All Articles Tagged "crowdsourcing"
‘Notorious’ Actress Uses Kickstarter to Launch Real-Life Music Career
Image: BlackFilm.com
Antonique Smith, perhaps best known for playing Faith Evans in the Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious, is launching a real-life music career with help from Kickstarter. Over the weekend, the actress exceeded her fundraising goal of $50,000 (by $27). The money will cover the cost of finishing and promoting her debut album “Speechless.”
Smith has a solid acting career, having also appeared on Broadway in the musical Rent and in the movie Abduction (starring Twilight’s Taylor Lautner). This year, she’ll appear opposite Zoe Kravitz and Gabourey Sidibe in the film Yelling to the Sky. She talks with Black Enterprise about the risks and benefits of embarking on a music career that’s been crowdsourced.
“It’s not just fundraising; it’s also the growth and awareness of the brand. We don’t want to just do an album and put it out in a couple of months,” she tells the site. “We are creating the anticipation. We are centralizing my fan base.”
There is a rule about returning all of the money if you don’t reach your goal by the campaign deadline. But she was able to build a group of 217 “core supporters,” some who donated in excess of $7,500.
“Some people were from random countries like Austria and Finland who gave large amounts. Some are family and friends and people I went to 5th grade with. It was good to see names I haven’t seen in years,” she tells the site.
For more about Antonique Smith and her Kickstarter campaign, click here.
Get Organized Before You Kick Start Your Crowdfunding Effort
Image: Shutterstock, Rafal Olechowski
St. Mark’s Bookshop, a 35-year-old bookseller in New York’s Greenwich Village, is trying to save itself by appealing to others. Using Lucky Ant, a crowdfunding site that caters to local businesses, the bookshop’s owners are trying to raise $23,000 to move to a less expensive location.
St. Mark’s Bookshop is among the tons of aspiring small businesses that are using crowdfunding sites to get the cash it needs. Over on Kickstarter, perhaps the most popular of these sites, Live & Let Dye is looking for funding to “take our printing operation to the next step”; a band called Secret Mountains seeks cash to put the “finishing touches” on their debut album; and the filmmakers behind a documentary called The Wireless Generation is asking for funding to complete their movie and go on a screening tour.
But before you open up an account on one of these sites and start your fundraising efforts, there are a few legal things you ought to know about.
President Obama signed the JOBS Act in April, which gave the average Joe the opportunity to invest in a private company even though their net worth is less than $1 million. However, come January 2013, there will be new Securities and Exchange Commission regulations that entrepreneurs will need to suss out. Donations have always been acceptable, but now there will be rules for large projects.
“…[I]t’s expected that all companies pursuing a crowdfunding path will need to have their financial statements in order, certified by an accountant if seeking more than $100,000, and audited and prepared by an accountant if raising in excess $500,000,” writes Reuters. Overall, the key word is “transparency.” The new rules will require a business plan (which you should already have, to be honest) and, overall, paperwork to account for your dealings.
Crowdfunding supporters say these sites give ordinary people willing to take a risk the chance to invest in what could be “the next big thing.” That may be true, but the government is trying to keep scammers from taking advantage of these sites as well. Meaning anyone who’d like to turn to crowdfunding will have to have their house in order before they do so.
Crowdsourcing Craze: Black Artists & Businesses Getting Funded by Friends
Enterprising African-American creatives , small business owners, and more are using crowdsourced funding platforms instead of traditional loans with success.
Griffin used her Kickstarter funds to shoot "The Fifties: A Tale in Black and White."
“IT TRULY TAKES A VILLAGE” was the all caps theme of the updates Raquel Griffin posted on Kickstarter.com, an online funding platform that bills itself as “a new way to fund and follow creativity.” In January 2011, the New York-based photographer and stylist who has racked up impressive credits styling for the likes of Adrien Brody, People magazine, and MTV, wanted to shoot an editorial spread that would address the absence of blacks in 1950s fashion photography—and she needed $3,500 to do it. Using Kickstarter to launch a 30-day campaign that included a video and written pitch to her “village,” Griffin surpassed her goal in three weeks, ultimately raising $4,607. Although starting her Kickstarter campaign was free, a 5% fee was then levied on Griffin’s pot of creative capital.
