On Sunday night, I launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo, a site that provides a platform for small business owners, filmmakers, writers and others looking to launch and manage on online fundraising effort for their project.
It’s been a humbling 48 hours. As you can see from the following screen grab, we have plenty of “crowd,” but no “funding” yet. It stings a bit, but I want to share this stuff because there’s some good learning here that others looking for this kind of funding might benefit from.
This traffic report from IndieGoGo doesn’t indicate where the visitors are coming from, but I assume most of the views are the result of my promoting the “AdPulp Journalism Fund” on Twitter, Facebook and AdPulp.com. So, I have enough influence to drive people to click and consider, but I’m weak when it comes to motivating conversion.
Weak though I may be, I hope to improve and find new ways to go about raising money for AdPulp. One thing that occurs to me at this early stage is the need to go one-to-one with this ask. That means email, letter writing and in-person appeals. Somehow I need to establish a personal connection to the site for our most ardent supporters.
I want the campaign to work, and I want to learn what works and what does not. I also would love to see my paid email newsletter, “Hungry for Gumbo” take off. Right now, I have nine paid subscribers to the email. As you can see, it’s tough going, this path to the paid content mountaintop.
I’ve been invited to speak on the topic at GeekEnd in Boston in October. The title of my talk is “The Honeymoon Is Over And The Bill Is Due: Paid Content in 2012 And Beyond.” I’d like to be able to share a few personal success stories at that time, but I’m going to need to roll out some innovative new approaches in order to do that.