JAVS Spring 2014

Members of the Chiaroscuro Trio, from left to right: Elizabeth Pétillot, Aurélien Pétillot, and Yuko Kato (photo courtesy of Amber McConnell, Red Rogue Studio)

Wisconsin-Eau Claire), and launched a Kickstarter campaign.

campaign also confirmed this tendency: over a third of our backers decided to give between $25 and $100 to receive either a digital download of the whole album or a CD signed and personalized by the trio. Our thank-you gifts to our backers included a digital download of four tracks at the $15 level, invitations to our CD release parties at the $100+ level, a VIP dinner with the members of the trio at the $1,000+ level, and a private concert and a framed autographed score of one of our commis sions at the $5,000+ level. We easily distributed our digital downloads via SoundCloud and Dropbox. Sending the signed CDs proved more problematic: we had only received fifty free copies from Albany Records and had to purchase one hundred addition al copies at $5 each. In addition, since yuko doesn’t live in the same state as Elizabeth and I, we had to ship her the CDs so that she could sign them and then forward them to each of our backers, many of whom live abroad. We should have obviously better anticipated the costs of the extra CDs and the steep international shipping rates. We nonetheless still managed to deliver our rewards and invite donors to our CD release parties if we were performing in their respective cities, as promised. Our two highest donors gave at the $1,000 level. They were family members who opted to forego the VIP dinner.

We received both grants relatively easily and quickly for a total of $11,000. We still needed $10,000, which became our goal for the Kickstarter cam paign. We contacted everybody we knew, repeatedly shared our project with them, and introduced them to the works on the CD, while reminding them of our all-or-nothing deadline that stipulated that we would lose all of our pledged donations if we didn’t reach our goal in time. We also advertised as heavily and frequently as possible on social media. Our families not only contributed but collected dona tions from their circles of friends. Many friends and colleagues backed us as well. Most surprising was the support from our featured composers, from friends we hadn’t seen in years, and especially from people we only knew tangentially. A few complete strangers who were particularly excited about Rob Deemer’s Erotica song cycle and a new setting of the Jabberwocky by Graham Reynolds very unexpectedly chipped in as well. We had studied what other successful Kickstarter campaigns had done and what kind of thank-you gifts they were offering. Unsurprisingly, we noticed that most people usually gave less than $100. Our

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