Do you have a project you care about that you would like to see funded? If so, Kickstarter is an option to be considered when it comes to project funding. Kickstarter is a website that helps creators of projects attain the funds required to complete their projects. Whether it is film, games, music or many other creative products, Kickstarter lets its users find interesting ideas they’d like to support and provides a way to fund them.
So how does it work?
The creators of a project post their ideas for what they want to create and how much financial backing they’ll need to make sure their ideas come to fruition. The users can then decide whether they want to pledge money to the project. If the creators are successful in receiving enough pledges to satisfy their financial requirement, they then receive the money pledged from the users to create their product.
What do I get in return?
Creators set pledge tiers for varying amounts of money pledged. These are at the creators’ discretion and range from the creators’ thanks — usually for $1 pledges — to receiving their product for higher pledges, and many other things like getting autographed editions of products and behind-the-scenes looks at the creation process.
Is there a risk involved?
That’s one of the great features of Kickstarter: not worrying about funding a project that never gets created. This comes down to Kickstarter working with the “all or nothing” model, meaning that a project must reach its required funding or none of the money pledged is processed — translating to users keeping their money if the creators don’t reach their goal.
Yeah, but does this really happen?
Definitely. One great example of the possibilities of Kickstarter comes from a game development studio called Double Fine. Double Fine started asking for funding for a passion game project with a goal of $400,000, and are now at over $2.2 million dollars with time still left in their deadline — a project that might never have existed without the Kickstarter community.
ERIC C. LIPSKY can be reached at science@theaggie.org.
