Discussion of Donator Incentives

[allykat.livejournal.com]

Hello. My name is Ally and I recently got my crowdfunded project (freewee) underway a little over a week ago. Things have been going fairly smoothly, but I find myself wondering how to make my model friendly to donator incentives.

To start with, a brief summary of how I'm doing things:

It's an LJ community which anyone can join but only I may post. Instead of running large events spanning the course of a day or several days I post offers as I have time to do them. For instance, in the evening when I've finished my homework, I might feel like winding down and posting a free sketch. On the weekend I might have more time and post five free sketches. It operates on a first come first serve basis.

Donations are accepted and those I receive go into my microlending project. I make my Kiva.org profile available to the community so they can see when I make new loans, who I make them to, etc.

The Question:

I've generated more than I thought I would at this very early juncture, which is great. However I can't come up with any real sustainable way to offer incentives to donators as I'd like to do. As a student with two jobs I feel that donations for "guaranteed art" kind of negates the purpose of this sort of "ninja style" art offerings. My current model fits into my life nicely and I don't want to jeopardize that by accidentally getting in over my head.

The only idea I've had thus far is perhaps to hold on to old sketches and periodically post an offer to color them for donations. Maybe mail them out for donations? I don't know. It's all variations on a theme and I feel like I'm not thinking outside the box enough, so I thought I'd post here for input.

Thank you very much!

Comments

[dulcinbradbury.livejournal.com]

Keep a donor list & send out a donor perk picture once a year?

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

You could make some posts visible to everyone, and some only for donors.

One thing that seems very popular is "behind the scenes" material -- descriptions of how the creative person works, or snapshots of their workspace and works in progress. For my poetry sponsors I make an extra post that talks about my thought process, a type of poetry, the month's thematic background, etc.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

You could have a random drawing, and mail one out for free to a random donor, on some kind of periodical basis, for instance, for every dozen donations--doing it ninja-style, like this, making the period dependent on the number of sketches or number of donations seems like it might suit you better than something time based (like once every month). The rest could be offered at a set price for sale and a higher set price for sale colored, offering to color only as many as you will have time to do in the next week or so at a time, and only when you have the time (or need the cash).