Future of Film: 10 Tips for Crowd-Funding Newbies

After 22 years of work, filmmaker Jennifer Fox found that she had a completed film with no way to pay the bills and fund the distribution. With no hope left, she reluntantly turned to Kickstarter to ask for help (read more details of her story here). Future of Film wanted to tell more of her inspiring story, which came with some very useful and inspirational advice. Below are 10 things she learned while trying to reach a six-figure funding goal on Kickstarter.

By Jennifer Fox

1. Reach Out to Family and Friends
Unlike what many will tell you, I must say that for me family (and friends) are more about getting emotional support than money. It is very dicey to ask people you know and love to give you their hard earned funds. I had some friends tell me that they felt offended that I was emailing them about our campaign. Discussing this with them led to some very interesting insights about why I feel this is a democratic and legitimate way to support the arts. But I am not here to proselytize. I immediately backed off. In a way what they are saying is true: they don’t ask me to fund their passion, why should I ask them to fund mine? However, that’s not exactly how I see it: I believe that the film project, My Reincarnation, has a greater good for humanity and is a contribution to people’s lives. Hence, it must be seen and is worth funding.  

2. Build a Team
Filmmaking is a collaborative experience, but so is fundraising. It takes a lot of brainstorming and thinking out of the box. It takes multiple skills that one person rarely has all of. Without a team you just can’t get the traction and the reach into the world. But also it helps with the fear factor. I don’t know about you, but this kind of public fundraising scares the sh*t out of me. My team kept me from losing it. Having a team is also essential for Tip #3.

3. Brainstorm the Campaign as a Rollout with Different Phases
Our team, Katherine Nolfi, Lisa Duva, Stefanie Diaz and myself, discussed how the campaign would start and how we would keep rolling out new facets over time. This included building email lists, adding new incentives, and creating regular new videos for our website, Facebook and Twitter that could be linked with our consistent updates on Kickstarter.

We saw our campaign as having three initiatives: the web campaign; seeking out and approaching larger private donors to become Producers; and setting up “Sneak Preview Benefit Screenings” in key locations. The screenings were part of our plan because we had a unique problem: we were fundraising for a film that was technically finished, but that no one had seen. We hypothesized that people might need to see the finished film to give it money. In the end, festivals also helped on this account. But I also learned that the film’s trailer was often enough for people…

4. Make a Good Trailer
Of course “make a great trailer” is common wisdom for any kind of film fundraising. However, My Reincarnation was such a difficult film that I didn’t edit a trailer during the fundraising process. When I looked for funds, I always showed edited scenes assembled in a half-hour or hour format (which is probably why we failed miserably much of the time). Once we finally cut the trailer, right before launching at festivals, it was rather easy to do because the story arc was so clear. Now I’ve been told by some people that they cry when they watch our trailer. It has helped many people to make a donation when they haven’t seen the film yet.

5. Incentives
Since you can’t really put many images on your own Kickstarter page, Stefanie created a full brochure of pictures of the Kickstarter incentives on our My Reincarnation website so people could see what they were getting. She used the PBS pledge images as her model. We gathered a mixture of incentives, some Buddhist oriented and some film community oriented. One thing that we did very early on, even before the Kickstarter campaign began, was to offer a Limited Special Edition Pre-Release DVD for sale on our website at a very high price: $108. We started to sell this a good six months before our Kickstarter campaign to help keep our office running during the festival release. When we put up the campaign, we decided to offer the DVD in two ways: the Commercial DVD in 2012 at $25 and the Limited Special Edition Pre-Release DVD in September 2011 at $108. This was our most successful incentive.

For higher priced items, I raided anything I could find in my home: there are two of my own museum quality paintings by a very well known Buddhist Painter and a beautiful antique Tibetan chest that my parents gave me. I even put up a limited edition watch I received from being on the Zurich Film Festival jury last year. Basically nothing I own was off limits. It’s been a great Buddhist teaching to struggle with–and let go of–my attachment to my objects (that chest is one of my favorite possessions)!

6. Write, Write, And Write
Early on in the process, I would send my eblasts to my team to edit. We thought one page, max–so they cut and cut (my writing style can be a bit longwinded). Then we noticed that we were receiving the most donations following longer, more personal messages. They received overwhelmingly positive feedback. What at first seemed like a weakness, turned out to be one of our strongest tools. Writing became fun. As some of you may know, being on the road with a film can be the one of the most uncreative jobs one does over the course of film. But suddenly, writing these weekly Kickstarter updates and email blasts became a creative outlet for me.

