Month: June 2011

Hard to believe, but true: Here are the very last 6 Tips that I learned from our Kickstarter campaign. (Then again, you never know when I might suddenly get more Kickstarter inspiration…)

37. The Advantages of Fundraising for a Finished Film: A New Model?

As I’ve mentioned often, I was terrified of fundraising for a finished
film. It seemed to break every rule imaginable. So it was strange to
discover is that there are actually advantages to fundraising for a
film that is completed. It turned out that the very thing we wrote on
our Kickstarter site
to sell the idea of donating to our film to prospective patrons is
true: Donating to a finished film is a low risk proposition. Why?

• Most films go over budget, take much longer than
planned (Oh like 20 years) and God forbid I should put this in print,
never get finished. While I am not sure the general population knows
all these facts, I think they can smell the “risk” in the ether.

• With a finished film and especially one that is beginning to get noticed and play known festivals like MY REINCARNATION was doing, people can enjoy giving to something that is a sure bet. It is already successful.

• For the fundraising filmmaker, an obvious benefit
is the ease at creating “New News” (previous Tip #34): We could film
endless additional video updates from the various events the film was
showing at and also make “Sneak Preview Fundraising Screenings” to show
them the goods and create buzz. Because MY REINCARNATION was playing at
festivals,
there was plenty of news, but still the film’s potential of widespread
commercial release could not be achieved without further financial
help. So there was evidence of success, yet with a clear obstacle to
distribution that begged for people’s support.

I am wary to suggest this as a new fundraising model for obvious
reasons. The amount of risk to the filmmaker is extremely high: I mean
what if you can’t make the costs in this late game effort? Who
knows how many years the anxiety about paying off the film’s cost took
off my life?

But dreaming into the future, could people “vote” with their pocketbook
for the films they want to see once they are made in the same way they
vote by buying a ticket to a movie theater. Of course, this is asking
them to vote at a higher level then going to a matinee, but for niche
films on rarely seen subjects, maybe people are willing to pay $100 or
$200 for the price of admission. Just a thought…

On another level, the question is can you translate some of the
advantages we had on our campaign to a film that is not yet finished?
And like all fundraising efforts, how do you have the manpower or
womanpower to launch a campaign of this magnitude while simultaneously
finishing your film?

38. Create ‘Events’:

There are many ways you can create “Events” even if your film is not
finished. Any way you can generate new compelling video that is under 5
minutes (and even better around 2-3 minutes) and can be uploaded onto
YouTube, your website, your Facebook page, and your Kickstarter page,
helps your campaign. Here are a few ideas that came to my mind (you
will surely think of more):

• Just like we had “Sneak Preview Fundraising Screenings” of MY REINCARNATION
during our Kickstarter campaign, you can have “Sneak Preview Excerpt
Fundraising Screenings” or “Fundraising Soirées” in a host’s home. You
can also show the trailer or scenes from the film to an invited group
of potential contributors or just interested souls. The key is to
videotape the event and then get people’s reaction to the clips they
have seen on camera to create a new video post. If possible, another
hook might be to ask the film’s subjects to appear at the event with
you to talk about the film (depending on the subject matter).

• Honestly, neither of our Sneak Preview Fundraising
Screenings generated much money. However, the video we created
for the website – of me talking, the protagonist talking, and people’s
reactions to what they saw – helped the Kickstarter campaign have life
and credibility. From our analytics, we saw immediately that
contributions rose when we posted these videos. Remember the Lemming
Theory in Tip #30? People will be more likely to join your project and
make a contribution if they hear others singing its praises. Any way
you can get these video testimonies is worthwhile…

• You can also videotape discussions about the film
in the edit room with your editor and yourself and post them.

• You can bring people into the edit room to screen
parts of the film and tape their responses. Or ask them discuss the
film’s important topic and it’s meaning for the world.

• You can ask your film’s current partners, who are
already on board the project, to talk to camera about what they love
about the film and why they are supporting it. Then edit that into a
string of testimonies for the web.

