Could crowdfunding help kickstart your career?
(image from www.recharity.ca)
Crowdfunding is a fairly new social media concept especially for Canadians which provides individuals and businesses with an opportunity to raise money through online campaigning. There are many different platforms to do crowdfunding, Kickstarter is probably the most popular but there are may others as well. I'm sure many of you are now familiar with Gawker, which was actually a blog which was originally intended for posts on celebrities and the media industry. You probably know about Gawker due to our mayor's recent incidentwhere the website was attempting to buy his infamous video for $200,000. Gawker actually used a crowdfunding platform called Indiegogo which is an international website, they managed to raise $63,500 in 2 days.
One of my colleagues recently wrote a crowdfunding blog for the library's Business & Personal Finance blog you can read it for some more information. Also, the Business department will be hosting a program next Thursday, September 5, 2013 to kick off our Small Business Matters series which runs from September to December.
A lot of new artists, entrepreneurs, inventors etc. have used crowdfunding to help get their career or product off the ground. Some examples are; Canadian Indie Rocker Amanda Zelina , Sprayable Energy., and alternative-rock icon/blogger Amanda Palmer who began as a street performer and raised $1.2 million with Kickstarter(this is the largest music crowdfunding project today). She actually faced a lot of criticism for asking people to fund her album back in 2012. You can watch the TED video "The Art of Asking" below where she talks about how to get people to pay for things, as she says by "simply asking them."
Of course as always you can also come up to the Business Department and check out some of our books if you want to raise some money for your business, or download some ebooks from home! Check these out:
(Also available as an ebook)
Let me know what you think, share your comments 😉
2 thoughts on “Could crowdfunding help kickstart your career?”
Thank you Ashley,
so much for the TED video starring Amanda Palmer – ” Art of Asking ” and this all inspiring blog – great intro to crowd funding – what a super concept & cool new way to get things started – Who woulda thunk it ! Well Done !
Hi Paul, you’re very welcome. I was so inspired by the TED video, I thought it really captured the essence of Crowdfunding; ask and you shall receive – which is a concept which I was quite unfamiliar with myself, but I learned a lot from our program. You should check out the National crowdfunding Association Website NCFA for current Canadian information; legislation, process, resources etc. Glad you enjoyed the blog, thanks for commenting Paul!