How I KickStarted The Ma’Ati
On August 14, I successfully funded my dream project, The Ma’Ati Magazine, through Kickstarter. I spent an average of 12 hours per day in order to raise $13,324 in 30 days.
Most resources I read before the campaign stated that I would need a huge fan-base, virtual assistants or paid sponsored posts with major bloggers. I had none of these and I’m sure others who are considering using crowdfunding for their projects don’t either. I went into this campaign with a plan and some resources but also kind of winged it. Hopefully this can help other awesome creatives bring their projects to life.
** This post will be continuously updated. So if you have any questions, ask away and I’ll post here as well.**
Kickstarter or Indiegogo?
Deciding which crowdfunding platform to use was a pretty big part of the process for a number of reasons. I had to take into account what percentage of the total funds collected would be taken by each platform, how far each platform seemed to reach itself and even which one potential backers would trust. I wasn’t trying to offer any equity for The Ma’Ati, so those platforms were out. My project was not a personal endeavor like raising money for school or studying abroad, so I axed out Gofundme. Really, my best two options seemed to be Indiegogo or Kickstarter. I ultimately went with the latter because a lot of my friends had pledged to it already plus I really liked the idea that it was an all or nothing pursuit. Whatever goal you set with Kickstarter is the amount you must reach, or you will receive none of your pledges. At certain points in any campaign, this nuance makes a difference. I didn’t want to reach only partial funding with say, Indiegogo and still need to fulfill rewards (which could potentially wipe out a small budget) or not be able to do the full extent of my project.
What became my homework before and during my campaign, however, was educating my audience on the fact that Kickstarter was all or nothing. This involved showcasing what the money would be used for, discussing the stages of funding I had gone through and individually emailing people to let them know.
This isn’t to say that Indiegogo wouldn’t be a good option for you. Kickstarter has REALLY strict rules when it comes to raising money on its platform. For example, you cannot run contests as part of your campaign or even events. A lot of folks like Indiegogo because of how liberal they can be with certain projects. Two friends were able to extend the life of their campaign past the goal date they had set because Indiegogo took a liking to their projects. It’s all up to you and what you believe your project needs at a bare minimum.
Understanding and describing my project to my friends, family and, especially, folks who’ve never heard of me was a task. So step one in my Kickstarter journey began two years before I even launched. I had been developing the Ma’Ati since the spring of 2013 when the idea first came to me. Once I’d practiced my elevator pitch dozens of times on friends who may or may not have volunteered to help, I felt ready.
I researched the fuck out of what I wanted to do. Like for real. The whole mess of it. I developed my storyline, spent hours looking at ancient documents and myths, explored my own imagination, etc. I also researched other travel publications and tried to understand as well as I could what I was offering that would be different. I showcased all this
This step is never done for me, by the way. It changed during my campaign, and it’s shifted after. But I realized that a creative project is not a linear line, it’s an ethereal abyss you and only you can sort out. You just have to find a way to explain that to people who may give you some money to pursue it.
I needed to come up with a figure that was both reasonable (for 30 days), and would seriously push my project further into the beautiful vision I had for it. I had already spent time my own money and had a good idea of how much it cost to travel, commission artwork, and work with my web developer.
So I decided to raise $10,000. With this amount, I knew that I could finish traveling for the first novel within the Ma’Ati series, and move forward with art commissions and the website builds for the novel and magazine. Amazingly, I raised more than my budget (a cool $13,324) BUT that’s not exactly the amount I received.
Most Kickstarter projects have lost backers after the total tally and mine was no exception. This happens for a lot of reasons too. Some of your backers may pledge early, and need to cancel credit and debit cards during or just after the campaign. Others may not have enough funds when Kickstarter debits their accounts. Luckily, I had a very minimal amount of backers dropped and most were amazingly kind and contributed to me after the campaign was over. Kickstarter gives only 7 days for backers to update their accounts and with people being super busy, a lot can miss emails. And of course, Kickstarter took their cut (about 8%).
All in all, I received a bit shy of $12,000. This meant that I could do even more with the project AND work towards making it a sustainable entity pre-launch. Consider also that Kickstarter revenue is revenue and most folks will tell you NOT to do your campaign in December. Why? Because unless you’re gonna drop all those stacks that one month, you’re gonna need to pay taxes on this earned income. Thus, I ran my campaign July-August to give me a good cushion of time to spend the money.
