A New Way of Funding Dance in Philadelphia
Aug 23rd, 2011 | By Steven Weisz | Category: The Creative Economy
The Micro Fund is a new project from PhiladelphiaDANCE.org that has been established as a means of creating a source for online donations to help fund dance projects in the region. This site is designed to offer members of the Philadelphia Dance Community the tools to effectively build a campaign and raise money.
A hybrid of the crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, The Dance Micro Fund is a simple and easy to use platform, that gives dance companies, organizations, curators and dancers in the Philadelphia region a way to “fan fund” a variety of dance projects by using a tiered support model. If you’re not familiar with this model, it lets people setup a project with a funding goal and a deadline. A series of tiers for how people can fund the project is created, with promises to receive certain perks in response to those tiers. Social networking tools and widgets built in to the site are used to spread the word by the project creator.
For many dancers and organizations, greater flexibility in such a model was needed. It’s quite rare for a project to set out with a definitive, singular goal and end up specifically at that point. Projects like the artists, who create them, evolve as things begin to gain momentum. The Micro Fund allows for that fluidity. It also allows artists to keep funds raised, even if they do not meet their donation goal. This is critical for so many performers, who have used other crowdsourcing sites, only to fall just shy of their goals and then receive absolutely no monies for their efforts.
In addition, while the Dance Micro Fund does monitor which projects get posted and has a set of community guidelines, the gatekeeping is less restrictive than its counterparts in order to allow for smaller projects to also be funded alongside of more ambitious ones.
In these difficult economic times, where fewer grants are available and funding amounts have been greatly reduced, the Dance Micro Fund, allows fans/donors to make contributions in any amount, allowing for the philanthropic spirit flourish without severely stressing anyone’s budget. The concept is that small amounts from a large number of people will enable project creators to reach their goal.
It is the hope of PhiladelphiaDANCE.org that the new Micro Fund site will foster a pairing of donors with dancers, allowing for even more creativity and new works to occur throughout the Philadelphia region.
PhiladelphiaDANCE Micro Fund
http://www.philadelphiadance.org/microfund/
