On his blog, filmmaker Chris Jones tells the story of how one of his friends raised $8900 toward the production of a short film, “Clowning Around.” Among other things, Lielani Holmes and her team ran a poster competition. They provided designers with photos of the movie’s actors and challenged designers to create a poster.
They got more than 100 entries .
Facebook visitors could “like” the one they preferred and then a panel of industry judges, including Chris, picked the winner from the dozen or so most popular. Chris points out:
“What is so smart about this competition is that it engages creative people now, before the film is made. It also solves the problem of designing a great poster before the film goes into production. This is a great example of effective Crowd Sourcing. It’s fun, it’s about being part of something and it’s got a competitive edge.”
Hmm, do you think this could work for the cover of a book?
The poster design was only one of the ways they used to get people involved and made it more likely they would get supporters. They also loaded lots of videos, photos, and even the script on the crowdfunding site, and they ran small contests throughout the fund-raising period.
(Just to be clear, crowdsourcing means getting the public to create things for you, like a poster, and crowdfunding means getting them to give money toward the production of your project, usually in return for different levels of rewards like autographed books, posters, exclusive videos, etc.).
If you are considering using crowdfunding to finance your book or other creative project, this is a good campaign to study. If you want to have a look at the materials they used and the levels of rewards they were offering to contributors, you can go to the IndieGoGo crowdfunding page for this project: http://www.indiegogo.com/clowningaroundfilm
(Their secret was doing something different. If you want to discover one hundred case studies of people who marketed themselves or their product or service creatively and inexpensively--and how you can adapt their methods--get my book, "Do Something Different," published by Virgin Books and available from Amazon and other book sellers.)
