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Yes, make one, if… you want to make a project bigger than your current resources can support

Whether you want to make a feature film, a TV pilot, or a full web series season, it might be a good idea to start small in order to showcase your ability to deliver on a big promise by starting off showing a smaller one.

Creating some kind of visualization to showcase your final concept is a much easier persuasion check when asking for money and support. Anyone can say they have a great idea… not everyone can show off their ability to accomplish it. In this way, a proof of concept can substantially set you apart.

No, don’t make one, if… you want to submit to film festivals

A proof of concept by definition rarely has a concrete ending, which makes it hard for festivals to program it next to pieces with a beginning, middle, and end.

If you can make a standalone short film or web series that you can enter as an end unto itself for festivals and contests, that’s always going to be preferable. As I said, you can’t really submit a sizzle reel or trailer or out of context scene to rack up awards and accolades, which means your proof of concept’s ONLY purpose is to convince funders and collaborators to join the team.

Instead of focusing on a proof of concept, if festivals are what you’re after, focus on a first project instead. It may bear resemblance to your ideal longer-form piece, but if it cannot stand on its own two feet detached from the context of the longer-form project and a pitch deck or crowdfunding campaign, it’s unlikely to find many opportunities on a festival run.

Yes, make one, if… you’re making something distinct and unique in genre/tone from your existing portfolio

If you’re known for your short form comedy sketches and then you turn around and ask for support in making a drama or horror film, it might be worth doing a little bit of extra work to convince us that you can make something off-brand just as successfully as your current content.

In fact, if you’re usually a dramatic or genre filmmaker who’s looking to expand into comedy, it’s even more valuable to have some kind of proof of concept. It’s more of a leap for a more dramatic artist to make us laugh than it is for a comic artist to make us think, because in many ways laughter is the hardest thing to truly sell.

No, don’t make one, if… the eventual completed project is short form

If you’re looking to fundraise for a short form project, like a short film or a digital miniseries (fewer than 10 episode web series with episodes under 6 minutes in runtime), there’s really no point in creating a proof of concept. At that point, the proof of concept will likely be half the thing you need to make anyways, so you may as well just make the whole thing.

At the point at which your proof of concept for a short film is close to the quality of the eventual short film, it’s better to just save your favors and money for cast and crew for the final project. There’s a lower barrier to entry for asking for funds for a short-form project, and simply making an excellent, thoughtful pitch video is plenty proof of your abilities.

Need help with making a pitch video? Check out my Complete Crowdfunding Template Pack, which comes with a pitch video starter script!

Yes, make one, if… you’re making something more ambitious from your existing portfolio

This, in my opinion, is the most important reason to make some kind of proof of concept prior to the actual fundraising or pre-production of the ultimate project. Ambition is so important to making progress in your filmmaking career, and it can also be the thing that stops it in its tracks if you aren’t thoughtful about how to approach it.

If you’re a sketch comedian or have only made single-location short films, but tell me you’re crowdfunding for a SFX-heavy piece… that’s going to be an upwards battle without proof you can follow through. No combination of persuasive words and cool ideas will make you magically able to film a realistic-looking spaceship battle or produce a feature-length project after only making 4 minute shorts. You need to prove you have the chops to pull off whatever it is you’ve never done before.

The ultimate show, don’t tell; because telling is often not enough to raise the budget you need.

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Bri Castellini is an independent filmmaker, a romance author, and, regrettably, a podcaster. She’s known for the 2017 short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 165k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcasts Burn, Noticed and Breaking Out of Breaking In, covering the USA television show Burn Notice and practical filmmaking advice, respectively. She can lick her elbow (not clickbait). Full work history and ways to hire her as a consultant can be found on her website BriCastellini.com

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What is flexible funding?

There are a few different kinds of crowdfunding campaigns, with a few different kinds of funding (investments, equity, private donor, etc) but today we’re focused on the two most common campaign formats- fixed and flexible funding.

Fixed funding is where you set a goal for how much money you’d like to raise, and you have to achieve that goal (or, in some cases, a concrete percentage of that goal) if you want to keep any of the money raised. On Kickstarter and, as of Sept 2025, IndieGoGo, for instance, if you set a goal for $5,000, you must raise $5,000 or more in the timeline you agree to (usually between 30–60 days). If you raise $4,999, you keep none of it. If you raise $5,000, $5001, or $10,000, you keep all of it. On Seed&Spark, by contrast, you just need to raise 80% of that total goal (so in the case of a $5,000 campaign, you only need to actually raise $4,000) in order to keep the funds. But it’s still considered fixed if there is a mark you have to hit first before collecting your payout.

Flexible funding, by contrast, is where you set a goal, but you keep whatever you raise regardless of how much you actually get committed. On GoFundMe, for instance, you can set that same $5,000 goal, but you can keep any money pledged whether it’s $1 or $4,999.

