We've been giving the whole crowdfunding thing a lot of thought, especially for touring, as it is really expensive. The financial risk of booking tickets, renting vans, taking time off work makes without knowing how much you're going to earn (or lose in most cases) makes it really difficult to tour more than a week per year at our level.
So this is really valuable feedback. The thing I'm really interested is Amanda's statement that she believes they wouldn't have raised as much money if they had done it on their own site.
Kickstarter looks like a really great platform but there's no major issue with them as far as we're concerned. It's for US residents only. I mean, they'll take money from anyone, from anywhere in the world, but they won't let people outside of the US set up a fundraising campaign on their site. I'm sure there are reasons for this, but it's still rather frustrating.
So we've been looking for alternatives. We just found a company who are developing a wordpress plugin that enables you to build your own crowdfunding site. They're called Ignition Deck and they're using the beta version of their own platform to fund the release of their software. Go check them out, they're really great people and are definitely worth supporting!
They've offered to work with us to help us launch our fundraising campaign, which we'll be setting up over the next few weeks. In our case, the campaign will be run directly from our website, so we won't have access to all the art fanatics on Kickstarter! So I hope for our sake that Amanda is wrong and we'll be able to make this work without the help of Kickstarter maniacs!!!
I'll come back and post our results in a few months!