This charge is worth the tremendous empowerment Griffin gained through joining the “crowdsourcing” trend. With budgets shrinking in response to the recession, particularly in publishing and other creative industries, artists like Griffin have had to conceive of new ways to fund their passions. Through crowdsourcing (or crowdfunding), entrepreneurs are turning to specialized sites that help them fund projects that traditionally would have been impossible to produce without the support of financial gatekeepers.
By sidestepping institutions like banks, crowdsourcing sites allow anyone with access to a computing device to raise money from friends for their ideas. Many black artists—and more—are already riding this wave.
“The old way of getting money is dead,” declares LaShunda Davis, owner of ‘Cure Beauty Bar nestled in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood. “Knowing that banks were totally not giving out loans,” Davis continues, she opted to make her pitch on GoFundMe to acquire more capital. “My thought was to get people and friends involved.”
The concept of tapping your community instead of a bank appealed to singer Imani Uzuri, who has toured the world promoting her first album, which performed with The Roots on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.” In less than two months she raised over $18,000 to produce her second album through Kickstarter. She has good reason to exclaim: “Community is power!”
Google Hires Crowdsourcing Guru to Manage Africa Outreach
(Fast Company) — Much of the coverage of Google focuses on its domestic priorities–its rivalries with Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook, its friendship with Verizon, its interest in net neutrality. But less well covered has been the tech giant’s efforts overseas, particularly its focus in the past few years on expanding Internet usage in places where it trails, like Africa and the Middle East. Google just scored a coup in moving those efforts forward–by hiring Ushahidi’s founder and director to become its manager of policy in Africa. You may know Ushahidi as the open-source platform for crowdsourcing information, created following the 2007 Kenyan elections as a way for people to report incidents of violence. The woman behind it was 33-year-old Ory Okolloh, a Harvard-trained lawyer who had previously created a site to monitor corruption in the Kenyan legislature.
6 Cool Crowdsourcing Business Tools
(Inc) — It’s been four years since Jeff Howe coined the term “crowdsourcing.” Since, Facebook has engaged thousands of members to translate the site into more than 65 languages. Pizza Hut uses virtual order-takers through the cloud, and if you need a new logo, you can tap the design pool through 99Designs. Biewald and Janah have compiled six of their favorite tools for crowdsourcing in small business.
How To Participate in Crowdsourcing – Right Now
(Read Write Web) — Perhaps you have some spare time on your hands, or perhaps you just want to do good for others from the comfort of your desk chair. Either way, a great way to fulfill these needs is to participate in crowdsourcing – community driven conglomerations of small efforts by large crowds of participants. The simplest form of crowdsourcing are online wikis like the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia, and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other great examples. Here are a few great ways to get involved in the wonder of crowdsourcing.
How To Participate in Crowdsourcing – Right Now
(Read Write Web) — Perhaps you have some spare time on your hands, or perhaps you just want to do good for others from the comfort of your desk chair. Either way, a great way to fulfill these needs is to participate in crowdsourcing – community driven conglomerations of small efforts by large crowds of participants. The simplest form of crowdsourcing are online wikis like the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia, and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), but there are hundreds, if not thousands, of other great examples. Here are a few great ways to get involved in the wonder of crowdsourcing.
Can the “Wisdom of Crowds” Work for Funding Startups?
(Read Write Web) — Whether or not you believe that venture capital is broken, the necessity of funding startups still exists. One alternative to traditional funding models is “crowdfunding” – crowdsourcing the fundraising process. Like crowdsourcing, crowdfunding is based on the idea of the “wisdom of crowds.” And crowdfunding contends that “the crowd” can be a better source for financial support than traditional funding avenues. As these traditional avenues are often criticized for being based on “who you know” as much as “what you do,” crowdfunding promises fundraising that is more transparent, more collaborative, more accessible, and more global.
Crowdsourcing: Opportunity or Time Suck?
(Entrepreneur.com) — Like most successful freelancers, Brett Slater of Slater’s Garage Ads & Audio earns a majority of his income from clients who hire him outright, agree on a contract, and compensate him for all his work on their projects. But roughly 15 to 20 percent of the audio and video producer’s income is generated from an unlikely source: crowdsourcing websites and contests.
