Met with the Fundbreak team when they popped by RMIT for a chat earlier today, mainly because I wanted to get a clearer idea of what they do and how it might help the social media marketing project I’m working on with Group120 at the moment.

I am aware of crowd-funding and am familiar with more ‘established’ and global sites like Kickstarter and, even, IndieGoGo. Fundbreak is a new, local service and claims to be “Australia’s 1st crowdfunding platform developed for creative individuals, groups and organisations”.

Today, Rick Chen and Alan Crabbe from Fundbreak gave us an introduction about crowd-funding and how it’s steadily been gaining momentum in recent months. Some points:

• Value is not completely in the money, but from your supporters. Reminder that even if a project is not successful in getting 100% funding, we shouldn’t ignore the supporters. These are the people who are interested to help you project grow and should not be ignored. Consider this successfully spreading your word to that many people; i.e. that many networks.
• Recent boom in crowd-funding in the last six months. Sites like Kickstarter, SellABand and IndieGoGo can attribute at least 80% of their net profits to the last six months alone.
• Crowd-funding becoming more popular because of capped public funding for creative industries. Organisations need to outsource their funding, and communities are realising that it is beneficial to support and other start-ups.

Methods of succeeding in a crowd-funding network like Fundbreak:

• Keep target as low as possible. A lower target increases the chances of a 100% success. Anything below that will void all efforts and you end up getting nothing.
• Reward system for supporters. $25 and $100 are proven milestones in crowd-funding, so offer supporters something substantial and sincere.
• Start with your instant networks. Your closest friends/fans who you know will support your project no matter what. These are the people who will be your driving forces.
• Engaging with your supporters. Use project updates and social networks to keep your supporters updated and in the loop. Make them a part of your creative project, and let them feel like they had a part to play in the production of your project.
• Exposure. Look for press coverage. Bad publicity is good publicity? Discussion for another time.
• Online and offline communities. Important to keep networks on and offline. For example, arrange pub meets in a casual settings to meet and interact with your supporters physically.

So far, it all sounds very well and good, and more importantly, very manageable for Group120. It seems simple enough, putting our project up online and getting more supporters; whether or not there is a monetary benefit. Looks like Fundbreak will be in Melbourne for a couple more days. Will probably be meeting again for another chat to work out how it can best help Group120.

For those interested, Fundbreak will be available for meets in Melbourne till 18th August 2010. More details here.