Last week we talked about crowdfunding, and some of you shared the experience of participating in a crowdfunding process, mostly in start-up business. Here I am sharing with you a not too recent issue, but an important event happening this spring in Taiwan.
Maybe none of you have seen this before. The background of this story is that more than 500,000 Taiwanese demonstrated on the Ketagalan Boulevard (in front of the president palace). Students repeated the demand for “legislation before review”, but the government didn’t respond to this at all. CNN also reports this, therefore if you are interested in the detail, you can click into the link: http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1114340
In order to let not only people in Taiwan, but draw the attention of the world. The leading team decide to let the news go into public. They set up a crowdfunding project to let the issue be put on New York Times. Guess how long it takes to raise 6330000NTD (around 208300 US Dollars)? Only 3 hours! This also broke the fastest record of reaching a funding goal in Asia. After that, they made an international version webpage http://4am.tw/ within a day. As a result, the campaign and article was printed on the International version of New York Times for two days.
Back to the crowdfunding theme, they choose to use an external crowdfunding website in Taiwan, FlyingV to make things go easier. I think that what makes this project work is they successfully convey the concept to people. That is, we wish we could be heard. Despite the fact that there weren’t really any payback, like product or discount you sometimes get by supporting startups, we are still willing to devote our money to it. What we get is more like a sense of identity and feeling of being involved.
In my opinion, making people understand your concept is a key element for crowdfunding. Only when people know and agree on what you are doing are they willing to pay contribute to your project, especially for public issues.