• If you do any mid-game interviews with press, make
sure you tape them and post on your website, your Facebook, your
Kickstarter page.

• Tiny Note: My experience is that when you ask a TV
station or a print interviewer for a copy of the interview you just
did, they always promise to give to you and often never send it to you.
My solution is to bring a small Flip camera everywhere and ask an
assistant or intern to conveniently film you being filmed. (Make sure
they stand as close as possible for sound.) This way you have the video
even if the sound is not so good. You can always subtitle the tape if
necessary.

39. It’s Not Over Till It’s Over….

As our last week countdown continued we kept up the pressure. It didn’t
matter that by the Day 4 of the countdown we had achieved our second
goal of $100,000. We had a third goal in the back of our minds since
the very beginning: To raise monies for the films theatrical rollout in
the USA, which would be another $40,000 – $70,000. So we kept going.

Part of our campaign plan was that in the last week we would post a
written update every day. This took a lot of work, but we actually sat
together as a team and outlined what topic I would write about each day
in the last 5 days of the campaign. Again we had the idea that these
letters had to be real pieces of writing and not just a reiteration of
the financial appeal. For ideas we tried to draw on things that related
to the film topic, Tibetan Buddhism, and to the film’s subjects, Chögyal Namkhai Norbu and his son.
This outline was really helpful. We followed the same procedure as with
all my posts. I drafted the letter and then they were passed to Katherine and Lisa to edit and then to Stefanie
to do the layout and artwork and post on all sites, It was intense, but
it worked, even while midweek I had to hop on a plane to the Krakow International Film Festival where the film was having it’s Polish premiere.

The last couple days we even posted several times a day on Facebook with the hour countdown, mimicking what was on our Kickstarter site.
Meanwhile, other people around the world started posting the countdown
as well. Pretty cool when you realize others are following the ball
dropping on your campaign and urging people to join during the last
minutes! I myself kept reaching out to people on Facebook from Krakow
until the “0 Seconds Left” appeared on our site.

In fact, there was so much energy at the end of our campaign that
people turned to our website to make donations when the Kickstarter
site closed down. We got several contributions in the days that
followed May 28th.

It’s a good thing for me, because now that we have raised our
completion funds and made a dent into our next goal, our theatrical
release, I plan to keep continuing the fundraising – off Kickstarter –
to raise the remaining costs for our theatrical release starting this
October in the USA. In fact, Stefanie just put up a new "Store" (which we will conintue to build) and "Donation"
page on our site. But due to Kickstarter, we were able to hire
our theatrical booker with the funds we have so far and have started to
chart the campaign, including having booked the film’s theatrical
opening in NYC. More details to follow. (You can continue to hear about
all things related to MY REINCARNATION by signing up on our Mailing List for constant updates and to find out when the film will be at a theater near you.)

40. The “Tipping Point”:

For months I fantasized about that illusive thing called the “Tipping
Point”. I wondered how to make it happen. Clearly all the things we did
and all the waves that our work generated around the world inside of
other people took hold in the last 4 days of the campaign and created a
small Tsunami that blew the MY REINCARNATION campaign off the charts. In those last days we more than doubled what we had raised previously in 86 days of work.

Afterwards, people wrote me things like: “Watching the last days of the
campaign was better than a good soap opera”; or “I couldn’t stop
checking the numbers all day to see how much they rose by”; or “I kept
meaning to donate earlier, but somehow I kept forgetting till now”;
and “I didn’t plan to give that much, but I just did!” (Said by
the woman who bought my beloved Tibetan chest for $7,000 on the last
day of the campaign with 6 hours left to go.)

I’d like to tell you it was all the result of our careful engineering
and planning, but that would be a lie. Having been making films for 30
years, I know that you can work just as hard as we did and create a
carefully constructed campaign, with a lot of good press, and plod
along fairly well, but never hit that illusive “tipping point”.

So, I have to go back to my old dad for wisdom on this one. He always
told me that 60% of success in life is hard work, 10% is talent, and
the rest is luck. I think he is right. After all is said and done, I
think we had some of that luck on our side this time.

