$5K

My plan had been to post for every 1K we passed on our way to raising $5K on Kickstarter. So much for plans.

Anyway, we raised our money! And we did it because:

1) We have amazing friends and family who contributed and/or helped spread the word, and
2) Kickstarter works.

As a fundraising tool, Kickstarter integrates your project into a community of like-minded creators, protects the contributors by releasing funds only AFTER the goal amount has been raised on deadline, and it affords an air of legitimacy to your fundraising. I can't count the number of people who told us they were skeptical about giving to an online fundraiser UNTIL they encountered Kickstarter for the first time.

I also think our success had something to do with our circumstances: we had a completed movie so we could put clips in our video as a sort of proof-of-concept, we were asking for "only" 5K, and we set a deadline of 31 days from the establishment of the fundraising so our campaigning wouldn't drone on forever.

And I think that's the key to utilizing any online tool for independent filmmaking. You can't expect any tool to work miracles be it Kickstarter, IndieGoGo or even Facebook. You have to know HOW to use the tool properly for it to do your project any good.

That and a lot of loving, generous people working on your behalf.

Thank you to all 103 of our backers on Kickstarter (to date).