All this talk about #patreon and #librepay has me thinking...
In my creative work, I'm primarily a live performance (circus and theater) creator. While successful in the past, #crowdfunding has been difficult for our company because of the additional, and sometimes seemingly Herculean, efforts we had to undertake in order to create physical products for rewards.
In the end we did it, but most of it felt unrelated to the work...and in some cases potentially damaged the work because of creative concessions that had to be made.*
*The example that comes to mind was adjusting theater lights and seating to accommodate video recording for a downloadable video of the show.
While the campaign was truly a rousing success, I can't help but feel like we spent a considerable amount of our creative energies making good on "begging-related" promises.
I'm curious how those who make things that can't be turned easily into downloadable or shippable goods make patroning and funding work for their projects.
Chime in. I'm curious.
@RussSharek I feel like the entire reward system is... sort of misused? The idea is for patrons to fund what you already do so that you can keep doing it, not to fund you doing something tangential just for them. I feel like patrons who pledge for rewards and creators with reward-oriented campaigns are missing the point.
Patreon is certainly to blame at least partially, since they copied Kickstarter's reward-heavy page layout, despite it being much less appropriate for their platform.
@eishiya @RussSharek I agree... one podcast Patreon I support has a few minor bonuses like your name getting read sometimes and the ability to suggest topics... but their goal levels are stuff like "we pay our sound editor this much per episode" which is work I want to support. I don't need more _stuff_
@ruth @eishiya
Yes. This.