7. Reach out to Appropriate Partners to Help Blast for your Campaign / Befriend the Tastemakers
The first tier we reached out to were listserves connected to the students of the film’s protagonist, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu. Rinpoche has centers around the world, so we regularly wrote new, special updates to be blasted to their membership. These letters were less chatty than the ones I send to the general mailing list or post for our Kickstarter patrons.

We started a web series called Outtakes From the Film (O.F.F.) that we edit and post online and in our Buddhist eblasts to give those communities new video to enjoy, and entice them to become more involved with the project. These videos have helped assuage Buddhist students around the world, who are anxiously waiting to see My Reincarnation and are not so happy that they have to wait for the distribution rollout. The other thing we did–but could only do with the Sneak Preview NYC Fundraising screening–was offer incentives to appropriate organizations to blast their membership on behalf of our campaign. We gave the heads of each organization a free ticket to the screening in exchange for sending out an announcement. And of course, this laid the groundwork for establishing partners and building an audience for the film down the line.

8. Use Web 2.0: Facebook, Twitter, Bloggers…
This is absolutely obvious in today’s world. We posted updates on social networking sites many times a week. We worked hard to build up our Facebook and Twitter pages daily. We also posted on other organizations’ and individuals’ pages and walls – searching for related topics like “Buddhism,” “Tibet,” “Spirituality,” “Religion,” and “Yoga” – with information about the Kickstarter campaign, new videos, incentives and screenings.

9. Blast Often, Regularly, and Best at the Beginning of the Week
Get those eblasts out on Monday or Tuesday. Later in the week they get lost in people’s over-loaded inboxes. It’s important to keep up the pressure. It’s hard to know what the “tipping point” is for someone to make a donation. It can be the first letter or the twentieth letter that brings them over to the Kickstarter site.

10. Go Beyond Your Limits
Every step of the way on this journey, I had to go beyond my comfort zone to publicly ask for money: on the web, in emails, in person, on stage – over and over again. At every point, I had to push through my reticence, fear and a general “I just don’t want to do it again!” attitude. Facing these inner demons is necessary if you are going do this type of campaign. Believe me, crowd-funding certainly pushes those buttons, but it also requires you to let go and not listen to your ego so much.

My motto is, “Never say die!” Despite years of experience facing rejection, it can still be hard to pick yourself up each time. Somehow we have to find a way not to take rejection personally and move on. Of course, with some potential funders, you just have to give up, back off, and try somewhere else. A person who says no today may still say yes tomorrow. And if you give them new evidence to change their mind, they often do.

All of Jennifer Fox’s helpful tips were posted originally on Hope for Film.

Stay tuned for her insights on how to round off a successful campaign.

Jennifer Fox is an award-winning filmmaker and educator known for her ground-breaking features and series, including Beirut: The Last Home Movie, An American Love Story, Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman and My Reincarnation. She recently co-wrote the half hour television pilot The Good Egg, and is developing the feature script The Horse’s Tale. She has executive produced many films, including Love Diane and On the Ropes.

The Tribeca Future of Film blog is a place where leading filmmakers and experts within the film industry share their thoughts on film, technology and the future of media.

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Google+: The Beginning of a Revolution?

The pieces are rapidly falling into place for Google’s increasing integration of “social signals” into its search algorithms. With the oddly isolated “+1″ button launch at the end of March and the seemingly abrupt end of its agreement with Twitter in early July — see “Google Loses Access to Twitter Stream, Suspends Realtime Search,” on Mashable — it seemed that Google was dropping the social ball yet again.

Instead Google surged forward with Google+, its month-old social network based on sharing specific content to specific circles. From the users’ perspective, it’s like Gmail and GTalk combined with Facebook, but far more engaging. From Google’s perspective it’s the missing piece that connects the social dots between its products and provides a unique source of social-signal data to feed its ever-growing algorithms. Assuming Google+ realizes its potential, Google has the beginnings of a revolution on its hands.

Another Social Network?

Social networks come and go, right? Each network a business chooses to join requires a profile, content generation, creativity, outreach and interaction with happy and not-so-happy customers. It’s a lot of effort, and the payoff is not always easy to track. So what makes Google+ different? It’s the combination of user base, advertising platform and algorithmic expertise. With data feeding from its web search, advertising platform, maps, local, email, mobile operating system, desktop operating system and social network, Google is better positioned than ever to touch customers across multiple platforms.

Who else has Google’s reach? Facebook is strong in the social and advertising arenas, but its reach is limited by its walled nature. Apple has the mobile and desktop OS covered, but is weaker in the advertising space and doesn’t play at all in search or local. Microsoft has search, maps, advertising and operating system areas covered, but its real strength is in desktop software with limited mobility. Google alone has been able to pull all these pieces together, and — more importantly — data from all these pieces together, and apply them to its users’ lives.

