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Fundraising for Dr Lipkin's study.

vli

vli

Senior Member
Messages
653
Location
CA
acer2000 said:
I think that the effort might be more effective if it was using one of the mainstream sites like indiegogo or even a more science focused one like experiment.com. It would expose the project to a much larger audience of members looking to fund projects via their emails and recommendation engines, those sites have more virality baked into them, and they get a lot of media coverage. For whatever reason those established crowdsource sites lend a bit of legitimacy to the projects they host, especially for people not already familiar with the cause.
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A quote from the latest project update email from Jen Brea on Canary in a Coal Mine:

However, there are other reasons why winning competitive grants is awesome. First, the money we raised on Kickstarter is not the money we actually raised for the film. Not only are there the roughly 10% in processing fees from Kickstarter and Amazon, the costs of the rewards, and the cost of the campaign, we are stilling trying to collect a substantial number of both very small and very large pledges (e.g., sometimes a credit card charge was rejected). Unfortunately, it's much more than a rounding error.
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It would be no exaggeration to say that it would be sheer lunacy for us to give 10% of a potential $1 million to Kickstarter if we had used one of these sites. It would be lunacy even to give Kickstarter 10% of how much we've raised to date ($15K+). There really is a reason behind the choice not to use one of these crowdfunding platforms.
 
S

Sasha

Fine, thank you
Messages
17,863
Location
UK
@drewmaster - I wonder if you'd be happy to request a change to the title of this thread? Lots of people use the 'New Posts' button to see what's new on the forums and every time they do that and someone has posted here, they'll be reading that title and getting the message that 'fundraising for Dr Lipkin's study is going slowly'.

It may well be going more slowly than we'd like (what fundraising doesn't!) but I think it will go even slower if people are constantly given the message that it's going slowly.

Can I suggest a change to something like, "Fundraising strategies for Dr Lipkin's study"?

If you agree, please tag Kina or report your own first post and request the change.
 
A

acer2000

Senior Member
Messages
818
vli said:
A quote from the latest project update email from Jen Brea on Canary in a Coal Mine:

It would be no exaggeration to say that it would be sheer lunacy for us to give 10% of a potential $1 million to Kickstarter if we had used one of these sites. It would be lunacy even to give Kickstarter 10% of how much we've raised to date ($15K+). There really is a reason behind the choice not to use one of these crowdfunding platforms.
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Yeah that all is true. That post from Jen was pretty enlightening about the issues they have had with the kickstarter platform. It may well turn out to be a wise decision not to use kickstarter for the reasons you mention. I was just trying to point out some advantages of such a system. What is going on with kickstarter is that they are collecting a commission to use their platform and the purported advantages and exposure that come with it.

I am going play devil's advocate here. If the difference is raising $300k and paying no commission and not meeting the funding goal or raising 1.5M and paying 10% commission and having the project funded, it might seem wise to pay the commission – as distasteful as it is.

Of course, nobody can predict the course of a particular campaign. I don't think there is a "wrong" way or "right way" to go about this. I am super proud of the team who put together this funding push and I have worked tirelessly to raise money from my friends and family. I really believe in this project and I think we can get there one way or another.

Many people wait until the end of the year to do donations so I'm guessing we will see a big bump this month. :)
 
A

Anne

Senior Member
Messages
295
To the team:

I was just about to copy the Christmas tree picture from The Microbe Discovery Project's Facebook page and send it out in an e-mail to friends - but it seems to no longer be available on Facebook?

Could you e-mail the Christmas tree picture to me? If you send me a personal message here on the forum, I'll reply with my e-mail address. Many thanks!
 
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A

Anne

Senior Member
Messages
295
Thanks @Sasha and @Bob !

Do you know why it's gone from Facebook? I had the Swedish patient org (RME) and others base their FB posts about The Microbe Discovery Project on sharing that picture, and now all those posts seem gone as well! Unfortunate :-(
 
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B

Bob

Senior Member
Messages
16,455
Location
England (south coast)
Anne said:
Thanks @Sasha and @Bob !

Do you know why it's gone from Facebook? I had the Swedish patient org (RME) and other base their FB posts about The Microbe Discovery Project on sharing that picture, and now all those posts seem gone as well!
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Hi Anne,
We've had some technical issues with Facebook. We wanted to edit that post slightly, but unfortunately it seems that we might have accidentally deleted the post instead. (We're not sure exactly what's happened - we're blaming Facebook! or brain-fog!)
Sorry, I'm sure this is annoying for you, seeing as you've used the post for your promotional material.
We'll see if we can get it fixed, or set up a replacement post.
In the mean time, the text and image can be found in this dedicated PR thread:
http://forums.phoenixrising.me/inde...iscovery-christmas-message.34147/#post-530196
 
B

Bob

Senior Member
Messages
16,455
Location
England (south coast)
Anne said:
Darn, it seems to mean that all the posts I managed to get people to post are gone as well...

If there's any chance you could revive the picture, which had this link address:

https://www.facebook.com/microbedis...9692043766500/755199457882424/?type=1&theater

then maybe all the Scandinavian posts relating to it will come back as well (???) (hard to do it all over again)
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I fear we may have lost it, Anne. If we can revive the post, then we will. I understand how annoying this is for you.
 
A

Anne

Senior Member
Messages
295
It was news to me that when a post is deleted on FB, all the posts linking to it or sharing it are deleted too, even if they had separate texts put in them (in this case, a text in Swedish explaining The Microbe Discovery Project). I would have thought that FB would have kept the Swedish text in the post, with a box saying "Deleted link" or something like that replacing the deleted shared post.

It was a shame because we lost a lot of "Shares". But I've re-done as many posts as I could, now putting just the picture in (no link or "shared" part). Hopefully there will still be some gifts from Scandinavia.
 
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