Any strong opinions for or against particular crowdfunding sites?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m on the planning committee for a local arts festival. It’s been in existence for several years and is well attended and an incorporated 501c3, but due to a decrease in grants this is the first year they’ve considered crowdfunding. The money raised would be used to attract more name artists and entertainers without raising the admission prices. My subcommittee is to examine the different crowdfunding sites and the pros/cons of each.

I’ll do that more formally, but for the informal research, does anybody have any strong recommendations for or against any particular crowdfunding sites?

Thanks for any info-

J

2

Personally, I associate GoFundMe pages with losers looking for free money from gullible people. Every “I’m a pretty girl posing in my bikini who wants you to pay for my vacation” page seems to be posted there. Same goes for the “I spent too much money on dumb stuff this week, so I can’t pay the rent”. It seems that this site started out with the best of intentions, like kids-with-cancer looking for help to pay for treatments, but like Craigslist, has turned into a wasteland of stoners looking for people to pay for their high. I would say Kickstarter or Indiegogo is the better approach, but it seems like those sites specifically want to you set up rewards for certain contributor levels and/or return money if you don’t reach your goal. You could try that with a pre-paid discount ticket and/or some nominal reward like a free meal at a food vendor, but that may not be ‘exclusive’ enough to attract the kind of traffic you’d want.

3

I don’t see GoFundMe the same as **Yarster **does…I’m sure there are losers asking for handouts but unless someone I know posts a link to a GoFundMe campaign I am not hanging out on the GoFundMe site, and my friends only post links to legit needful campaigns, therefore I don’t know what kind of other people there are posting to the site.

GFM does take a cut of the total donations. There’s differences between GFM/Kickstarter/Indigogo which you will find through your research.

That being said, here’s a link to the IndieGoGo campaign from a music festival I went to this summer. Nelsonville Music Festival Boxcar Stage and Mural | Indiegogo

You may want to simply look through the different sites and see what other arts festivals are using. I suspect it will be IndieGoGo.