41. From Kickstarter to outreach and distribution…

One of the things that became very clear to me doing this campaign is
that Kickstarter is a preparation for your basic outreach and
distribution campaign in America.

• We now had 518 additional people invested in the film and in it’s success in the world.
• We had reinvigorated our previous partners through the campaign’s success.
• We had built our mailing list, adding new
individual names and new related organizations across the country and
the world.
• We had built up our facebook and twitter presence.
• We had gotten people hungry for the film’s release in their local.
• We had identified and begun to build partnerships
with key organizations related to the film that we could draw on for
the theatrical release.
• We had raised the name recognition of the film on
the web and in the world through the campaign and through selective
press.

The biggest thing is that going through this experience has built our
own “chops” on how to run a campaign for this film and gotten us in
fighting shape for the theatrical to come.

42. Delivery…

Ah delivery, the most unglamorous part of the campaign but the aspect
that requires as much or more care. We have not actually delivered to
our patrons yet, so there is a lot we still don’t know (perhaps another
Kickstarter Update in a few months!). But there are a few things that
we have thought about that you might want to consider:

First, just make sure you calculate the cost of Kickstarter, Amazon,
the time of the people helping you and the costs and postage of
delivering items properly. In my mind, I have made this to be about 15
– 20% of what you raise. In our case between, $22,500 – 30,000 out of
the $150,000 we made towards the film. So what we will take away is
somewhere around $125,000. Thinking about this ahead of time will help
you set the right number goal for your project. But I think it is also
important to let you backers know how much is the exact take-away from
the campaign, so they understand what you might still need to raise, or
why you may have to come back to them in the future. I haven’t yet
figured out exactly how to “frame” this to contributors, but I am
working on it now.

I think it is important to keep in touch with your patrons after the
campaign ends, giving them updates on next steps and how the Incentives
will be delivered and the future of the film. These people are your
best friends in the march towards completion and getting the film into
the world properly. They are your new expanded team, or, as I like to
think of them, “Soldiers” for the film in the world. They have a vested
interest in your film’s future, because it is now, in part, their film.

Kickstarter is an amazing process to go through. I highly
recommend it for its potential monetary rewards, how it expands your
network, and challenges your inner conceptions. I would do it again
immediately with the right film project.

I do however, have to say one thing: All of us agonize about how to
fund our films, and indeed it is a challenge. But sometimes it is easy
to forget that the really difficult thing is not fundraising but making
good films. Nothing compares to the challenge and the complexity of
this unique art. With funding so scarce in America, it is easy to loose
sight of this fact. Kickstarter is nothing compared with the task of
making a well-crafted, surprising, valuable, enjoyable, emotional,
eye-opening visual work that has the power to change the way people see
themselves and the world. Let us all keep our eye on the ball as we
journey forward!



Coming in the next weeks is a special post from the MY REINCARNATION team – Stefanie Diaz, Lisa Duva and Katherine Nolfi – filled with new wisdoms and perspectives on climbing the Kickstarter Mountain!

Here are the next 4 Tips of Kickstarter wisdom I learned along the MY REINCARNCATION crowd-funding path….

33. How Many Times Does It Take? The Rule of Three (at least):

For many years I heard distributors say that you have to hear the name
of a film three times before you will go to see it in the movie theater
(the same applies for purchasing any new product). I am not sure why
this is the case, but the idea is that you have to have a new idea
reinforced several times and several ways before you will take decisive
action.

This is something I noticed over and over during the MY REINCARNATION
campaign. People did not act the first time we sent them an
announcement but somewhere down the line – email blast or
Facebook Post number 3, 4, 5 or 6 (that they actually read) – they
decided to become a patron. Of course this it totally different
for those who have heard of the project before – like your
long-suffering family and friends – who have been listening to you talk
about your dear film ad nausea and make a donation if for no other
reason than to have some peace and quiet.