I broke a lot of rules here. Everyone says to keep your Kickstarter video to two minutes or less. Meh. I had mine at 7 minutes. Why? Because the first 2:30 talked about my project and the rest showcased my travels. I didn’t get good feedback with that from everyone and I was cool with it. It’s what I wanted to do and well... it didn’t matter in the end. At one point, I did upload a shorter version to Kickstarter but by then I was still over half funded. I paid my amazing friend Gaje of the Mousai Art Collective a little fee to shoot and edit my video and asked my friend’s from local DC band RedLine Graffiti to use their music et voila! I had my Kickstarter visual.
T-shirts, posters, pens, postcards. Depending on who you ask, physical rewards are either the way to go (free marketing!) or something to avoid like the plague (will drain your budget!). Iiiiii was conservative in this area. Providing physical rewards, depending on your project, will mean a plethora of things. Sales tax. Shipping. Sales tax… I only offered two physical rewards. One was for postcards from my travels for those who pledged $5 or more. Another was for a print of the artwork from the first chapter of the novel. One would have had to pledge $250 or more for the latter, meaning that the cost of the poster was substantially lower than what they were contributing. That matters tax-wise.
Five days before my campaign launched, I began to release little teasers of the project’s artwork. A month before this, I also began to speak to some of my friends and potential contributors about what I was doing. I called my mentors, former professors, colleagues, friends, family, everyone, to let them know that I was raising money, asking for advice and, hopefully, monetary support.
The one strategy I had for my campaign was the media. As a freelancer, I’ve been able to write for different publications along the way and I hit some of them up just before my campaign, as well as new ones. My aim was to explain to certain blogs and web-mags why their audience would be interested in my project. For me, that meant hitting up sites that dealt with African culture, black nerd culture, art and travel.
For the day of the launch, I knew I was going to publish to my blogger platform on the Huffington Post and amazingly, Afropunk wrote me back saying they’d be down for me to write a post as well. That meant that when the campaign began, I had two major sites talking about the Ma’Ati. And it worked! I had a good amount of pledges the first few days and a lot of excitement and buzz surrounding the project. I continued reaching out to sites during the entire course of my campaign, including sending follow up emails to folks who hadn’t responded. This was really important because editors are super, super busy people. It’s way too easy for a cool email to get lost.
To find email addresses for editors, most sites have a contact page or a masthead listing editors by content. Don’t be afraid to ask around for contacts either. Some of my friends put me in contact with sites or steered me in the right direction for others. Although most of my support still came from folks who knew me, but I believe that what swayed a lot of them was constantly seeing my updates and the support I received from the media.
Again, I told erryyybbbboooddyyy about my Kickstarter. Everyone I knew. All of the business cards I’d accumulated over the years, contacts, ex’s, besties, casual acquaintances, parents, grandparents, cousins, neighbors. Everyone. My good friend (and web developer) Babusi said it best. Now’s the time to be aggressive and let everyone know what you’re doing. Because the absolute best part of the Kickstarter is how surprised you’ll be with who’ll support it!
That’s right, through Kickstarter, you’ll get the joy of having your own cheerleaders. Although my grandparents and parents had basically no idea what Kickstarter was, they were too excited to contribute and rally more troops to join them. It became a ritual for them to check in every other day to see who’d they’d been able to convince. (“Oh, ____ didn’t contribute yet?! That girl owes me money...”)
But one of the most important things I learned during this campaign was not to get salty about who DOESN’T help out. Who cares if you helped out a homie a few months ago or have a friend who has a gazillion followers? They may not be supporters of your campaign. And that’s cool! Seriously! It’s not necessarily a negative sign. Plus, what really matters is who does come to support. Their positivity carried me through the ebbs and flows of my campaign, and I can’t really remember who didn’t respond. You’re celebrating your idea here and inviting people who love you or may not even know you to help you create it! That’s awesome and fun and great, and will help you not to get distracted by those you would have never needed to convince.
If you’re going to run a crowdfund campaign, set aside a little bit to go towards Other People’s Projects. (OPP if you will.) It creates good karma for you, and you then get insight into OPP’s. Their setbacks, gains, rewards. We’re all out here tryna learn. One awesome project I was super happy to support was Flicker by a new friend. We were trying to raise the same amount and ran our campaigns at basically the same time. We were able to share what was and what was not working, and strategies to move forward.
The first few days of the Ma’Ati were fierce and powerful and I felt invincible.
But then, those streams of pledges turned into a trickle which turned into… a drought. For days. Like, long, awful days of nothingness. I was moved because supporters were still reposting articles that talked about The Ma’Ati and the Facebook page was getting new likes all the time. But, my phone wasn’t vibrating from new pledges. My Kickstarter dreams were starting to crack, crumble and fade. Finally, it became too much and I broke down, twice, at my summer job. (Cuz fuck a 9 to 5, bitches tryna get liberated.)
