Tips for a Tuesday - Creative Ways To Fund Your Work

Say you've got a great idea for a new artistic endeavor - a new line of jewelry, a new series of paintings, a new documentary about some wonderful thing you've stumbled across - but you lack the necessary dinero to make it happen.

Starving, yet clever artist, meet kickstarter.com.

Kickstarter provides an ingenious way to leverage your existing network to help fund your project in exchange for a piece of what you make in return. This way, you can get the money you need without having to beg a bank for a loan, or feel like a big ole mooch. The process is something like this. Submit your idea to their editors. It has to be a creative project with a fairly specific and narrow scope. For example: "Help me Pay My Bills for a Year So I Can Keep Making Art" is less eye-catching to them than, say, "I'd Like To Travel The Country for a Year Painting National Monuments." If they like what they see, they give you the go ahead to create your pitch.

You also have to set a specific financial goal and a specific amount of time in which to reach it. Say, $2,000 in 30 days. This is an important part to give thought to, because if you don't reach the minimum in the allotted time, you don't get to keep any of what anyone has pledged. However, if people pledge more than your minimum, you get to keep the extra money. Once you've got that part all figured out, you create rewards to give your donors/backers in exchange for certain levels of funding. Again, the great part about this is that it incentivizes people to contribute because they're getting something out of your project as well.

The site gives you a place to post a video about your project, which it encourages making in order to connect you better to people you don't know. At any rate, if you'd like to know more about the process, their FAQ can be found here.

I just spent the past 2 days creating and launching my own project and found the site really easy to use. Even better, my project has been live about 8 hours and I'm already at 25% of my funding goal (29 more days to go)!

So go check out the site - check out some of the projects seeking funding, get inspired to create your own. I'm working on getting a trip to Costa Rica funded so I can experience first hand the interesting personalities of all the little critters there and create some art from the adventure.

What might you be inspired to create if you had the funding to do so?

Until next time,
Maggie