profile—adding classes and experiences, updating and linking my network to my current projects, and just staring at my completed resume going, “Hmm…not bad, actually.”
At least some of this is ego, and at least some of that ego is beyond proportion, but I am very glad to have that profile. It’s like a FaceBook page where I get to show off all the most flattering aspects of my work history and my talents, not to mention that LSAT score I have no other use for since dropping law school from my plans…and the updates are all of my connections doing interesting new things, rather than expressions of moribund wit in the guise of political commentary.
For that reason alone--it's a place where you're expected and encouraged to brag about your accomplishments--I'd recommend you get to work on your LinkedIn profile if you haven't already. I touted Challenge Accepted for being fun and useful, how much more for something that's (a little less) fun, (equally or more) useful, and might help you connect to a future employer?
Having a LinkedIn profile also gives you that much more control over what people find when they google you. If that matters to you. While some of its fancier services are sold on a subscription basis, the basic profile and networking aspect of it is free, at least for now. I'm hoping it doesn't pull a Duotrope and start charging, but even if it does, as someone who pays $5 a month for to keep up on my story submissions I can justify paying the same amount to keep track of my resume. To be fair, the Duotrope subscription was a gift; maybe in the future I'll hope my loved ones get me LinkedIn credits as a gift too (anyone want to bestow a premium account on a poor newbie job searcher? Well, you get nothing if you don't ask!)
It's also a portable, complete resume. As someone who agonized over trimming her resume down to one page--a resume that only covers my college years, because I haven't had any years beyond that--I really like the ability to expand on my skills, courses I've taken, languages I know (if only I had any to share, alas) and some of my publications. Speaking of which, it is considered appropriate to include your LinkedIn profile URL along with other contact information in the heading of your resume.
My LinkedIn functions not only as a resume but also a way to connect with writers and editors. Right now my connection demographics are split half and half between people I've worked/studied/interned/volunteered with and people who have edited an anthology or magazine I appeared in and/or shared a table of contents.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Farewell, I'm off to Ghana!
Tomorrow morning I meet with the rest of my class for a last-minute orientation and packing of certain supplies, and then in the afternoon we head to Baltimore Washington International Airport, from there to JFK in New York, and from thence to Accra, where we'll arrive early Thursday. Making this my last blog post for some time.
I hasten to point out that they do have internet access in Ghana. The country as a whole is completely into the 21st century, and they have more cell phones than people. That said, I will not be bringing any electronics along (except my iPod, which I could not brave a 16+ hour flight without). They would be too much weight, trouble, and risk for a first-time study abroad trip. So this is the last you'll hear from me for a while. I have a post or two scheduled to go live while I'm gone, but the last time I tried scheduling posts on Blogger it didn't work.
Until April 8th, then.
I hope to have lots of interesting pictures and stories--including some from Capacity Rural International, for which my student group did a fundraising project to support microloans for rural women and scholarships for qualifying youth-- to share with you all when I return.
In the meantime, here are some cool sites to check out:
FreeRice.com uses advertising revenue, generated as you play simple games testing vocabulary, math, and art history, to fund food programs around the world. It's a great way to pass the time with a little bit of brain activity and a little bit of good.
Anthologybuilder.com allows you to select short stories (including genre & classics) from a database to build your own collection. Their cover art selection is stellar as well, and I'm not just saying that as I won their 2009 Match-That-Artwork story contest in the youth division, although that did happen.
Thuum.org, a community dedicated to constructing the language of the Dragons from Skyrim. It's run by my friend, a talented programer, blossoming conlanger, and major Skyrim fan--while I don't play myself, I had some fun times sitting at his shoulder watching him run through the beautifully designed world. I've seen movies less gorgeous. Speaking of gorgeous, that website design! Anyway, it's a site you might want to check out if you're also a fan of the Elder Scrolls, conlangs, or crowdsourced projects in action.
Until April, then!
I hasten to point out that they do have internet access in Ghana. The country as a whole is completely into the 21st century, and they have more cell phones than people. That said, I will not be bringing any electronics along (except my iPod, which I could not brave a 16+ hour flight without). They would be too much weight, trouble, and risk for a first-time study abroad trip. So this is the last you'll hear from me for a while. I have a post or two scheduled to go live while I'm gone, but the last time I tried scheduling posts on Blogger it didn't work.
Until April 8th, then.
I hope to have lots of interesting pictures and stories--including some from Capacity Rural International, for which my student group did a fundraising project to support microloans for rural women and scholarships for qualifying youth-- to share with you all when I return.
In the meantime, here are some cool sites to check out:
FreeRice.com uses advertising revenue, generated as you play simple games testing vocabulary, math, and art history, to fund food programs around the world. It's a great way to pass the time with a little bit of brain activity and a little bit of good.
Anthologybuilder.com allows you to select short stories (including genre & classics) from a database to build your own collection. Their cover art selection is stellar as well, and I'm not just saying that as I won their 2009 Match-That-Artwork story contest in the youth division, although that did happen.
Thuum.org, a community dedicated to constructing the language of the Dragons from Skyrim. It's run by my friend, a talented programer, blossoming conlanger, and major Skyrim fan--while I don't play myself, I had some fun times sitting at his shoulder watching him run through the beautifully designed world. I've seen movies less gorgeous. Speaking of gorgeous, that website design! Anyway, it's a site you might want to check out if you're also a fan of the Elder Scrolls, conlangs, or crowdsourced projects in action.
Until April, then!