But for strangers and for those who don’t have an emotional attachment
to you, the key is to give reasons to keep reading, watching and
considering the project so they can hear about it several times and
pass their individual saturation point or “tipping point” to make a
contribution. But to keep them engaged till they make their decision to
become a patron, takes some work…

34. “If You Give, You Shall Receive”:

During the course of our Kickstarter campaign,
I became so fired up with crowd-funding that I found myself really
sympathetic to email appeals I received to help complete other films on
both IndieGoGo and Kickstarter.
I found myself making small (I am broke after all) $10 to $25 donations
to other film projects I liked. What happened was surprising.
Inevitably when I gave a donation to someone they made a donation back
to our project. While we didn’t exactly make huge sums from this, it
expanded the awareness of the project and they became part of the
film’s community (see previous Tip #25). I found this very interesting.

It made me realize that another thing my Mother told me was true. When
I was grown up, my Mom made a post motherhood career change to become a
professional fundraiser for deafness research and created a foundation
called NOHR (The National
Organization for Hearing Research). She always said that it is
important that she make donations to all her local charities and go to
their events if she wants people to give to her foundation. I always
found this idea strange, until I saw it happen on Kickstarter.

35. ‘New News’:

Previously I spoke about the idea that our team approached our Kickstarter campaign with the idea that there would be a “rollout” (see previous Tip #3), many people asked me what I meant by this.

A “rollout” means that you have to constantly create new reasons for
people to keep checking your site and read your email blasts.
This may not be so true on a shorter campaign but on a longer campaign
like ours, which lasted 90 days, it becomes absolutely evident. So the
question becomes: what new incentives are you giving your audience to
continue their involvement or begin their involvement? I have already
said in the previous post that fundraising is not a passive act (previous Tip #26); you must grab that potential patron’s attention.

Once you launch your Kickstarter campaign, the excitement of what you
are offering – the new video appeal, all those new wonderful incentives
– only lasts a certain while. I would give it about 10-days and then
all that “newness” becomes old hat. After that you have to start adding
“new news” to give people reasons to check your site and read your
emails.

Of course one of the things you are giving people are your exciting
written updates, that tell people about the film’s progress, campaign
updates, and your life following the film’s development (which I have
spoken intensively about in previous posts see Tip #14).

But I would say as a campaign goes on, you have to keep upping the
ante, which means adding something new, every two weeks, then every
week, then every day – until D-day. For our campaign the first thing we
thought of is that we have to keep adding new video to our website and
Facebook page regularly and point everyone to this video in every
eblast we did on our own list as well as on the list serves of other
organizations. These videos were created from every screening the film
had at film festivals; a video series we created called O.F.F.’s
(Outtakes from the Film), where we released various short clips (1.5 –
4 minutes) from the 1,000 hours of unused footage; two sneak preview
screenings, one with protagonist Chögyal Namkhai Norbu in Melbourne, Australia, and another with the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City; photos from MY REINCARNATION
events as I traveled around the world; and more video and audio
interviews with me or the protagonists Chögyal Namkhai Norbu and
Khyentse Yeshe.

Late in our Kickstarter campaign, when we were searching for “new
news”, we started to add new incentives to the original list. Posting
photos and descriptions of these new beautiful, precious items day by
day gave people a reason to keep checking our site. See the next Tip
#35:

36. Late Game Discoveries –What We Wish We Knew 90 Days Earlier:

There are many things we learned in the last days of our campaign –
approximately 6 days till D-Day – when desperation set in and we kicked
into even higher gear. Some of the things are due to it being our
first time out with such a high priced campaign, others are just about
breaking those inner taboos that keep you from going all the way to
exposing your financial need (and therefore vulnerability) to your
friends, family and the world.

• Towards the end of the campaign, with 6 days to go,
I realized we needed more medium priced incentives on the site. The
lower priced incentives were selling, but some of the higher priced
incentives remained and didn’t seem like they would go. I decided to
try something new as I discussed in the previous tip. So I raided my
house once again and brought out more Buddhist artwork – at lower price
points – to add in several installments as new incentives to offer
people to buy. The next day Stefanie took pictures and posted the
photos, updated our Kickstarter incentive lists, and sent out my new email announcing these objects and suddenly the contributions rose again.

