How to Crowdfund a Short Film in 2020
This is a guest post from Elise McCave and Liz Cook Mowe, the Directors of Narrative Film and Documentary at Kickstarter.
Last year, Kickstarter turned 10.
A decade ago, the crowdfunding concept had to be explained to most people; people were distrustful of putting credit card information online, which was a legitimate concern at the time, but a sentiment that now feels quaint as more than 100 million people make purchases on Amazon every day.
Perhaps most notably, a decade ago the most common criticism of Kickstarter’s vision was that no one would want to give money to support a creative idea without some kind of financial incentive. And yet, $4.7 billion from 17 million people around the world and more than 176,000 creative projects later, here we are!
Numbers aside, we’ve also learned a ton about how best to use Kickstarter to raise funds and find your audience. So, below is a short and insightful list of our top tips and best practices–as well as our most commonly seen pitfalls and missteps–to help guide you through the process.
As many filmmakers who have used Kickstarter before will tell you, running a campaign is no small feat. It takes a lot of preparation, attention, and sheer determination to make it happen (not unlike making a film!).
It’s our job at Kickstarter to help ease that process.
With that in mind we will be launching a month-long initiative we’re calling Long Story Short that will spotlight short films live on Kickstarter during the month of March 2020. The idea is to bring as much attention and visibility to short films during that time as we can.
So if you have a campaign of your own to launch, now’s the time, and the rest of this guide will walk through those best practices we’ve gleaned over the years.
We think about this process in three main stages: preparation, running the live campaign, and post-campaign fulfillment and communication.
Let’s dig into each in more detail.
1. Preparation is paramount
You wouldn’t try to make a film without pre-production would you? No. So don’t try to skip this stage with your Kickstarter campaign either.
First, you need to prepare a thorough outreach strategy that will enable you to reach the widest net of backers for your project.
The majority of pledges for your project (around 76 percent) will come from your extended network—people you know and people they know. So make sure you have a contact list that’s up to date and all in one spreadsheet or database.
But who are the internet strangers who will support this project and how will you find them?
Spend some time figuring out who your audience is, where they live online (where on the internet they spend their time, who they interact with, what they read and listen to, what they comment on), and how you can best reach them.
Consider how you’ll share your project with your audience once your campaign is live—by email? In person? On social media? On which platform?—and how you’ll tailor your messages to each segment of your audience and each platform.
Second, draft your detailed description of what you’re making, why you’re making it, what you need in order to make it, and what your backers will get in return for supporting you.
When you’re telling your story, be sure to address questions like: What’s your film about? Who’s working on it? Why are you the right team to make it? What‘s urgent or relevant about this story at this moment in time? What stage of the filmmaking process are you at, and what is your anticipated timeline for completing it? What will the Kickstarter funds help pay for?
Two essential elements for you to include in your project page are a project video (duh! Videos are what you do best!) and high quality, engaging images that help tell your story and share your visual aesthetic.
2. Running your live campaign. You hit launch–now what?
Hopefully you let your closest allies know about your imminent project before you launched, using our new “pre-launch page” feature.
But once it’s live, your first order of business is to tell literally everyone you’ve ever interacted with that your project exists and needs their support. Enlist your closest friends and family to contribute early; you’ll feel better having those early dollars in and it may motivate other backers to join in. Post a link to your project anywhere you exist online.
It’s common for film projects to slow down after the first few days of the campaign. Don’t panic! Here are some tactics to keep your momentum going:
Post project updates–they let you tell your backers how it’s all going. It’s an opportunity to keep the people who’ve shown faith in you informed, and an avenue to express your gratitude.
Add a new reward and announce it to your community, like the creators of The Shawl did.
Find a matching grant. If someone in your community is willing to give at a higher level, leverage their pledge to act as a matching grant, like the creators of Truth, or Consequences did.
Say thank you! You can message backers individually to thank them and encourage them to spread the word.
Set up achievable campaign milestones to rally your community, like the creators of The Three Men You Meet at Night did. For example, you can ask your backers to help you get to a certain number of backers or a certain financial goal by the end of the week or by the midway point.
3. After your campaign ends: fulfilling your rewards and keeping everyone in the loop.
You’ll need to know who and where to send your rewards to. To get this info, circulate a backer survey which lets you collect the details you need to deliver the rewards to your backers.
If managing the logistics of your project starts to feel overwhelming, or you wind up with more backers than you were prepared for, you don’t need to do everything yourself.
Working with a fulfillment service can help lighten the load and create a better experience for everyone. We’ve compiled this list of services that help with everything from packaging and shipping to manufacturing.
For distributing digital downloads, many filmmakers use WeTransfer or Dropbox. For password-protected digital links to your film, many Film creators use Vimeo or Reelhouse.
After the project has ended, but before you’ve completed your film or fulfilled your rewards, you should update your backers regularly.
After that, send them a note whenever you’ve got something interesting to share. For example, you can announce that your film’s been accepted into a festival, or that there’s going to be a public screening. (When the short animated documentary The Shawl was accepted to the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, the team sent out this lovely update.)
We recommend employing a principle of radical transparency. It’s not unusual for creative projects to hit speed bumps, and the more open and honest you are with your backers, the more likely they are to understand when things go wrong, and even come to your aid in times of need.
Here’s a great post written by the team behind The Viking of 6th Avenue outlining the work they were putting in, as well as the unforeseen developments that contributed to their delay in finishing the film. We think it’s a great example of radical transparency!
So, what about some of the common missteps that lead to challenging–and occasionally failed–film projects?
1. Setting a goal that is just too dang high.
We totally get it. The amount you ask for on Kickstarter is almost never the full amount that you need to make the film, so how do you determine what an appropriate goal is? Well, if 76 percent of the average film project’s funding comes from the personal network of the filmmaker, you can use your knowledge of that network to inform what you think people might be willing and able to contribute.
2. Lack of preparation.
Your timeline was short so you launched before fully preparing your outreach and communication plans and now you’re running to stand still and aren’t ready to take on the work required to manage the campaign.
These campaigns require a lot of time for detailed consideration of who your audience is, why they’d be compelled to support your project, and how you’ll go about convincing them of that. If you build in time to do that work up front, prior to launch, then you’ll make life easier when the campaign clock is ticking.
3. Launching or ending your project on a holiday.
The first few and the last few days are typically when the majority of your pledges will come in. It’s important to think about launching and concluding your campaign when the largest number of people will be awake and at their computers.
4. Setting your campaign for 60 days.
60 days will likely feel like a long time to anyone receiving your repeated fundraising messages, but it will almost definitely feel like an eternity to you. We see a dip in success rate in campaigns lasting more than 45 days, so unless you have a very compelling reason to run that marathon, we’d suggest keeping it shorter. Most projects should set their campaigns to run between 14 and 35 days, and if your project goal is $25,000 or more, we recommend the longer end of that range.
We know there’s a lot here (and actually a lot more here - the first of four blog posts we recently published on best practices for filmmakers using Kickstarter) but the main takeaways are: spend time prepping for your campaign and use your Kickstarter page to tell the story you want to make in your own words.
Kickstarter is no longer the new kid on the block but it still remains one of the only places where anyone can tell their story in their own way without needing approval from Hollywood or other gatekeepers. It’s where storytellers like Matthew Cherry, who just won the Oscar for Best Animated Short, can bring an idea for a beautiful film like Hair Love and find an audience of thousands that have been demanding to see a story like this on screen.
Our support of film projects doesn’t stop with Long Story Short in March so please don’t hesitate to reach out to the film team at film@kickstarter.com with your ideas for campaigns or questions on how to run them!
