This is the 8th fundraising blog in a series aimed at helping musicians find the different paths towards achieving funding for their recordings. This is primarily to assist those involved in the Freedom Solutions Recording Plan or FSRP.

It takes a creative approach to fundraise money. Ask any professional fundraiser or non-profit organization. You have to have the drive, creativity and the ability to take a lot of no's before even a single yes.

There are a lot of other avenues to finding funding besides just going directly to individuals. This is key since most people will exhaust all options with the individuals they go to directly before they have achieved their full budget.

Visit the previous fundraising blogs that are posted each Wednesday for different ideas and approaches on how to obtain the capitol you need for your project.

The small donations and paypal donations

Small donations in cash and through paypal can amount to much more than you realize and help you out more in the long term. Yes, it is amazing when someone comes at you with a thousand dollars or even five hundred or for that matter even one hundred. Still, barring that you have some very rich friends and relatives as well as connections, a great deal of your budget will more than likely be raised in very small amounts.

Having a paypal donation link on your site as well as your myspace is a great step to getting those small amounts to come in easily. While five dollars might not seem like much, fifty donations of five dollars amounts to two hundred and fifty dollars. In a lot of budgets, that could cover half a day in the studio or a percentage of the food budget or even a session player to do some tracking or overdubs.

It is all about thinking with the broadest spectrum and not locking into the concept of only trying to raise large amounts. At the same time, don’t concentrate on only the small amounts. The most effective fundraising occurs when you are looking at every angle across the board, both small and large.

Be creative in your approach for small donations. Think about percentages of your budget or parts of it. For example if the engineer and studio costs total $5,000.00, think about asking people to play a role in studio time donations of 5 dollars. The donor in turn can feel like they are being involved in a direct part of the project. True it is only a one thousandth of the time, but it adds up. You can also cut it down to closer numbers, like if a studio costs $500.00 for the day, go after a fundraising campaign for “one percenters” to be involved in a single day of the recording.

Yes it is a small amount, but for many people it can be a lot easier to go after very small funds online by going after many more people than it would be going after only a few people for very large funds.

Many have heard about the ad campaigns launched a couple years back, where some web designers sold a pixel for a dollar and filled up a site with one million little ads and made a million dollars. This really happened. It was a wild marketing idea and people bought from one dollar to one hundred dollars in pixels to do their ads. In the span of a year, a number of these sites were filled and the creators became millionaires.

What could you sell online for small prices? What can you come up with to do something a little different to capture the donating audience out there?

There was a woman in Colorado that wanted to get out of debt and go back to school. She figured she needed $100,000. With a truckload of work going through chat groups, forums, and anything and everything online, she raised all the money, got out of debt and went back to school.

It comes back to the creative marketing approach and looking at things from different angles. The small amounts you raise are just like the small steps you take on the preproduction, production and postproduction that you have to do everyday. These smaller amounts will add up and help to supplement the funding of your budget, so you can achieve the goal you have set. Every dollar truly counts and since it is easier to get a dollar than it is to get a thousand dollars, you should pay good attention and put good amounts of time into raising the small amounts to achieve your budget and your goal.

 

© Loren Weisman