I’ll admit that I’m a little blown away by you, the good people of the listserv. You work for places like the Washington Post, USA Today and CBS News. You’re bloggers, screenwriters and college professors. You’re cub reporters in training.
And a couple of you are crowdfunding veterans.
By my count, people on this listserv have used crowdfunding to raise more than $160,000 for reporting projects.
Yes, that’s right: One hundred and sixty THOUSAND dollars.
And that’s just people on this email.
Crowdfunding is a game-changer of a resource. And so I wanted to bring on a crowdfunding expert to explain why you need to be paying attention to it — and how you can take advantage of it.
IndieGoGo: The Oldest — And Largest — Crowdfunding Platform on the Planet.
Kickstarter has gotten a lot of attention lately, and Spot.us is the journalism-specific crowdfunding site, but IndieGoGo is a really interesting platform. They’ve been around the longest, and they’re sitting on a mountain of data about crowdfunding.
So yesterday, I sat down with Yan Budman — IndieGoGo’s director of marketing — to talk about how to successfully crowdfund a project or a business.
In our conversation, Yan explains:
– Which channels drive the most traffic to campaigns
– How long you should keep your campaign going
– The importance of updating your fans regularly
You can watch our five minute conversation here.**
Or you can download it here in audio-only form.
I also highly recommend checking out the IndieGoGo blog, where they’re breaking down the numbers about crowdfunding and offering even more insights.
Now get out there and tell some great stories today!
** Thanks to some strangeness with Skype, you’ll notice that I kind of disappear with about two minutes left in the talk. (Oops. My bad.) But: I’m going to be doing more of these video chats in the coming weeks. The quality of everything will get better — I promise. A big thank you to Yan for making time for the listserv, and for staying calm even when I appeared to vanish.