But it was my grandmother, the crafty capitalist genius, who knew what to do. We were hanging out on one of our Sundays when she told me to bring her her laptop. We created a Kickstarter account for her and then she told me, “Put $2000.” I cried obviously and refused and she won. My grandmother said that it takes money to make money. “White people support their kids all the time with these inheritances and all this stuff and we should too.”
After that pledge, where I was only at 18% funded, suddenly, I was 38% funded. My grandmother was right. When people saw that amount, they reacted and not another day went by without a pledge.
Don’t Take This Too Seriously
But even before I got through the lull, I had a revelation. I was not going to keep taking the Kickstarter so seriously. Sure I wanted it to work, but it didn’t HAVE to. A really dear friend of mine who’d also run a successful campaign told me that this was only one of 10,000 ways to make my project happen. Once I grasped that, I formed a sort of disconnect to the campaign that allowed me the space I needed to think of other creative ways I could get this project moving if I needed to.
When I adopted this attitude, I was then able to have fun with having this Kickstarter. Every pledge was cause for a celebration and each day was a creative endeavor to see how I could get more. I loved talking about the Ma’Ati and I focused on spreading this passion around. Travel, culture, stories. That’s all I talked about and that passion became infectious. People really wanted to help me and become a part of this nation.
And best of all? THE absolute best thing? I never took it personally when people DIDN’T respond to my emails or even straight up told me that they wouldn’t be able to contribute to the campaign. First off, I’m a struggling artist at the moment too. I know firsthand that not everyone has the ability to budget a Kickstarter into their month. Second, the Ma’Ati will not interest everyone. And third, I gave people time to show what they’d like to do. Some of my backers (like my mom) told me they waited until the very end of my campaign to see if they’d need to make up the difference. Luckily, they didn’t, but by allowing folks the time to support in the way they wished too, I got to enjoy the magic of the people around me.
The only time in my life that social media made all the sense in the world was when I was running the Kickstarter. Suddenly, I had something to say and an accessible audience to hear just what I was doing. I have more Facebook friends than any other platform, and most of my support came from them! What got that going, though, was having media publish articles on my project and then showcasing it on my personal and project FB page’s like, see? It’s legit! When folks felt comfortable, but also a part of a larger movement, they reacted. And it was always awesome to see folks getting excited about what it was I was trying to build.
I know the popular rhetoric behind anything is, find people with tons of followers and get them to talk about you. That works when those people are willing to do it. For instance, I was so happy that Son of Baldwin went out of his way to support news of the Ma’Ati. He really didn’t have to and having his stamp of support was huge. I have been a fan of his for a few years now and don’t know him personally, so having a fellow writer show support was incredibly moving.
On the other hand, there are other folks I know with massive followings who I was excited to ask to tweet and post about the Ma’Ati. Most of them didn’t. In reality, most of my support came from people you’ve never heard of. Friends from high school, college and grad school who were so excited to see what I was up to. Folks who read about the Ma’Ati from articles. Kickstarter gave me an amazing chance to reconnect with folks I haven’t seen in forever! (Looking at you, Sunny and Danielle!) These people were pivotal to the success of my campaign and gave me the feedback and shoulders I needed to keep going.
I am so happy that I ran my campaign in the summer because DC public pools were open. After spending 6 hours messaging FB friends to ask or remind them to contribute, and sending pitch letters to media publications and doing interviews, sometimes all I needed was to float in water and stare at the sky. I put in work during my campaign, and I was attached to my phone or computer for 18 hours a day typically.
I messaged every backer I had, and if I knew them personally, called them and sent Facebook messages to thank them. I also posted IG photos of what I was up to, and tried, hard, to give an idea of what it’d be like to follow the Ma’Ati around the world. I also combed through Tumblr, IG, Twitter and other platforms to thank those who’d retweeted posts about my project and were generally excited about what was to come. It gave me an idea of who was attracted to my publication AND allowed me to interact with like minds. (SO AWESOME!!)
So, obviously, sometimes I needed to detach and relax. And I did! Often. For half my campaign, I was also working as a summer school teacher, so creating some sort of life-balance was beyond essential. The campaign taught me that I was an incredibly resilient hard worker, but also that I deserved to have down time to reflect and be what I am: a creative.
I wish you the best of luck with your campaigns! If you have any questions, please ask or email. (I’ll be traveling for the next 3 months thanks to Kickstarter, so there may be a delay.) Please also feel free to follow the Ma’Ati on social media platforms (@themaatimag) to stay in touch and give me advice or keep up with my global gallivants.
