Behind The Scenes Of A Crowdfunding Campaign - A Frog's Eye View

I feel like I owe my regular readership – or perhaps, what was my regular readership – this apologist post. Even though food and wine and Frenchness may not feature (much). 

I had to take a break from blogging in recent weeks because my intellectual and emotional resources were all-consumed by the crowdfunding project I was involved in. In fact, my French husband Maxime also found himself being sucked into the crowdfunding vortex with me, despite the fact that only one of us had been hired to do it and he had a day job. Nevertheless, every day for two months, he'd monitor the campaign page to see how much we’d raised and give me ‘help’, Maxime style.

It all started when I was contacted by some local Melbourne innovators some months ago. They were not social media savvy and needed help to promote a campaign to fund a clinical trial of a new potential therapy for chronic tinnitus. My first response was, ‘what on earth is chronic tinnitus?’ Then, when it was explained to me, I thought about the temporary ringing in the ears we all experience from time to time and thought: but what if that ringing never STOPS? If you can never escape it? And the penny dropped – it must be terrible. I mean, even our three year old stops crying sometimes. So I got on board with the project.

What’s more, once I began to talk about it, heaps of friends and family began to ‘come out’ and confess that they suffered from tinnitus. I was almost hurt. ‘But you never TOLD me!’ I would say to them. I felt as if they’d been keeping a huge secret from me - as if they had a secret identity and were in fact a goat.

And so I learnt about tinnitus and beavered away on Twitter, Facebook and traditional media. I even created a flyer for the campaign in French, to be pinned up at various places in France which we would be visiting. We weren't going to France for the campaign (the sort of campaign that can afford that doesn't need crowdfunding), it was because Maxime had to go to Paris for business, and the kids and I tagged along to visit the French family and friends we left behind when me moved to Australia almost two years ago. Maxime was dubious about approaching the French for crowdfuning help, however. They would be way too suspicious of something so new as crowdfunding! But despite Maxime's warnings about the French resistance to newness, I thought sticking up flyers couldn’t hurt. (Besides, didn't the French invent the term avant-garde?)

I soon came to regret making a flyer in French though. I did my best, looking up the French for tinnitus (les acouphènes, would you believe), and asked Maxime to print off a few copies while I went to check the dinner.

'You mean print a few copies and correct it,' came Maxime's reply. 'Who wrote this? The French is a catastrophie.'

'Uh ... me,' I said.

He threw up his hands as if to say ‘but of course’. Maxime then sat at the computer for the next hour, composing an impossibly wordy but probably quite beautiful version of the French flyer.

'People have about three seconds to read this, Maxime,' I said to him. 'This is a flyer. We can’t give them something the length of a novel by Proust, no matter how well-crafted the French.'

This is not to say that writing the English version of the flyer was any easier. 

'You can’t talk about 'feedback loops',' said Maxime. 'It’s got to be understandable by simple people - like real estate agents.'

I don’t know what Maxime has against real estate agents. But I insisted on keeping some science-y stuff – people like to feel they’re helping advance science, I thought (although apparently they don’t generally like it enough to actually go to their computer, look up your website and enter a really long credit card number).

For all his criticism, constructive and otherwise, Maxime did write to people on behalf of the campaign, and the French ended up being the second largest group of supporters after the Australians. You see, Maxime, having the Frenchman’s seemingly inborn knowledge that he’s absolutely terrific, had no issues with writing to people to ask for contributions. But for me, writing and sending emails to contacts asking for help was the mental equivalent of a really long Chinese burn. For some reason, I was afraid people would write back and say ‘I hate you forever for asking me to give money’. I was actually surprised (and hey, relieved) when instead of ‘bugger off’, people replied ‘OK’. Of course, Maxime could have pointed out how silly I was being about all this. Which is why I didn’t tell him.

And, unlike Maxime, I didn’t feel I could ask people for help without giving something in return. The only carrot I had was to invite people a party where I would could place before them my traditional buffet of Too Much Food. As an added bonus, they would get to drink Maxime’s wine (another thing on my list of stuff not to mention to him).

In the end, we raised over 5000 dollars, which, although short of the target, is apparently not TOO bad when you have nothing to sell and contributions aren’t tax deductable. I'd seen that

not even Maxime's flowery French would get us to our target when it was clear that tinnitus organisations wouldn’t help out, not even with a measly re-tweet or two, (though wishing us well), since this was not a not-for-profit exercise. At that point, I realised we were pushing a rather large amount of faeces up a very large hill. Now, other avenues must be explored to fund the tinnitus trial. Or, as Maxime pointed out, we could run the campaign again, and do it properly this time (i.e., listen to him more).

At least the crowdfunding campaign gave me an excuse to have a party. And, after the hordes had left the party and the empties had been put in the recycling, Maxime had an excuse to go out and buy more wine.