Earlier this year my band and I were invited to play an early slot at Mountain Man Festival in the roughly Charlottesville-sized town of Saratoga Springs, New York. With a confirmed list of headliners like Islands, HEALTH and Real Estate, it sounded like a good deal: a fun weekend with free music, plus nice exposure for my band, about which nobody gives a hoot.
The organizers—two music fans who were about to graduate from Skidmore College—had a fundraising goal of $65,000, which would go toward covering the guarantee for these (relatively) high-profile headliners, all sorts of rentals and, of course, security. Needless to say, the task of raising such a large amount of money was met with Waynestock levels of skepticism around the blogosphere.
I was dismayed to learn, in the end, that the skeptics had won: Mountain Man Fest was a total, sarcastic "A-for-effort"-worthy failure that fell far short of its fundraising goal.
But it wasn’t until I came across the festival’s Kickstarter account that I saw that "failure" probably wasn’t the right word for what had happened: This pair of 20somethings had in fact raised nearly $7,500 for an event that would’ve probably been the most exciting day for Saratoga Springs since Funny Cide won the Kentucky Derby.
Maybe $65,000 was a little ambitious, but you can throw one hell of a concert for $7,500. It got me thinking about how locals have been using the website, which allows dreamers and project organizers to solicit donations over the Internet. (Nobody gets charged unless the project reaches its fundraising goal.) My searches suggest that the local arts community as a whole hasn’t yet taken to the tool. But a few more modest projects have.
In order of increasing strangeness:
- The Charlottesville Community Design Center has an ongoing campaign to raise $3,000 for its annual Design Marathon, during which it provides free design services to area nonprofits. Seven backers have so far pledged $775.
- Thirty-five backers donated $1,369 last year to fund Nourish(meant), a local arts education project for which two locals converted a schoolbus into a biofuel-powered garden and education center.
- Christian Breeden ran a successful $500 campaign to "Fuel the Dragon Wagon," a firebreathing machine for which would chop his grandmother’s Grand Marquis and weld a 20′ dance floor on top. (Check it out.)
What other tools can artists and arts organizations use to float projects?