At noon on Christmas Eve we embarked on a journey to raise $25,000 in 30 days for my new film. The structure for the journey was somewhat pre-designed by the fundraising website Kickstarter.com.
It began partly as an experiment. I wondered if it were truly possible to reach, say, 250,000 people through the internet, in order to get 1% of them to put in $10 each. Surely there are millions of Hoop Dreams fans out there. Can we reach ¼ million of them? Will 2,500 of them put in $10?
The short answer is no. I don’t think we reached ¼ million people. My best guess is we reached maybe 30,000. But who really knows? You can add up website hits, Facebook friends (and your friends’ friends), Warrior Films Twitter followers and numbers of Tweets, email list numbers, and conversations with your Aunt Sally promising to speak to her tablemates at the retirement home dinner. But nobody really knows what it takes to make a campaign go viral. And viral is what you need to reach great numbers of people. Viral also is what you need to reach them with a repeated message. The best marketing campaign wizards will tell you that you need to reach people 3 or 4 times with the same message in order to get them to act.
But even if we did reach that many people they clearly are not willing to put in $10 each to fund our film. So maybe the money “ask” is too great. (I do recognize that the official ask range is $1 – $5,000, with commensurate “rewards” for each contribution amount. But the thrust of most of our appeals to donors was for $10.) We are still in recession and for plenty of people that I know $10 is still pretty precious.
Then there’s the film’s subject matter. How many people want to support a project on initiation and mentorship of teen boys? I tried a few times to launch this film over the last eight years without much success. Far too many people see helping boys as a zero sum game, ie., if we help boys it hurts girls. They still don’t get it that helping boys realize mature masculinity helps girls and women. So maybe the subject matter was a drawback. Certainly for hardcore basketball fans it may be of no interest whatsoever.
So with these data uncertainties and unmet objectives you’d probably think “well, they failed.” But you’d be wrong!
As I write this we’ve received $19,500 from 159 donors. I estimate that as many as 50 backers are people I haven’t met before – about 30% of the total. That’s far fewer people, and a much smaller percentage of the total, than I hoped we might have. And yet it’s still remarkable. We received separate donations of $5,000, $2,000, and $1,000 from people I don’t even know! If that’s not a testament to faith I don’t know what is. If that’s not the miracle of personal trust enacted entirely through electronic means I don’t know what is.
To see support pour in from around the country and across the globe from people both known and unknown has been tremendously uplifting. It has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life.
Over the last 15 years I have seen numerous funding sources significantly reduce funding or disappear altogether. I have seen the competition for the scarce remaining resources increase ten-fold. I have seen the commercial distribution network for independent films largely evaporate. And all that happened in the days before the recession hit. Then things got really bad. Given the new realities I saw one remaining option to carry on as a documentary filmmaker: take the films directly to the audience, co-create them with them, have them fund them and deliver the finished product to them.
For a man impatient with bureaucracy, wary of institutions, unwilling to play politics, this approach has serious attractions. To fund films by bypassing the gatekeepers – those who’ve told me my whole life “no one will watch this, we can’t broadcast this, this won’t improve society…” (yes, even with Hoop Dreams!) is unbelievably exciting. To distribute films by cutting out a different set of gatekeepers who say basically the same things brings a veritable delirium of joy.
Photo Credit: Miguel Á. Padriñán from Canva