Recently there was a campaign on Kickstarter run by a man name Zack Danger Brown in which his efforts to raise $10 to make potato salad wound up raising over $52,000 in pledges. Granted, this was an anomalous event, but it showed the possibility and potential of something small and simple turning into a something much more. Inspired by Brown's success, I'm hoping to test the waters of crowdsourcing by starting my own modest campaign based on a simple, silly idea to see where it might lead.
My idea is to make nachos. It was just a random idea based on a sudden craving I had for some good nachos. For this campaign I would not actually be making the nacho chips, but instead the fixings to go with nachos. If it were feasible to actually make the chips at home, that might come into play, but as it stands, the campaign will be to raise money to create the accompanying sauce/fixings/dip for the nachos. While the campaign would be based around the making of the nacho sauce, it could, in fact, be about a different food...the hankering for some nachos was just what triggered the idea for the campaign.
Well, that's pretty mundane, you might say, and if that's all it was, that would be true. What I'm really looking to do is turn it into a multimedia project that would involve music, visuals, and voicework, all home-grown, so that no copyright issues would be involved and there would be no need for licensing of pre-existing materials. I'm thinking of including things like videos and/or Powerpoint slideshows of the food-making process, including narration and music for the videos, and pseudo-documentary blurbs (video, still photo, audio) about the process, or the ingredients, or even contributors to the project...by pseudo-documentary, I mean, made up , silly, out-of-the-blue "facts" relating to the project (e.g., "Early writings of Lao Tzu tout the benefits of nachos for keeping the mind clear during meditation.") It could even go as far as the creation of a short pseudo-documentary covering the 'history' of nachos that would utilize the names and locations of contributors.
Since fundraising involves providing something for the contributors, incentives would need to be in place for various levels of contribution. The initial proposal would include a set of ingredients needed for the sauce, which could be increased, in either volume or number, with a given pledge amount, or with the reaching of a certain contribution amount.
I haven't gotten terribly far in figuring what sort of incentives to offer, so here's a rough-sketch idea of what an incentive scale might look like:
Overall pledge level > Incentive
$1 > thank you via email and on website
$2 > pic of finished product
$5 > printed and signed pic of finished product
$10 > personalized thank you video
$25 > name and location mentioned in pseudo-historical slide/video/audio
..and so on.
These are just demonstrative incentives. Actual incentives would need to be worked out. If this campaign should take off, additional incentives and contribution-level amendments could easily be added. The result could be a video of not only the process of making the sauce, but the pseudo-documentary accompanying it.
So anyway, this is just an idea I have so see what crowdfunding is like and how I might utilize it for other projects in the future, and it is an opportunity for me (and others) to exercise some focused creativity. Who knows...it may lead to a career.
