By Jessica Weiss
To raise money from the public for a
media project, you shouldn't subscribe to the adage, “If you build it, they
will come.” Instead, you must “build it and engage,” says Serbian journalist
Sasa Vucinic.
Vucinic founded the
crowdfunding site IndieVoices as a marketplace to match innovative
media ideas with socially motivated investors. It focuses on projects in the
developing world.
The platform, launched in November, has
attracted “beautiful, unique and creative ideas,” Vucinic told IJNet. But their
“conversion rate into full-fledged, well-explained and convincing media
projects and crowdfunding campaigns ready to be listed on the platform is
incredibly low.”
So what stops those great ideas from
growing into something bigger? Vucinic said an “engagement divide” separates
media entrepreneurs who possess the skills to run a successful crowdfunding
campaign from those who don't.
“Understanding the importance and
developing skills to engage with one’s own audience is a precondition to
successful crowdfunding,” he said. Identifying and engaging with potential
donors and partners via social media is key, he said, because “that is the
channel all of us use to talk to people who share our interests.”
Because the first few months of
IndieVoices showed that many promising media entrepreneurs lack that
understanding, the organization has expanded its mission to include helping
them learn to engage their potential audience. To that end, it’s establishing
the Independent Voices Foundation to promote audience engagement and
crowdfunding as a potential solution to the problem of financial sustainability
for independent media.
It also plans to develop tools
specifically for crowdfunding of media projects that can help project owners
create and focus their campaigns. This will include case studies and write-ups
of best practices. It also plans to raise funds to help subsidize engagement
for important crowdfunding campaigns.
What are the keys to a successful
crowdfunding appeal? “What we’ve learned so far by watching listed projects on
our own platform is that a good crowdfunding campaign first of all has to be
unique and memorable,” Vucinic said. “Then, it has to have the power to
motivate people to want to do something or to see something done or something
changed.”
A good campaign sincerely and genuinely
offers potential donors a way to participate. “The crowd is very fast to detect
if this offer to participate is genuine or not,” he said.
A campaign, like a news story or media
product, must also target a specific audience. “You have to focus a campaign to
your core audience; you have to reach your core followers and those people you
can identify in the crowd as like-minded,” Vucinic said.
The message of the campaign should
appeal to the donor’s sense of mission. The project description should not be
“help us buy a photo-drone by giving us 50 bucks,” he said. Instead, explain
what it really means to make that donation. That might be, “Become one of the
founders of drone journalism in Malaysia, with an investment of only 50 bucks.”
Jessica Weiss is a Bogotá-based freelance
journalist.
Image CC-licensed on Flickr via Simon Cunningham.
Source: http://ijnet.org/stories
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