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Originally Posted by pwalker8
As far as I can tell kickstart and other crowd sourcing projects are one of those ideas that sounds great, but rarely works.
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Successful crowdfunding requires far more planning, and organization, than getting a loan from a bank. Part of that planning involves:
- Drawing up financials that are even more exhaustive than used when applying for a bank loan. ^1;
- Attracting the attention of people who don't even know that the area of endevour that whatever you want funded, exists. ^2;
- Persuading people that oppose your project, to fund it.^3;
- Being realistic.^4;
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then we were see more use of grants and patrons, kind of how the arts were paid for during the Renaissance.
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I can't point to any specific evidence, but I've noticed an increasing number of non-fiction books either list grants that were used to fund research, or writing the material, or thank specific patrons for financial support, or both. I don't know if that information is provided due to more stringent disclosure rules that are legally enforced, or changes in various codes of ethical conduct, or if the use of grants and patrons is really increasing.
^1: More than one successfully crowd-funded project was sunk, because the planners did not account for taxes owed on the revenue obtained by crowd-funding. Other successfully funded ventures were almost sunk, becuase of unexpected costs, that were a direct result of using crowdfunding.
^2: In looking at a number of projects on KickStarter, I noticed that:
- Crowd-funding that relies on 1,000 "true fans" is inevitably going to fail;
- Crowd-funding that relies on 100,000 hangers-on, will succeed;
- Offering several widely dispersed levels of financially contributing is mandatory;
The majority of hangers-on appear to be completely unfamiliar with every aspect of the field that the project is within. These hangers-on make small contributions, but, en masse, push the funding over the goal.
^3: The rational here, is that those who oppose the project, do so, purely because their objections have been neither acknowledged, nor addressed. Address those issues, and the oponents will support your project;
^4: I'm looking specifically at books that people sought crowd-funding for:
- Starting from scratch,translating from Medieval Hebrew, Aramaic, Yiddish, and Latin roughly 1,500 handwritten pages, and publishing it, within a nine month time frame. No information about translation skills or experiance was mentioned in any of the promotional material;
- Photograph every church in the state capital, and publish the results in a book. Estimated time frame --- six months;
- An unauthorized sequel to Gone With The Wind;
- Building each device that Testla patented, and publishing the diary of that experience;
- A family history;
- This history of a plot of land in a small town;
Getting any of those projects successfully funded is a non-starter.