Important clarification- most campaign platforms do not process payments until after the campaign timeline has been completed. So in the case of a fixed funding platform, if you fail to raise your goal, money isn’t returned to the supporters because it never left them. Their cards were never charged. Even on most flexible funding platforms, payment is only processed after the campaign deadline is passed.

But flexible funding sounds safer!

You’re not wrong! But also… you’re not right either. Let’s put this a different way:

In fixed funding campaigns, all the risk is on the creator, because if they fail to raise the money they say they need to make their project (or move forward with it), they don’t keep anything pledged to them.

In flexible funding campaigns, all the risk is on the supporter, because if the creator fails to raise the money they say they need to make their project (or move forward with it), the creator pockets anything pledged to them anyways, even if it’s far below what was asked for in total.

Why should other people, especially strangers, be saddled with the risk of your creative campaign? Alternatively, if you gave someone $25 towards their film campaign, and they kept it, but yours was the only money they were sent, let’s be honest. They’re not making that film. They only have $25. So why did they get to keep that $25 that would have taken multiple hours of minimum wage work in the US to earn if they can’t actually deliver on their promise?

Because that’s what crowdfunding is. It’s a promise to an audience that for the amount of money you set as your goal, you will make something. A movie, a proof of concept, a trailer, a web series, or at least the beginning of the process of making something.

What you are telling us, the audience, when you set a crowdfunding goal, is “this is the minimum amount of money I need to raise to make good on the promise of the rest of this campaign page.”

But I can make the thing with less money!

Then why is your goal set so much higher than your actual budget? No crowdfunding campaign penalizes you for raising more than your goal! Tons of campaigns raise over 100% of the goal they set, and crowdfunding platforms love that, because that means they make more money than they anticipated when helping host your campaign!

Your campaign goal should not be an arbitrary number, or what you think you can raise, or even what you hope you can raise. It should be the number, which you can back up with a spreadsheet or pie chart, that is the minimum viable budget to follow through with your promise. You can have a secret goal that’s higher, or a stretch goal with a concrete additional promise attached (“if we raise $1000 more, we can film an extra episode!” etc), but the initial goal, the one you’re primarily focused on, should be no more or less than exactly what it will take to make the thing you want to make.

If you can’t raise your minimum viable budget, you shouldn’t be keeping people’s money in the first place!

The most important thing when setting your goal is to be transparent. If your initial crowdfunding goal is simply to get production started, but won’t be enough to get through editing, tell us. Be specific in the promise you’re making, and if you can, tell us what else you need ideally, so there’s a clear reason why a person may help fund you beyond that starter goal!

Ok fine… but I’m scared

Extremely fair reaction! Crowdfunding is a lot of work, and should be treated like a complete production the same as your eventual film. You’ll need to develop it, do pre-production, and then spend a month or more of your life running the dang thing!

But you don’t have to do it alone.

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Bri Castellini is an independent filmmaker, a romance author, and, regrettably, a podcaster. She’s known for the 2017 short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 165k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcasts Burn, Noticed and Breaking Out of Breaking In, covering the USA television show Burn Notice and practical filmmaking advice, respectively. She can lick her elbow (not clickbait). Full work history and ways to hire her as a consultant can be found on her website BriCastellini.com

Since I’ve honed this answer over the past seven years as a crowdfunding expert, I figured I should enshrine it in a single post. So here you are! The three biggest crowdfunding misconceptions.

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Misconception 1: Social media is king

I’ve had many many consultations where an artist will brag about (or, if they’ve already run an unsuccessful campaign, bemoan) their social media following. Here’s the dirty secret: social media, especially in 2026, is near-useless for crowdfunding success. Between constant algorithm changes that mean even your own followers see maybe one in three posts, platforms getting bought out and their former posting and moderation tools falling apart, and the sheer volume of other things going on in everyone’s feeds, social media hasn’t been a valuable form of communication in a long time.

It’s even worse if you’re trying to fundraise.

In fact, there’s only a ~1% conversion rate for crowdfunding social media posts, whereas direct email (or text or phone call) converts between 10-20%. Conversion rate meaning that less than 1% of the audience who sees the post will actually convert into paying supporters.

I want to be so clear: when i say “direct email,” I don’t mean a mass BCC, and I don’t mean a beautifully designed newsletter. I mean a personalized, one on one email directed to a single recipient.

Is it more work? Slightly, if you don’t know how to use mail merge. Is it 200%+ more effective than posting on social media? Yes.

Email, or text or in-person, converts at a significantly higher rate because it goes directly to the source, it makes the source feel special and singled out, and it’s far harder to ignore a concrete, personalized plea for support than it is a generalized message that you scroll past alongside articles about genocides, election squabbling, advertisements for starry night lamps, and bad takes about The Oscars.

If email and direct outreach isn’t the priority in your outreach plan, you’re wasting your time, the time of your team, and the time of your potential audience.

Misconception 2: If you build it, they will come

We’ve all heard the stories of the viral campaigns, like that potato salad campaign, or projects that suddenly collect a windfall of support due to a chance discovery by a rich and powerful patron. But just like you can’t ask your social media manager to design a “viral” post, planning for passive crowdfunding success just… isn’t a thing.

