Comics Real MacGuffins on Fringe Crowd Funding
Some people make money out of Edinburgh but those people aren’t the performers. So we find ourselves in a tricky situation – wanting to maintain the momentum gained from previous successes in perhaps more carefree years, but now that one of us is married with two children to feed, one is getting married and needs to save every penny he has (both of them) and one is a single no-hoper who has foolishly swapped his life savings for a huge mortgage – how on earth can we afford to do it? You’d have to be insane to do Edinburgh. And we are.
But we have a plan. Young Matt MacGuffin has his finger on the technological pulse. He runs our website, Facebook group, Twitter page and is desperate to drag Jim and I into the 21st Century. I mean – who has an ‘email account’ and a ‘mobile phone’ these days? I’m sure he’s exaggerating.
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Hide AdHe has heard of something called ‘Crowd Funding’ – whereby you essentially convince random strangers to believe in you and support your endeavours. These are generally business or artistic ventures but some bizarre ones exist out there – ‘help pay for my nose job’, ‘give me dollars so I can buy Saturn’ , ‘I need money to smear my walls with jam’. Support is primarily financial but people can also help by spreading the word through social media – which can snowball and generate a huge return allowing you to ‘meet your goal’. Singer Amanda Palmer wanted to raise $100,000 for her album and tour and ended up raising over $1 million – she is just one of many (see alleywatch.com/ 2013/03/the-top-25-crowdfunding-success-stories).
We are not after $100,000 – we need to raise £5,000 - although we wouldn’t complain if we raised $1 million. So what is our campaign? We bounced some ideas around and the one that stuck (it may have been Matt’s but Jim and I will take the credit if it’s a success) is to sell shares in The Real MacGuffins and offer a range of benefits to shareholders – from personalized Youtube content to signed T-shirts, from tickets to our weekly AGMs in Edinburgh to having your name appear in the show.
We shot a short, punchy video to publicise this – filmed by the amazing Jason Read (www.robofilms.co.uk) in Teddington on the one sunny day in May (special thanks to Louise and Charlie at Mini Me Hairdressers and all at The Vinery Café). We hope you like it – it was a lot of fun to make.
So far we have raised over £400 in 2 days – so just 58 days to go to raise £4,600…please help us in any way you can – financially ideally – otherwise Matt and Jim will starve. I actually need to lose some weight so every cloud…