I’m back at the Atlantic. Its
February and a moody sky watches over the dramatic churning of waters
frustrated by winter winds. The air temperature is about 9 degrees and the
water temperature is about 11. Yesterday I received over £7000, which has put
an end to over 2 years of financial insecurity and means I can finally knuckle
down and get my work published. I didn’t receive the money from a wealthy
foundation or a scholarship for my academic excellence, but from a crowd of well-wishers
and concerned ocean lovers.
Crowdfunding is both an incredibly
novel and an age-old invention. In essence it is no different from any
sponsorship drive; you tell people what you want money for and if they like
your idea, they give what they feel. The difference is the tool of social
media, which has allowed this well-worn technique to bloom and reach new
heights. ‘Future for Coral’ was my first ever attempt at crowdfunding and in many
respects, my first time to really interact with social media in a serious
manner. I thought I’d share some of experience from my point of view as the,
now jubilant, owner of the campaign.
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| The Atlantic in February |
Since the financial crash in 2008 it
has felt like convention funding, for almost everything, has dried up. My
supervisor looked into figures for deep-sea marine biology and found that
available funds have dropped to a third (70% reduction) of what was available 4
years ago. Two years ago, I found out my PhD funding had been pulled. My friend
Andrew was visiting me in Kenya, where I was working at the time, and offered
me some money to help. I felt terrible; the thought of taking money from a
friend. He explained that he and his wife Emma thought that my work was worth
it, so I should take the money. I cautiously agreed, and from there an idea was
planted.
When I returned to the UK in May last year, my
funding was still a mess. I decided I needed to do the crowdfunding idea. I
watched Amanda Palmer’s TED talk on the ‘art of asking’ a dozen times and set
off to Cornwall in July to film the promo video with my mate Mike. The reason
it took nearly 6 months before I ran the campaign was a combination of
desperate hope that some money would come in soon and terror about putting my
work and myself on a pedestal for all to see. Several grant rejections later I
decided to go live with Future for Coral.
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| Filming in more clement weather |
The most important thing in any
social media exercise is ‘reach’. This means how many people are seeing your
‘content’, be it the webpage, article or whatever. This much I knew before I
started. What I had no idea about was how hard it is to extend one’s reach. You
cannot simply put something up on the net and expect people to access it. I put
up the campaign, told all my friends about it saw the readership start going up
and the first donations go in and felt pretty good about myself, so I sat back
a bit to watch. Rooky error. The excitement died down and nothing happened.
At this point I realised with horror
that I was in the position I had feared would happen all those months of
thinking about doing this; all my friends and colleagues watching while I
floundered. In panicked desperation I started to send messages and tweets to
everyone I could think of. Every time I did it felt like I was inviting one
more person to watch me fail, but I couldn’t stop. I had to make this work.
Readership went up a few more donations went in, and then it stopped again.
This pattern continued for the first 3 weeks of the campaign. Even at the
two-week mark, when I received a fantastic donation from Somerville college of
£2000, it still felt like I was treading water. Not until the final week did
the social media reach a tipping point and the content started to generate its
own reach. The graphs below show readership on the platform over time and
donations. The graph about readership also tracks my emotions over the past few
weeks pretty well too!
The second most important factor in
crowdfunding is the content. Can you put up something that people will ‘like’,
‘share’ and of course most importantly donate to? As a scientist I am used to
expressing my ideas carefully, noting my uncertainty, over several pages. All
of a sudden I have 140 characters to convince you that what I’m doing is
important and you should give money to it. Yikes! This, however, was much more
fun than promotion. It was great getting to wax lyrical openly and freely to my
growing band of fans. Initially I thought people would be interested in the
human aspect of coral reef decline or the personal aspect of my work. Turns out
people went crazy for underwater factoids and pretty pictures, so I adapted my
content as I went along, and in the end it was the stuff that most excites me
as well.
Apart from just beating my drum on
social media I went out and did a few stunts as well. The first was to paste my
bedroom window with Future for Coral stuff. I got so sick of staring at Twitter
that I needed some art and craft therapy and through this ended up getting an
article in the Oxford Mail! I gave a talk at my graduate college, which I
thoroughly enjoyed and then was bowled over when the college decided to give me
£2000 and write an article about me for the alumnus network. I was starting to
feel pretty cool. My final stunt was to set up a stall at the East Oxford
Community Market and spent a lovely morning chatting to people about my work
and various tangents on this, while giving out free baked goodies. To my
complete surprise George Monbiot, the famous Guardian columnist walked past
with his family. “George, will you please retweet something for me?” I blurted
as he tried to buy some veggies. He agreed and that evening my final video
update was tweeted to his 116,000 followers. After that, my social media grew
on its own.
So in the end I achieved my goal
despite spending most of the time not really believing I would. It is of course
thanks to 80 or so wonderful individuals who gave me money over the 4 weeks. As
a scientist I wanted to understand a bit more about who gave and why, so here’s
a few factoids about the donors.
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| Proportion of donations from different groups |
- Proportion of page visitors who donated – 5% (apparently this is about the average)
- I received 50 pledges from friends and acquaintances, 22 from random people who liked the campaign, 2 from academic sources, and 4 secret donors, including one secret donation of £850. I am dying to know who this was! (The amount raised by these different groups is in the pie chart.)
- The average donation by friends was £61.40 and
from randomers was £47.95. These amounts were closer together than I had
expected.