• Silly at it may seem, I was uncomfortable reaching out to the film’s protagonists Chögyal Namkhai Norbu and Khyentse Yeshe
for support. In fact, it was something I considered taboo for the
duration of the Kickstarter campaign till the last days. There are many
needs in a Buddhist community, and I didn’t want to ask for more help
with something so superficial as a film fundraising campaign. I
remember having a light bulb go off the same Sunday I raided my home.
We were only at around $65,000 and I was wracking my brain how to move
the campaign forward. I was nervous, but before going to bed, I wrote
both Rinpoche, and Yeshi, who were both busy with heavy teaching
schedules in Russia. I didn’t know if they would see the emails I sent
them or even respond. The next morning I awoke to an email from
Yeshi – donating a fantastic Buddhist statue – and then Rinpoche
responded two days later offering a personal diamond ring to sell. We
immediately posted pictures of the objects everywhere (in fact you can
see the second one still up on our Kickstarter page
now). These objects sent a clear message that the protagonist’s
supported the film to the worldwide Buddhist communities that caused
the contributions to go flying. Why people needed this sign, after the
protagonists’ had given so many others – including letting me film them
for 20 years and after the film was finished doing Q & A’s at
screenings with me in different parts of the world – I don’t really
know. It is one of the mysteries of human psychology. But certainly one
of the many lessons is that people need constant evidence to keep
donating to a long campaign like ours. In retrospect, I could have made
this request sooner. But it also opened the idea of other contributions…

• In retrospect, I could have canvassed many people
in the community and backers and asked them to donate personal items to
the Kickstarter campaign.
This would have allowed us to keep adding incentives and also to enroll
more people in the effort without only asking for money.

• It wasn’t till the last week of our campaign that
we realized that you could keep adding photos and video to our actual Kickstarter page. We always posted the visuals on Facebook and our website, but not on Kickstarter. Adding new visuals to the Kickstarter page each day in the last 5 day countdown made people come back to see what was “new” and they ended up contributing more.

• It’s amazing in the last days to realize the people you haven’t contacted about your Kickstarter campaign.
One of my realizations came from yet another phone conversation with my
mother, who was always trying to come up with new ideas to help me. She
asked, “What about your high school? Have you announced the campaign to
them?” No I hadn’t and I wish I had. I know it would have paid off.
Same with your college class (I never graduated college so that was
moot for me.) Any groups or organizations you have been part of –
anytime during you entire life – are good candidates to tell about your
film, since many still think filmmaking is glamorous and may very well
enjoy being part of a film effort.

• The last day of the campaign I started to post
individual messages on friends’ Facebook pages. This had enormous
success and people contributed with hours to go. If I had to do it over
again, I would have done this much sooner and more widespread. In fact,
I would have slowly posted on all 3,500+ facebook friends I have built
from the campaign of my last film. I wouldn’t make the posts obnoxious,
just personal with a link to the MY REINCARNATION Kickstarter page.

• Beyond Facebook, I think I would have reached out
to more individuals on our email lists and asked them personally for
help in passing the word. We did a lot of mass mailings but the
personal emails were harder to write. Yet often they are the most
fruitful.

OK,
so I promised one last Blog Post and this one has already morphed into
three posts. But I swear that these last three posts are my last words
of wisdom about Kickstarter for a while (the final words of a self avowed Kickstarter addict).

Before I take a break and move onto other subjects, I want to let you
know that there is a fourth post coming down the pipeline from the MY REINCARNATION team – Stefanie, Katherine and Lisa – who are working on another article filled with their words of wisdom and perceptions of what they learned doing our campaign.

As you can see, the short form is not my strong suit. I am a serial
storyteller, not one for getting it all down in one neat punch. To me,
the dramatic structure of life is episodic, which is why I have always
loved the serial form and have made two documentary series and am now preparing a fiction television series. Even the new feature I am writing is told in episodic chapters.

