Crowdfunding – Indiegogo or Kickstarter?

I launched my first crowdfunding campaign (on Indiegogo). Check it out here!

I’ve been busy putting together perks – in particular I’m putting together a Blu-Ray with a collection of my past works, as well as new restorations of Dream and Untitled #1. There’s a lot to say about it, but I’ll save that for another post. For now, here are my thoughts on why I chose Indiegogo:

First of all, I decided to keep my goal pretty low – I really only need about $600 to finish the project, and I’m only dipping my toes in the water here. I’ve never tried crowdfunding before, so I want to try it out on a small scale to get a feel for it.

For crowdfunding, there are pretty much four options that I know of: Kickstarter, Indiegogo, GoFundMe, and skipping a platform altogether and soliciting directly or on your own website.

The advantages to using a platform are:
1) They are established, so people feel relatively comfortable with them, giving credit card info, etc.
2) They make it easier to set up a campaign than doing your own website, and they handle all the credit card transactions.
3) They provide ‘discoverability’, that is supposedly strangers might browse their way into your campaign and decide to contribute.

The disadvantage is:
They take a fee.

In the future I may decide to skip a platform altogether – so far ‘discoverability’ seems not to be a real thing, and I can set something up myself. But for now, setting up all the creative content was enough work, so it wasn’t worth it for me to do extra work to avoid a small fee.

So what are the fees on the different platforms?

Kickstarter – 5% + payment processing per pledge of 3% + $0.20
Indiegogo – 5% + payment processing per pledge of 2.9% + $0.20
GoFundMe – 0% + payment processing per pledge of 2.9% + $0.20

They all have pretty much the same payment processing fee (which would apply even if you skipped the platform and did it yourself – accepting credit cards just always costs something). And currently Kickstarter and Indiegogo have the same 5% platform fee, while GoFundMe has no platform fee.

GoFundMe seems to mostly be used for personal expenses – medical emergencies, things like that. It feels wrong to use it for this kind of project, so I decided that I better not.

As far as Kickstarter vs Indiegogo, a big part of it is that Indiegogo allows you to do ‘flexible funding’, which means even if you don’t make it to your goal, you’ll still get to keep the contributions, whereas with Kickstarter it’s all or nothing. In my case, I’m going to finish the movie no matter what, but I need all the contributions I can get, so flexible funding is a good choice for me.

Indiegogo also lets you keep the project active, accepting contributions after the campaign is over.

As far as ‘discoverability’, Kickstarter has a higher profile, but Indiegogo seems to have a good reputation with film projects.

So all things being (nearly) equal, I decided to go with Indiegogo.

I’ll let you know how it goes. In the meantime, if you’re able and willing to contribute, please do so! I would very much appreciate it.

All right, I have to get back to putting together perks!

One thought on “Crowdfunding – Indiegogo or Kickstarter?”

  1. Following up on my number-crunching and analysis from last month, I’ve continued tracking the progress of a market within comics that’s only beginning to mature. While there are more than two dozen crowdfunding platforms, Kickstarter and Indiegogo have been the established leaders from the get-go, especially in terms of comics-related campaigns. There is a smattering of comics projects on sites like GoFundMe, but by comparison those could be considered the long tail of this market. A crowdfunding hit has yet to occur on a platform other than Kickstarter or Indiegogo.

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