It’s a wrap! April 2016
One day, just like that, I received an email from the SOS Kinderdorf Austria asking whether I’d like to talk to them about community building. As I said when I summarized my February, you can only do what you can fit into your week, so focusing all my time and energy working with Kickstarter these days, I would have passed this challenge to someone else. However, given the type of work SOS Kinderdorf does, I thought they might benefit from my observations on why certain Kickstarter creators succeed and others don’t when trying to make their projects come to life, as well as how I’ve seen online communities evolve in the past couple of years. I will write a more in-depth report once we have some success stories to show.
The 1st of April marked one year of me representing Kickstarter in DE, AT, and NL. I’m incredibly proud of having worked with the team for so long. I would have never expected for this to become such a long-term collaboration, but once your values and the values of a company align so well, it wouldn’t make much sense to do anything else.
In the past, I’ve often switched between jobs when I saw my goals there as accomplished or thought my work could benefit another company more, but with Kickstarter, there has been a continuous supply of new challenges.
On one hand, not as many people in Europe know what Kickstarter is, and the far bigger challenge is the preoccupations I often face when talking about Kickstarter with people I meet: to many, Kickstarter is a platform where you ask for money and people, an anonymous crowd, throws it at you. From my perspective on the other hand, Kickstarter works because successful creators are genuine with their output and want to share their creative work with others. Creativity in a professional sense is often only possible when there is the necessary funding and so, yes, Kickstarter is a tool to help raise money. But overall, it’s more about giving and not so much about getting. If anything, it’s a platform that connects people so that both parties benefit: the supporter gets a piece of the creation the creative produced.
What I consider my biggest challenge at this point is to clearly communicate the values the team in Greenpoint and I share, and how these observations can be translated into successful campaigning. To me personally, Kickstarter is far more about social mobility than it is about making the big buck.
If you need help with your Kickstarter project or would like me to come to talk to your community at a local coworking space or a creative university, please let me know.