Crowd funding is the same. It is a series of small dramatic arcs
climaxing in small successes (after those failures I mentioned in the
previous post). It would be misleading to talk about a Kickstarter
campaign like it was one big Hollywood blockbuster. So here are the
next 4 Tips, with 9 more coming, consisting of a lot of small dramas:

30. “The Lemming theory” Meets “The Power Of One”:

Everything I know about fundraising and distribution comes from my not
so original, “Lemming Theory”. Human beings want to follow. So if the
campaign is doing badly, people stay away but if those numbers are
rising, people want to jump on the boat. Before people choose to
support you they want to know the crowd is already voting for your
project. No one except your mother or your father – and perhaps but not
for sure, your lover/wife/husband – will back you without evidence. The
“Lemming Theory” means that most people don’t want to be the first one
to take the lead.

So how does anything ever happen in the world, if no one wants to stand
out? A crowd doesn’t magically form. Usually it takes one courageous
person who is respected – in the community or communities that the film
addresses – to stand up for your project. Then other people see that
individual, figure things are “safe”, and start to join in. That means
that you, as the campaign team, are always searching for “key people”
to embrace your film or your campaign and lead the way. And usually, it
is a series of “Ones’”, over the course of the campaign that will get
the project funded.

In fact, when you get many key individuals standing up, that is when
the crowd turns into a stampede. (That is what happened in the last
days of our campaign when donations suddenly went crazy, but more on
that in the coming post Tip #40). To be clear, these key individuals
are not necessarily famous people, although they can be since they have
a lot of that “respect factor”, it depends on the project. But they are
people who are trusted in the community that you are reaching out to
for funding. Sometimes too, when you cast a wide net, people unknown to
you turn up and embrace your campaign and lead the charge…

31. Team Web – Spreading Your Reach through People and Press:

There are many reasons to build a Kickstarter team (see previous Post #1 and previous Tip #2).
Besides handling the sheer volume of Kickstarter work, a team expands
your idea base, and also your contact base. As I have mentioned
earlier, our core MY REINCARNATION Kickstarter team consists of Stefanie, Katherine and Lisa – each bringing different skills and experience to the campaign.

At the beginning of setting up our campaign, Katherine, suggested we
write down all our existing film partners and contact them to see if
they would help in spreading the word about the campaign. It was a
given that we would engage the Buddhist Community of the film
protagonist, Choegyal Namkhai Norbu, and his son, Khyentse Yeshe, with whom I have good contact. (This is the key benefit to having a niche audience as I discussed in the previous Tip #22.) But we were also looking for some traction in a wider circle of people than the obvious ones we knew.

Our Executive Producers and Funders were the first people we contacted
about our plan. Perhaps wrongly we did not engage our European film
partners at this level, since crowd funding is still new in Europe. (In
retrospect, why not? They might have made good outreach in their
communities. Oh well, next time…)

Interestingly some of our partners and EP’s took no interest in our
fundraising project. They adopted the attitude that they had helped the
film enough already and my current financial crisis was my problem,
which is fair enough. Others like Executive Producer, Dan Cogen, from IMPACT PARTNERS,
became a real source of support, blasting news of our campaign, Sneak
Preview Screenings, and answering email questions immediately no matter
how busy. One of many examples of his help relates directly to this
post.

In a late a game brainstorming session – after we had met our original
goal of $50,000 but were trying to make $100,000 – our team was
discussing strategies of how to push the campaign forward. Among the
many ideas, Lisa suggested that we needed to get people writing about
our campaign. We discussed trying to get someone to write about our
campaign at the Huffington Post. Lisa loves the blog “Hope for Film” and thought we should contact Ted Hope,
whom none of us knew except by reputation. She set about searching the
web for his contact address, but came up with nothing. Then I found him
on Facebook, wrote him, but no reply. On a lark, I emailed EP Dan to
see if he knew Ted, and indeed he did and immediately wrote him,
pitching the story of our campaign, which led to our first Blog Post
on the site. What I didn’t know is that now Ted would also become a
strong supporter of our efforts and keep publishing our story as it
spread to three blog posts and now five.