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Challenge Accepted: The RPG-style To-Do List
A few weeks ago, a friend pointed me to GetYeDone.com, an interactive, fantasy game style online to-do list. You start by signing up and preparing a character sheet, complete with race, class, and skills/attributes. Then you launch your quest: whether it's schoolwork, housekeeping, finding a job or managing the workload you already have, now you can get your daily dose of accomplishment!
In each quest you can list a gathering of tasks (quests themselves can be grouped in meta 'odysseys'), and as you check off a task you receive XP based on the difficulty. Since I joined Challenge Accepted about a week ago, I've gotten to level 2 and am nearly at 3. The most XP I got for a single task was 50 points, from a 'mini-boss' setting manuscript edit. Smaller tasks, like submitting a short story or sending an email, earn me 5 points each.
Challenge Accepted is useful for a number of reasons. First, it takes advantage of the effect that makes RPGs so addictive: the buzz of accomplishment you get as you check of boxes and watch numbers rack up, whether those numbers symbolize imaginary gold coins or XP. So far, it's only XP you can earn through Challenge Accepted, which brings up some aspects of it I'll critique in a minute. In its favor, it's fun, the website is easily accessible whenever you go online (I log into it first thing in a tab beside my email and check off what I've finished since last time) and is much more fun than a list in a Google Doc. By keeping a record of completed quests, it also enables you to look back on what you've accomplished--which can be useful when, say, adding an internship experience to one's resume. The hierarchy of odysseys, quests, and tasks makes for easy organization. You can keep track of long-term goals ("Therese's Writing Career" is one of my Odysseys) while breaking them up into small, simple steps ("One Hundred Days" is a quest, and "complete red-ink comments on the paper manuscript" is a particular task).
For some (*ahem*) this may lead to the temptation to tinker, and to waste potentially productive time in giving cutesey names to Quests and adding or deleting tasks. Probably less time is wasted than would be with an actual role-playing-game, however, as there's not all that much to do in Challenge Accepted except create tasks and tick them off when they're finished. I've had some random encounters of sorts, but they're just flavor text that haven't affected my...gameplay, I suppose it's called. One of the options to tinker with is the abilities and attributes used to perform each task. I'm not sure what selecting these does for me. Am I gaining ranks in skills? Are these meant to reflect my real-life progress? Perhaps when I hit level 10 in the game I'll start to feel like a level 10 in real life, too, whatever that means. The fact that I usually choose 'persevering' as my ability may say something about me.
It's disappointing that the rewards of Challenge Accepted aren't more solid. Then again, compared to a traditional to-do list, at least there are the bells and whistles and happy gaming/winning associations. And of course, the real reward in completing tasks is the real-life productivity and accomplishments you enjoy.
If you want to check out the site, do note that the game is called "Challenge Accepted" but the URL is GetYeDone.com. Happy questing!
Edit: Challenge Accepted is a work in development, but you can keep track of new additions and further improvements at their Coming Soon page. I'm looking forward to the email due date alerts!
Another edit: As of July 2013, I am still using GetYeDone, which says something for its usefulness. A few more updates to the site have been done as well.
In each quest you can list a gathering of tasks (quests themselves can be grouped in meta 'odysseys'), and as you check off a task you receive XP based on the difficulty. Since I joined Challenge Accepted about a week ago, I've gotten to level 2 and am nearly at 3. The most XP I got for a single task was 50 points, from a 'mini-boss' setting manuscript edit. Smaller tasks, like submitting a short story or sending an email, earn me 5 points each.
Challenge Accepted is useful for a number of reasons. First, it takes advantage of the effect that makes RPGs so addictive: the buzz of accomplishment you get as you check of boxes and watch numbers rack up, whether those numbers symbolize imaginary gold coins or XP. So far, it's only XP you can earn through Challenge Accepted, which brings up some aspects of it I'll critique in a minute. In its favor, it's fun, the website is easily accessible whenever you go online (I log into it first thing in a tab beside my email and check off what I've finished since last time) and is much more fun than a list in a Google Doc. By keeping a record of completed quests, it also enables you to look back on what you've accomplished--which can be useful when, say, adding an internship experience to one's resume. The hierarchy of odysseys, quests, and tasks makes for easy organization. You can keep track of long-term goals ("Therese's Writing Career" is one of my Odysseys) while breaking them up into small, simple steps ("One Hundred Days" is a quest, and "complete red-ink comments on the paper manuscript" is a particular task).
For some (*ahem*) this may lead to the temptation to tinker, and to waste potentially productive time in giving cutesey names to Quests and adding or deleting tasks. Probably less time is wasted than would be with an actual role-playing-game, however, as there's not all that much to do in Challenge Accepted except create tasks and tick them off when they're finished. I've had some random encounters of sorts, but they're just flavor text that haven't affected my...gameplay, I suppose it's called. One of the options to tinker with is the abilities and attributes used to perform each task. I'm not sure what selecting these does for me. Am I gaining ranks in skills? Are these meant to reflect my real-life progress? Perhaps when I hit level 10 in the game I'll start to feel like a level 10 in real life, too, whatever that means. The fact that I usually choose 'persevering' as my ability may say something about me.
It's disappointing that the rewards of Challenge Accepted aren't more solid. Then again, compared to a traditional to-do list, at least there are the bells and whistles and happy gaming/winning associations. And of course, the real reward in completing tasks is the real-life productivity and accomplishments you enjoy.
If you want to check out the site, do note that the game is called "Challenge Accepted" but the URL is GetYeDone.com. Happy questing!
Edit: Challenge Accepted is a work in development, but you can keep track of new additions and further improvements at their Coming Soon page. I'm looking forward to the email due date alerts!
Another edit: As of July 2013, I am still using GetYeDone, which says something for its usefulness. A few more updates to the site have been done as well.
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