Crowdfunding is no longer the shiny new thing clever creatives are using to disrupt the system. It is the system. And while getting featured on the front page of your chosen platform, or being in their newsletter, can increase the traffic to your page a bit, it rarely significantly increases your financial potential. I know, because I worked for one of these platforms for over 4 years, and I have colleagues at the others. I’m currently running a campaign that’s had the best platform conversion I’ve ever seen, and it amounts to 5% of total funds raised, and those kicked in after we hit 100% (in under two weeks, brag).

95% of traffic to crowdfunding pages comes from direct links: as in, people are clicking to your unique campaign link, rather than using the search function on your chosen platform, or finding you in recommendations.

Your crowdfunding platform can’t meaningfully promote your campaign for the same reason social media marketing is less useful than email outreach: it’s too general. Who is the audience for a crowdfunding platform’s posts? I’ll tell you right now, it’s not funders. It’s other crowdfunders.

Rich guys don’t follow Kickstarter’s newsletter waiting with bated breath to bestow millions of dollars on an unknown, scrappy artist. There are simply too many campaigns for that to be feasible or useful, and besides, at this point supporters rely on essentially the opposite strategy to consider funding campaigns: if they’re tenacious enough, and specific enough to my taste, they’ll come to me.

Which is why you need to spend an equal amount of time building your outreach plan as you do your campaign page itself, prior to launch. If you build it, they won’t come… you have to invite them. Probably via email (see how this all connects?).

Crowdfunding isn’t creative

One of the primary aspects of my crowdfunding workshops is this: successful crowdfunding is far more about audience building than it is fundraising. If you cannot convince a potential audience member, whether they’re your mom or a total stranger, that this is a project worth making, you’re dead in the water before you’ve even begun.

As we talked about above, crowdfunding is everywhere. Simply having “a good idea” is no longer enough; the campaign itself needs to be imbued with just as much care and creativity as the project it’s designed to fund. So how do you stand out?

Stop resenting crowdfunding as a process, and start embracing it.

Treat this like a creative exercise, because the ultimate goal with all this is not just to fund production, right? It’s also to get viewers for the eventual product, and the best way to do that is make the campaign itself a marketing-focused one. You’re a talented storyteller, so tell us a story, and use this crowdfunding campaign as an opportunity to get more people invested (in more ways than one!).

That means don’t just offer generic incentives, a pitch video of an 8 minute talking head, and corporate-sounding campaign updates. Make this fun, for yourself and your audience. It shouldn’t be a surprise when it stops being quick the slog, and starts picking up momentum.

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Bri Castellini is an independent filmmaker, a romance author, and, regrettably, a podcaster. She’s known for the 2017 short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 165k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcasts Burn, Noticed and Breaking Out of Breaking In, covering the USA television show Burn Notice and practical filmmaking advice, respectively. She can lick her elbow (not clickbait). Full work history and ways to hire her as a consultant can be found on her website BriCastellini.com

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Cis, White, Straight Male Artists

Male [cis, white, straight] artists aren’t called male artists: they’re called auteurs. Their professional identity is not defined by their personal identity, but their output. Their style. Their commonly covered themes.

When male [cis, white, straight] artists win an award, it’s called an award.

When it’s a queer person, a person of color, a woman, they’re usually competing within an identity-based structure. They’re a Trans Female Filmmaker who just won the Diverse Artist Award… but who’s winning Best Director? I was once a Quarter-Finalist in the category of Diverse Screenplays. Does that tell you anything about myself as an artist, or the work in consideration?

(Did you hear? I was a Quarter-Finalist for a screenplay competition! Wanna pay me to write? Get in touch!)

// Dissonance // I love that I’m queer, and that I’m a woman. Both of those things make it into my work with a regularity you’d expect, because art, even when it’s not biographical, is fucking personal. I remember reading my first books with women at the heart; I remember the first time the term asexual was truly defined for me and I realized that I wasn’t broken or wrong. Representation matters, and it mattered to me, and I love that I can make art to build on and celebrate, as well as expand beyond, what’s come before.

// Dissonance // I am a writer of sharp, and sharply funny, dialog. I explore mental health almost as frequently as I make my characters kiss, and strive to imagine worlds and relationships with optimism, no matter how dark things seem in the beginning or middle bits. And yet I rarely get a chance to say that, because my social media bios are cluttered to the last character limit with identity tags so people know I’m safe.

The Come-Out-Or-Else Industrial Pipeline

Kit Connor is an actor who, at 18, played a queer teen character in a Netflix show, based off a queer webcomic written by a [now] out and proud asexual/aromantic author. Kit’s performance was originally lauded, then approached with suspicion, until he reported he felt “forced” to come out. A new, but familiar, discourse cycle arose in mainstream and in fandom spaces:

Becky Albertalli is an author who wrote the book that became the film Love, Simon, another queer young adult sensation. In 2020, after increasing criticism towards her being a heterosexual woman writing about queer men, she came out in a Medium post as bisexual.

