And, with a huge sigh of relief, we’re into our last couple of days of crowdfunding and are doing our final push. It’s been a really up-and-down month – we’ve been moving offices, and mainly without an office for the last four weeks, which has been hard on the team. Hard keeping up with what everyone’s doing; checking what’s been done and hasn’t been done; and keeping the momentum – and the morale – going. (*I should also say that there have been some great highs – some very generous and unexpected contributions, and some exciting new leads to follow up. We’ll talk more about them next week though, when the campaign’s over.)
But we’re in our new office now – albeit with a few things still to sort out, which is starting to make life easier. However, some questions still remain…
- How do you get people who’ve told you they’ll pledge, but who haven’t done it yet, to put their money in?
- How many times can you ask people the same question?
- And what goes through your mind when you’ve pledged £1, and then ask for it to be refunded? Honestly, that happened.
I’m not sure we’ll ever know the answer to some of them. The plan is to generate a massive sense of urgency for the last few days, so people know that it’s now or never. You’ll find out, next week, when we’re doing a group update, what impact that’s had.
As things stand at the moment, with about 36 hours to go, we’ve got enough money to swing Issue One into production. But we’ll have to use that issue to entice some of the advertisers and supporters we’ve already spoken to, and get them involved in Issue Two onwards. So that’s the next challenge. In the meantime, we’ve got an editorial meeting later this week to look at the pagination, and tie down word counts for the stories we’ve started writing and are about to commission.
We’ve got a great piece on Adidas and Parley for the Oceans, and we’ve got content about community-building projects and places in both Norway and the US. And we’ve got a few other tricks up our sleeves, too – so you’ll have to wait for Issue One to see what they are!
There’s some more planning to be done, too. While we’ve been offered money and support in kind outside of the campaign, it does mean that we won’t officially hit our target, so we need to do some rethinking about how we sell our subscriptions. Because (we’re assuming!) we’ve missed the target on Indiegogo, we won’t be able to take orders for subscriptions via their InDemand service, which we were hoping to do. So we’ll have to do some more work on the site so that people can subscribe there. Which isn’t a problem, but does means more short-term expense.
So, we’ve got 36 hours. Thanks again for all of your support, and please help us spread the word! And if you’re planning on crowdfunding and want to talk about any element of your campaign, we’re happy to share what we’ve learned. Just give us a shout…
Fiona x