Network Reach Matters

As Google becomes more integrated into more aspects of everyday life, it will leverage what it knows about individual users to benefit either your business or your competitors. Today, Facebook and Twitter are widely accepted marketing channels for ecommerce companies. In terms of reach, though, where Facebook’s and Twitter’s networks end is where your reach ends — if those are the only two social networks used to promote your business.

For example, as I go through my day I interact with at least 10 different Google products in every phase of my personal and professional life. I use the Chrome browser, I carry an Android phone, I have three or four Gmail accounts, I use Google Talk, Google Voice, Google+, Google Maps, Google Navigation, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google Checkout, Google Web Search, Google Mobile Search, and I see — but ignore — Google AdWords across many of these products. In my office, at home, in the car, on the train, Google is always with me.

Consequently, across a growing number of these products, Google+ is with me as well. The persistent black header across Google’s products alerts me to Google+ activity: a message, a comment, a Huddle or Hangout request, someone adds me to a circle, someone +1’s a post. Google is with me all day, everywhere I am. And on most of those products, the little red notification square says subtly but persistently, “Something cool to see here!” That’s brilliant. That’s reach. And only Google has it. The others either lack the breadth of product portfolio or haven’t connected their products to the extent required to reach across them all yet.

I’m not the average consumer, I’ll grant that. But as mainstream consumers become more comfortable with an always-connected life in the cloud, Google will be there waiting to welcome them into its Circles. Every product in its wide portfolio is a potential entry point into the Google fold. A Gmail user today may think that social networks like Twitter or Facebook are a waste of time, but soon it will be a small, easy step from Gmail to Google+. We’re certainly not there today, with Google+ still working out the kinks in its field trial mode phase, but the potential is clear.

Benefit to Search Marketing

Google+ and the information from +1 buttons around the web are starting to influence search results, and the trend will only increase from here to fuel a powerful cycle of searching and sharing on the same network.

For example, a searcher Googling “cute shoes” sees that a friend has +1’d Shoes.com and is more inclined to click through to shop herself. While there, she finds a ridiculous pair of shoes that makes her laugh and shares that with her “Shopaholics” Circle in Google+. One of them is probably feeling like a new pair of shoes, anyway, and decides to click through, since the link is right there in front of her. Three pairs of flats and a matching handbag later she’s spent $187 and run back to Google+ to show off her new purchases.

If this same binge of shopping and sharing had happened on Facebook, it probably would not have triggered the social mention for Shoes.com in Google’s search results that the +1 did. Because Facebook does not share its data with Google, the same actions on Facebook are less visible to Google and less likely to display as a social mention in the search results. Courting fans and friends on Google+ will be more valuable to search marketing efforts than courting them on Facebook and Twitter, because the same actions drive engagement in social media marketing and search marketing channels simultaneously.

Getting Started on Google+

Google+ is not a practical marketing channel for most ecommerce sites today. Last week, Google began removing profiles for all but a handful of brands — see “Google Removes Mashable, Sesame Street Other Prominent Accounts From Google Plus,” at Search Engine Land — stating that its present incarnation is meant strictly for individuals. A Google+ product for brands is in the works, and has reportedly set to debut in the “next few months.” That’s good news for brands: You have a few months to learn and plan before the Google+ explosion hits and brands start scrambling all over each other to capitalize on Google’s superior reach. Use this time wisely.

1. Sign up for a personal account.
2. Use Google+ personally. Add your friends and colleagues. Be yourself. Share, learn, play, have fun.
3. Learn more about Google+: Mashable has a good guide to the basics, and others are coming out every day. Just Google it.
4. Watch for news on Google+ business profiles. Mashable, TechCrunch, Search Engine Land, and other tech blogs will be the first to report the launch.
5. Plan your business profile. Just like a Facebook profile, the Google profile requires some basic content such as business information, logos and images, descriptive content, links to your site and links to other social profiles. In addition, start thinking about Circles that make sense for your business like “Customers,” “Bloggers” or “Partners” and consider what brands or people you’d like to include in those.
6. Claim your Google Place. Start the verification process if you aren’t already verified. It can take weeks, and Places will undoubtedly be linked to the Google+ business profiles.
7. Editorial Calendar. Include Google+ on your editorial calendar as another channel that requires content generation and cross promotion with other marketing efforts.

Read Jill Kocher’s profile.

Related Search Terms

• Google+, Facebook

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