How to raise $16,000

While it is too early for a victory lap, I'm still really amazed at how this has all happened.

We started this fundraising project in November 2012 during Artist INC II, when Shay was a participant and I was a facilitator. Artist INC is an amazing entrepreneurial course designed for artists. The second level, Artist INC II, participants have to come up with a project, budget and a plan to implement during the eight week course. Shay put together the Lisbon project in which Shay, Jordan and myself will perform and study in Lisbon for the month of June and document the entire process.

At the end of the Artist INC II program there was a competition, where the participants pitch the idea in front of the audience. Shay was in the final three, but she didn't win the $1,500 prize. She did, however, receive her first donation of $100 at the after party and that was plenty of inspiration.

Video of Shay pitching our project

I can remember Shay telling me that she had put a budget together for all of our travel and costs for a month and it was around $15,000! This just didn't seem feasible at first. After our debut performance we introduced the project to the audience and received a sizable donation from the Seely Foundation. That's what put us over the tipping point and made us realize that this was indeed going to happen. We have also received many small donation of $25- $100 from patrons all over the country and we still get a few every week. So far, we bought our airline tickets and rented a fantastic apartment in the center of Lisbon.

Early on, we set up a tiered donation/gift level program that most people will be familiar with. It's very much like when one donates to public radio and receives a coffee mug but we give away CDs, tickets and prints. We've been able to accomplish this by utilizing a 501-C3 fiscal sponsor, Ko-Arts (Korey Ireland) so that people may receive a tax deduction for their donations. We solicited donations using email newsletters and snail mail letters on nice paper. The later being the more effective. Most addresses were taken from ticket pre-sales of our monthly fado shows around Kansas City. We also send out frequent updates and thank you letters.

We also printed business cards with QRC codes for donations

As far a crowd sourcing donations goes, I feel there's a bit of a "kickstarter fatigue" in fundraising in the local arts. I've heard it expressed that donors are tired of being burned by projects that never happen so we opted not to use the crowd funding model at this point. We feel something like kickstarter is probably a better fit for out upcoming Casa de Fado project when we return from Portugal. Kansas City needs a Fado house right?


We've also been quite fortunate to receive international exposure via PRI's “The World.” This sent our web stats through the roof. You can see below that on the day that the segment aired (May 1st) we were around 11,000 hits. The radio segment resulted in many donations coming from around the country as well as many new friends

By far the most effective device for Fado Novato is something we invented called the "anti-band meeting". I'm sure most of you know how awful business meetings can be. Whenever we met, we actually tended to socialize more than talk business. In the anti-band meeting we set up a conference call on our smart phones and open a shared google drive with a dated document outlining the topics that need to be taken care of (fundraising, travel, concerts, repertoire etc,). Each of us is assigned tasks from these topics and the ones that aren't completed are bumped up to the next week’s anti-band meeting. I've been in a lot of musical projects and this is nothing short of a miracle. We simply get things done - quickly. The meetings never go over an hour and we all do them from our homes in front of computers so no commute.

Here's an example of an anti-band meeting and our google drive directory.

It's been a mountain of work but we've all grown tremendously from this process. It doesn't seem like there's anything we can't accomplish. Although making an effective Portuguese press releases last week almost killed us.

- Beau Bledsoe