Isabel Fall is (was?) an anonymous sci-fi author of a satirical sci-fi short story about trans identity who, despite initial rave reviews, ultimately went back into the closet after a witch-hunt within queer digital spaces worked to accuse her of being cis and, therefore, being the wrong person to write about the subject she chose to write about. While she was in the early process of transitioning at time of publication, by the time the internet firestorm finished its work, she told reporter Emily St. James she was no longer seeking an exit from her “legal, masculine identity.” A quote from the subsequent reporting on this story has stuck with me ever since:

Scarlett Johansson is a white actress who, when criticised for portraying a character in an adaptation film that was originally Asian, famously declared that she should “be able to play any person, tree or animal.”

At least Emma Stone mostly regrets her own similar casting controversy. It’s probably best that Mickey Rooney doesn’t have to have these conversations anymore.

There is, I would hope, an obvious difference when we’re talking about immutable facts of identity (race, culture) and nuanced, potentially fluid ones (gender, sexuality). I only mention the ScarJo of it all because people see the conversation happening about artists being limited to their own experiences for creation and portrayal of new art and conflate them, and I didn’t want to leave it out entirely.

I’m not going to solve the who can and should write, portray, artistically represent who debate today. It’s not a debate, anyways. It’s an argument, and one without a concrete resolution because right versus wrong is emphatically the wrong way to think about this.

// Dissonance // Making art is as transformative as it is revealing. Oftentimes, the act of making art and telling stories gives the artist the space to learn something about themselves they didn’t previously realize. Erika Ishii, a well-known video game voice artist and tabletop player, has gone on record a number of times talking about how playing a nonbinary character prior to identifying that way themselves helped her come out and navigate it both internally and externally. I have plenty of friends who primarily made art about a gender that, at the time of creation, did not align with their presentation, and then later came out as trans, and cited making work about the gender they actually identify as helped them articulate their transition. Especially in a world where compulsory heteronormativity/cisnormativity still reigns supreme, it sometimes takes more than simply sitting in a dark room and thinking really really hard to uncover who you truly are. Art can be a bridge to identity, so how can we restrict the creation of it to people who are already self-actualized? And how can we demand, in a world where being queer or trans is still not universally safe or accepted, that in order to tell the stories of their hearts, they must make themselves potentially unsafe by performing their identity loudly enough that you can check it off your unproblematic bingo card before checking out their book at the library? You don’t know them! It’s none of your business, and by making it your business, you’re making it harder for them to live their truth and tell authentic stories! Sometimes, like in the case of Isabel Fall, you’re making it impossible!

// Dissonance // I read almost no books by men anymore, because I’m mostly reading romance these days and mostly reading romance with at least one female protagonist, and I have little to no interest in reading a woman from a man’s perspective. When I learn an author or filmmaker or artist is asexual, their work gets placed at the top of my list to check out next. And I know for certain that identifying openly and publicly as asexual has made my own work about that identity more accessible to the people I made it for.

// Dissonance // Commodifying my own identity and the identity of my target audience for my short film helped me get it to 165,000 views with fewer than 300 subscribers on the YouTube channel it was posted to.

// Dissonance // Hegemonic culture sometimes gets carried away with excitement about a problematic portrayal of an underrepresented/ marginalized identity and, oftentimes, that portrayal is done by someone not even remotely a member of that identity’s community, which can set progress back on a legislative and cultural level.

// Dissonance // Sometimes portrayals are problematic and also come from an artist who identifies like that.

// Dissonance // People contain multitudes. Having a marginalized identity does not shield you from consequence or accountability. Intersectionality exists, and assholes exist in every community.

// Dissonance // Even when creating in good faith, the world marches on, and what seems revelatory and progressive today will seem laughably outdated and problematic tomorrow.

You want a real take from me? Here’s my current take, which is, like my personal identity, subject to change at any time if I’m presented with new and compelling information:

There are no rules we can apply to everyone, so put on your big kid pants and learn some nuance so you can evaluate things on a case by case basis rather than flattening earnest philosophical discourse to such a degree that it becomes unrecognizable from extremist trolling.

If we cannot be open to people learning, unlearning, experimenting, trying new things… then we aren’t all that open, are we? We’re just a different kind of closed off.

It shouldn’t matter. It matters so much.

You cannot be what you cannot see. Before learning what asexuality was, I thought I was broken. I thought there was something wrong with me, because I lacked the vocabulary and the positive representation to describe who I was and how I might be different from those around me.

I hope I sound as sincere as I am when I say that I identify publicly as asexual and create art about asexual characters because if I make even one person feel less alone, less broken, less wrong, it will have all been worth it.

If I can help make one person feel less ashamed of who they are by being who I am open and joyfully, I think that’s worth a bit of discomfort once in a while. So far, I’m happy to say, it’s been true.

