JAVS Spring 2014

The best outcome of the campaign was surprisingly not financial; it was actually that I met some really interesting and dedicated individuals through doing it, and I really have opened new doors to opportuni ties that I may not have had otherwise. The knock on effect of the successful campaign was that through the publicity from it I managed to raise the incredible sum of a further £2,400. This was for a number of reasons—some individuals didn’t feel comfortable using an Internet donation site and sent checks or cash. Two local lunchtime concert series in Brighton, upon hearing of my crowdfunding cam paign, asked me to give a concert for them and pledged a split from the concert donations toward completing the total goal of £6,000. The link to my crowdfunding page was shared over five hundred times on Facebook throughout the course of the campaign (at least forty of those were from me), but this sort of publicity would be very expensive if you tried to purchase it! Never underes timate the power of social media. What I did completely underestimate was the amount of work that this project would take, which is something that I wish I had known beforehand. you will need to be able to think outside of the box to come up with decent marketing plans for publi cizing the campaign. The staff from the crowdfund ing platforms who work with you on the project are invaluable; utilize their help as much as possible—

they have an established base of relevant and poten tially interested contacts who can certainly help with the promotion and advertising elements of crowd funding. My one piece of advice would be to share, share, and share some more on top of that. The more you talk about your campaign on the Internet, the more it will gain interest, web hits, shares, likes, retweets, and exposure. Remember that if just 6 peo ple with 400 friends each share a link on Facebook, they have potentially reached up to 2,400 people. I have now paid in full for my new viola, and every time I play it I receive compliments on the incredi bly unique sound that it makes. An added bonus to this is that every time I play it, I think of the won derful people that all helped to make my dream pos sible. That maybe is the true blessing of crowdfund ing—making dreams possible, making new connec tions, and allowing creativity to flourish on a global scale. Visit http://americanviolasociety.org/resources/scores/mul tiple-violaensemble-music/ to find an arrangement of the Wexford Carol for four violas, one of the perks from Elliot Corner’s crowdfunding campaign.

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