Another example of how your team can help expand your contacts is the way we were able to connect with the Rubin Museum of Art and the programmer Tim McHenry. We were looking for a place to do a “Sneak Preview Fundraising Screening”
in NYC but were afraid of the costs. The Rubin Museum came up but I
knew no one there. I put the word out to the Buddhist community and one
of our big community supporters in Massachusetts, named Anna, came to
the rescue with a name, which she contacted for me and then passed to
me. Once I reached out to the person at the Rubin, the ball was in
play, and she passed us to Tim, who viewed the film quickly, loved it
and offered to host the screening. The Rubin also has a press office
that went to work for the event. There were several journalists who
came to that screening, most agreed to hold their articles till the
film would be released. But also at the screening was someone from the
Religion Department of the Huffington Post, who afterwards expressed
interest to Stefanie that I write a blog. I did so and it was published
five days before the end of the campaign, called, “Buddhist Samaya and the Making of ‘MY REINCARNATION’”. So another idea of Lisa’s was realized.

This is how “Team Web” works, everyone on your team – from the current
team to all those you have partnered with during all phases of the
making of the film – if contacted and enrolled in the effort can spread
your reach exponentially in ways that you never could have dreamed when
you started. Every person on your team is like the center of the web
with endless potential contacts.

32. Blanche Dubois & Depending On The Kindness of Strangers:

While the above stories are perfect examples of getting help from
people you know, the Blanche Dubois axiom is about the unexpected
support that can come your way. Many people along the campaign heard
about the film and our need to complete the funding and took up the
cause of raising funds as their own. This is where the web is truly a
miraculous tool to reaching out and connecting with like-minded
strangers.

One woman in Italy – named Frauke – who couldn’t afford to donate,
emailed me that she wanted to help our cause. Then another person from
Argentina – Raul – wrote me the same thing, asking if he could
translate our Kickstarter page
into Spanish. Both criticized some of our message, saying it was hard
for people outside the US to understand what crowd funding was. They
asked us to make it clearer and better. At first I was pissed off. I
stalled them both. People wanting to help seemed just like more
problems to me.

Quite honestly in the beginning I was afraid of these offers. I
thought, “I don’t know this person, the Buddhist community is a bit
tricky, what if he or she writes the wrong thing…?” I have always
been quite protective of my projects, working by that old axiom, ‘too
many cooks spoil the pudding’. But Kickstarter was busting all of
my other notions, why not this one. I knew we needed more traction in
the world, so I gave them rein. I did communicate with them about the
importance of what was written about the fundraising. Sometimes I had
to say no to some of their ideas. For example, Frauke asked me to get
the film protagonist Chögyal Namkhai Norbu
to write an endorsement of the film, but I didn’t want to bother him
with this, which seemed too pushy, but we were able to quote something
he said at the fundraising screening of the film in Melbourne, which seemed to work as well.

Suddenly everywhere on Facebook were posts from Frauke or Raul. It was
strange but glorious, because we didn’t have to do the work. Our reach
expanded and I loosened up a bit. Others offered help. A German woman,
Christiana, wrote me, worried that the shipping of single DVD’s to
Europe made them too costly (One of our incentives was a 2012 Commercial DVD pre-sale).
She asked if she could collect monies for the Commercial DVDs and make
one big donation, but then have one person bring them all to Europe. I
said fine not thinking too much about it, when three weeks later she
wrote that she had pre-sold DVD’s to the tune of $6,300, could she make
one large donation to the site? I said yes, floored. When a $10,000
came on the last day – the donor wrote us that she represented 60
people in China who had pooled their monies to make one large
contribution! Oh Blanche, it’s a shame you never knew about the web!

Stay Tuned for the Next Two Parts with 9 more Kick-Tips…