I am also deeply resentful of the fact that in order to make other people, who I don’t know and who otherwise don’t know me, feel less alone, I have to be open about a part of my life that, by all accounts, is none of anyone’s fucking business. That in any other circumstance would be reserved exclusively for my private life and my own discretion.

I shouldn’t have to bare my soul and my private, personal identity to participate successfully in capitalism, especially when my [cis, straight, white, male] peers are 100x more successful with 100x less exposure.

I am so honored when I get asked to be on panels or speak at events or join new projects as a, specifically, queer female artist.

I feel extremely contradictory about commodifying my identity. I will continue to loudly and proudly commodify and speak openly about my identity.

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Bri Castellini is an independent filmmaker, a romance author, and, regrettably, a podcaster. She’s known for the 2017 short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 165k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcasts Burn, Noticed and Breaking Out of Breaking In, covering the USA television show Burn Notice and practical filmmaking advice, respectively. She can lick her elbow (not clickbait). Full work history and ways to hire her as a consultant can be found on her website BriCastellini.com

Usually, the answer is no, which is a challenging but not insurmountable start, considering your email list (or, rather, your direct outreach opportunities- we’ll get to that in a second) is a foundational aspect of how realistic a crowdfunding campaign is.

So today, we’re gonna build your email list! Don’t worry- it’s easier than you think.

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Step 1: Why Email?

Great question! The answer is three-fold:

1. Emails are attached to the person, as opposed to social media followers, which are attached to the platform. If, hypothetically, a cretinous billionaire buys and destroys a social media platform because people were mean to him for being a cretinous billionaire, those followers are not yours to migrate elsewhere. If those followers don’t actively, purposefully, autonomously choose to move somewhere else with you, they’re lost forever.

2. Emails are direct, rather than algorithmically fed to you randomly at random times/days. They go straight to one person in their chronological, personal inbox. Direct outreach is a far more persuasive strategy when you need the person to take an action on your behalf.1

3. Emails are scalable, in that unlike any other digital form of communication, there are tools you can use to send a bunch of ’em at once in ways that still feel personal, if you set it up right, but don’t mean you’re spending 100 years copy and pasting roughly the same message. So as your audience grows, your workflow remains roughly the same, and you can spend more time doing what matters- making your work.

Hang on a hot minute…

You might have realized that two of those three reasons for “why email” largely also apply to in-person and phone/text outreach. And, naturally, in-person and out-loud outreach is the most effective at converting awareness into action. It may end up being the case that someone is on your “email” list, but the best way to contact them (or the most natural based on your relationship to them) is via phone, or by meeting them for a meal. That’s fine! The goal here is to document your network all in one place so you can make better estimates on what your crowdfunding capacity is, better segment your audience for marketing new projects to, and keep track of all the people who care about your work and want to help you make more of it. But we’re calling it an email list because mostly this will be for emails.

Before we get any further, when I’m talking about conversion rates and how to do this whole business, know I’m talking about sending 1:1 emails, not newsletters or mass BCCs. Those have a place in your outreach plan, but they are not the purview of this particular article.

Step 2: Pick a template

Subscribers to this Substack can get my email list template for free!

The important thing is that this is a template you can easily and efficiently add/update people to as you grow, and that it exists in Google Sheets because then you can use my beloved Yet Another Mail Merge (not sponsored, but my goodness, I should be. A walkthrough is available in my email template). At minimum, your list template should include:

• NAME: first and last

• EMAIL: :)

• RELATIONSHIP: I try to keep this pretty specific so I can easily “sort” my email list via relationship (since email templates to my family will differ from emails to coworkers will differ from former crowdfunding supporters you don’t know outside of their pledge).

• NOTES: Where you can add additional context- where you met this person/ what they last pledged to if you’ve crowdfunding previously. The more information you can collect about these people, the easier it is to personalize your outreach, even if you haven’t spoken for a while.

Step 3: Add Everyone [you currently know]

Look through your Facebook friends, your inbox, and your other social feeds for people to add. Check your calendar to remind yourself of film festivals and networking events you’ve attended to jog your memory — any of those business cards you collected still hanging around?

You might not reach out to all of these people for your current project- that’s ok! Remember, this is a comprehensive document, meant to be filtered and categorized. If it’s not comprehensive, it’s not useful, and the practice of adding everyone often reveals people you’d totally forgotten about who might find this right up their alley.

Don’t worry if you actually have an email on file for these people- once you know whose you need, you can do that research later, but you need a starting point.

Prompts for finding folks to add:

1. Friends & Family you’re actively in communication with

2. Former/current classmates

3. Former/current co-workers

4. Former/current artistic collaborators

5. Fellow artists in your field you’ve talked to before

6. Fellow artists in your field who you’ve exhibited with before (attended the same film festival/were in the same screening block or up for the same award, etc)

7. Organizations you’ve worked with in the past/would like to work with in the future

8. Social media followers (don’t forget LinkedIn! Though I wish we could!)

9. Members of online communities you’ve talked to more than once (subreddit or Facebook group members)

10. People who have sent you a crowdfunding email in the past (bonus points if you gave $!)

Once you have this to-do list of people’s names, if you don’t already have an email or way to conveniently contact them (OFF social media), get to work. And, yes, you might need to just straight up ask them if you can’t find their contact another way.

Sample message template:

Hey {{First Name}}! It’s {{Your Name}} from {{where you know them from}}. I’d love to keep you in the loop about some cool stuff I have coming up, like {{logline}}. Could I get your email address to add to my list? I promise not to spam you!

Step 4: Start generating new leads

I’ve spoken before about the power of surveys for quickly building email lists, but that’s far from the only way to do it! Other ideas:

• Start a production newsletter, if you’ve already got some projects out in the world and people who’re waiting for more. If you’re newer to marketing and creating your work, though, this might be something you set up so you have an email sign up link on your website or Linktree but don’t use much until you hit a certain organic audience milestone

• Start a thematic or subject-matter-related newsletter, if writing is something you can do easily and regularly but you don’t have a personal audience as of yet, or projects already out in the world. For me, prior to publishing my first romance novel, this looked like starting a romance novel recommendation/sporadic romance novel essay newsletter. I worked on that newsletter for two years before publishing my book, which meant I had a community of romance readers already listening to me talk about romance on a regular basis who trusted my taste, so when I publishing my own I already had folks I didn’t personally know jumping at the opportunity to get an ARC or be on my Beta Read team. I also read 350+ romance novels a year, so it’s not like it was hard to find regular recommendations to fuel the publication! Do you have a similar hyperfixation that would align with the work you want to make? This is an idea for you!

• Host a virtual or IRL event with an email RSVP. Similar to the above advice, try to host an event that holds appeal to your audience without the prerequisite of knowing you personally. A zombie movie hosting a “how to do zombie makeup” virtual webinar with their makeup artist around when people are planning their Halloween costumes, for instance. Or an environmental documentary hosting a panel of experts (both from and beyond their own film’s subjects) with a partnering environmental nonprofit, centering around action regular people can take if its an issue they care about. Or, even, teaming up with other filmmakers/authors making work similar to you and doing a collaborative screening/reading/event so that you’re essentially sharing your audiences with each other as a starting point. But importantly, make sure your RSVP system collects emails! This way even the people who don’t end up attending still get added to your list, because at one point they were interested, and that’s still useful information to you!

• Participate in communities your audience is already involved in. Here’s some tips on that.

• Got another idea? Leave it in the comments and I may add it to the list!

Ok, but, like, who is my audience? Friend, you know I’ve got you covered there too.

Step 5: Rinse and repeat

The more you use this system, the better it gets. As you meet new folks you hit it off with, whether at a networking event or online, get in the practice of adding them to this list and writing down anything that feels relevant to why they’re being added, particularly if it’s something that relates to a future or current project of yours. Are they also queer, and you’ve got a queer short film coming out soon? Are they a sci-fi fan, and you’ve got a space feature you’re looking to crowdfund soon? Are they a fellow lover of depraved paranormal romance and you’ve got a new book in the vein of Kresley Cole you’re prepping for publication? Write it down!

You can be cynical about this process, or you can remember that in crowdfunding and marketing, the best way to generate staying power for yourself in your chosen art form is building a community, who genuinely cares about what you’re up to, not just a list of people who you regularly hit up for cash.

The operative word is crowd, not funding.

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Bri Castellini is an independent filmmaker, a romance author, and, regrettably, a podcaster. She’s known for the 2017 short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 165k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcasts Burn, Noticed and Breaking Out of Breaking In, covering the USA television show Burn Notice and practical filmmaking advice, respectively. She can lick her elbow (not clickbait). Full work history and ways to hire her as a consultant can be found on her website BriCastellini.com

If you’re at a loss for what to put in your bag before heading out to set yourself up for success, here’s what I recommend you include!

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1. Phone charger/ external battery. You’ll be here a while, probably using your phone quite a bit to communicate with people, stave off boredom, do your job, and more. Extra insurance that you won’t be out of contact is a must.

2. Reusable water bottle. For environmental reasons, you shouldn’t be using reusable water bottles if you can help it, but for health reasons, you should be staying hydrated. A reusable water bottle also ensures you won’t mix up your life liquid with someone else’s. Think of the cooties!

3. Travel tissues. Maybe I’m extra sensitive to this one because I have famously bad allergies, but I’ve never in my life regretted having a pack or two of tissues on hand. For me, or for someone I’m with. Maybe you need to clean up a small spill, maybe there’s dust from the location getting aggravated from all the crew stomping around, maybe someone needs a quick fix for smeared makeup. No matter what, you’re the hero if you’re the one with easily accessible tissues.

4. Painkillers. Similar to tissues, being the person with Tylenol or Ibuprofen when someone needs relief will make you friends, influence people, and ensure no one on set forgets your preparedness. Also, filmmaking is hard and stressful! Long hours, hot days, heavy equipment! Bring painkillers, better safe than sorry! But don’t keep them in your car, they’ll melt.

5. Bandages. Better yet: a travel first aid kit! Accidents happen, and they happen more frequently on set with the aforementioned long hours, hot days, and heavy equipment.

6. Deodorant. Long hours. Hot days. Enough said (I hope).

7. Chapstick. In case you’re away from your reusable water bottle too long.

8. Script copy/ shot list/ notes. Maybe you’re a tablet-user, in which case, good luck with keeping it charged. I’m analog all the way when it comes to on-set documentation, because it’s easier to notate, I’m not paranoid about breaking a piece of paper, and I can stuff them in my pockets or purse easily. Also, usually I’ve got an extra copy or two in case anyone else forgets theirs, and it’s easier to hand off some stapled paper than a full device.

9. Pens (several extras). You always, always need a pen. So does everyone else. Be the hero!

10. Extra memory card. Better to be prepared for overshooting than have to wrap early without making your day. Why not pack a couple extra batteries while we’re here?

11. Granola bar/ pocket snack. You can’t always rely on craft services or getting a break to eat them, and you need to keep your energy and strength up.

12. Gum (or breath mints). No one likes stinky breath, but also, the number of times I’ve been on set when an actor needs to be close (even if not kissing) another actor where someone hasn’t asked for a mint is zero. Again, this is an item that’s more about you being a hero to your team than necesarilly needing it yourself. Film is about who you know, right? Be the person people know as a hero, it will only help you move forward in your career.

13. Headphones. Sometimes, you need a break. Sometimes, you need to make a hands-free call. Sometimes, your sound person’s headphones break and they need a quick solution. I never leave the house without headphones regardless of if I’m headed to set or not, so maybe this is another one of those “just me” items, but I’ve never been mad to have them on hand.

Bri Castellini is an independent filmmaker, a romance author, and, regrettably, a podcaster. She’s known for the 2017 short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 165k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcasts Burn, Noticed and Breaking Out of Breaking In, covering the USA television show Burn Notice and practical filmmaking advice, respectively. She can lick her elbow (not clickbait). Full work history and ways to hire her as a consultant can be found on her website BriCastellini.com

Platform isn’t everything, but it’s a lot, so here we are. Let’s choose one that’s right for you.

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Fees

Almost no early crowdfunder considers fees, which I know because I’ve fielded quite a few customer complaints at various times when they realized their final payout looked a little different from what their main campaign page showed to supporters. But it’s a reality of the space: fundraising platforms aren’t doing this for free, their payment processor isn’t doing this for free, and if you want a nice-looking UI to fundraise (versus posting your Venmo username on social media), you can’t really begrudge them for it. So do your math ahead of time and don’t get taken by surprise.

Every major crowdfunding platform I’ll be talking about today uses Stripe as a payment processor in order to accept credit cards. So in addition to the platform fees of the website itself, you’re also looking at the following ones:

3% + $0.20 per pledge
Pledges under $10 have a discounted micro-pledge fee of 5% + $0.05 per pledge

No platform that I’ll mention today charges a fee for a campaign that doesn’t reach its goal, as long as you’re using a platform where you have a time-locked goal to hit. If you don’t raise your funds, no one’s credit card is charged and no fee is due. Crowdfunding campaigns do not charge credit cards at the time of pledge, they place a hold on a credit card and then charge it if the necessary conditions are met.

Kickstarter

Fee: 5% of your final raise, as long as you raise at least 100% of your stated goal. No optional tip. We’ll come back to what that means in a minute.

IndieGoGo

Fee: 5% of your final raise, as long as you raise at least 100% of your stated goal. No optional tip.

Seed&Spark

Fee: No platform fee, optional tip

GoFundMe

Fee: No platform fee, optional tip.

How do I get my money?

Kickstarter

By raising 100% or more of your crowdfunding goal (and yes, you can raise more than 100%, it would be insane to not allow you to raise more money, I don’t know why people ask this question, which they do frequently). All or nothing, baby.

IndieGoGo

As of Sept 2025, it’s all or nothing, baby. A GREAT switch! Go, IndieGoGo!

Seed&Spark

By raising at least 80% of your goal, 40% of which can be made up of what Seed&Spark refers to as loans. We’ll come back to this in the Quirks section.

GoFundMe

Keep whatever you raise, withdraw at any time, even multiple times over the course of the fundraiser. Withdrawals can take 2–5 business days.

Platform Quirks

The non-monetary unique elements that define each of these platforms from one another. This is by no means totally comprehensive, and they’re all adding new features all the time, but these are the ones I consider most notable.

Kickstarter

• Projects Only. From their website: “Kickstarter can be used to create all sorts of things: art and gadgets, events and spaces, ideas and experiences. But every project needs a plan for creating something and sharing it with the world.” Emphasis mine. Essentially… you can’t crowdfund for your rent or a medical procedure, but if you’re making something, be it a tangible product, a digital product, or an experience/event, you’re all groovy.

• Add-Ons. Essentially, the chapstick and candy display in the grocery store checkout lane; this allows for easier multi-reward selection, as well as juicy little bonus morsels for your supporters once they’re already in the checkout pipeline. For campaigns I’ve helped run, we’ve raised an average of $25 more per pledge just by using add-ons, since Kickstarter only allows you to pledge once per campaign, and therefore if you have a few reward levels that don’t get included at other support levels, this is a good way of nudging people to give a bit more for something fun. My one complaint with Add-Ons, though, is that if you’re using them to encourage pledges to existing reward tiers with a limited stock, they don’t share a stock. What I mean is that if you have a limited availability offer, like 10 signed posters, and make it both a regular reward and an add-on reward, either you have to be exceptionally vigilant about ending your add-on and solo reward as soon as the combined numbers from your add-on and full reward make up your limited offer (so 3 add-ons sold and 7 solo rewards, as an example), or you should only include unlimited rewards as add-ons.

• Custom tracking links (referral tags). This has been huge for me and my clients recently. Once your campaign is approved, but before you launch, the Promotion tab in your project build dashboard gives you the option to generate unique campaign links and label them, so that you can keep track of where people are clicking into your campaign from. This allows for a better sense of your network effect and more comprehensive conversion rate calculation, because you can make a custom link for every teammate to use in their individual outreach, or even for individual events like livestreams and launch parties so you can see the true conversion of various marketing avenues and adjust as-needed.

IndieGoGo

• Open for most crowdfunding needs. You can run a campaign on IndieGoGo for: for-profit campaigns, campaigns benefitting nonprofit organizations or nonprofit beneficiaries, campaigns for products, anything within “Community Projects”, and educational campaigns in the Tech and Innovation category. This is fairly broad, so you’re probably groovy if you want to fundraise for most things.

• Stretch goal support. With the shift to an entirely fixed funding platform (bravo!) as of September 2025, they also released a stretch goal system where you can showcase what you’re raising beyond your initial goal, to encourage people to be clear about where the money is going and help campaigns that do well early better communicate what else they need to their backers.

Seed&Spark

• Artists Only. For a long time, Seed&Spark was exclusive to filmmakers and filmmaker organizations. In early 2020, they shifted to allowing campaigns from artists and artist-support orgs of all kinds, so while it’s still fairly narrow who can crowdfund with them, it’s less narrow than it was.

• Wish List. While Seed&Spark has all the normal hallmarks of a crowdfunding campaign page— pitch video, rewards/incentives, story (the main text area)— it also has what they call their Wish List. This is how you set your fundraising goal on Seed&Spark, to encourage more transparency between the creator and the audience, but also to encourage people either pledging money to particular aspects of the budget OR to propose loans. Click the link to learn more (about loans as well). While the wish list can be used creatively, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it in the past, 90% of pledgers completely ignore this tab, which makes it fairly pointless and frustrating to use unless you have a particularly unique way to utilize it in your marketing.

• Loans. Facilitated by the Wish List, in theory, loans are proposed by supporters and approved and valued by the creator. They are in-kind offers rather than financial contributions, things like discounted or free labor, access to locations, or props/wardrobe items. The monetary value of the loan does not have to equal the entire wish list item, and it is set by the creator, and the value set by any accepted loans does affect the total funded meter- 40% of your total goal can be made up of loans, which are rarely if ever audited by the platform.

• Feedback. Though all the platforms we’re discussing today have some kind of approval process for legal reasons prior to launch, Seed&Spark is the only platform that offers actual back and forth feedback, for free, to all campaigns, that requires one of their employees manually approving your campaign for launch, only AFTER you have implemented that feedback. However, Seed&Spark has been subject to a number of layoffs in their crowdfunding specialist department (sup?), so there are fewer people than ever responding, with less ability to truly personalize their advice. Relatedly, I have a one-day-turnaround, cost-effective crowdfunding feedback package you can purchase that’s highly and extremely personalized, and not locked to a single platform’s needs.

• Emails. I add this only because I’m frequently irritated by (though I understand) Kickstarter’s pledge list. On Seed&Spark, as soon as someone makes a pledge, you get access to their email. On Kickstarter, you only get their emails once the campaign closes successfully. This is meant to be so that you can only directly communicate to people through the platform’s messaging/update system until such time as the campaign raises its funds, and I get that. I do. But it makes support [without looping in the platform] nearly impossible, because on Kickstarter all you get is their display name, which might be Sam S. And if you’ve got more Sam S’s in your community, and both claim to have donated but only one Sam S appears on your list… you can’t help the correct one ensure they’ve pledged correctly. It also makes it harder to keep track of who you’ve emailed who’ve given money, if they aren’t using their unique first and last name as their display name, so you might end up sending follow ups to people who’ve already given you money, which is not a good look, and most people don’t realize you genuinely can’t tell who they are from the scarce information provided pre-campaign-closure.

GoFundMe

• Crowdfund for basically anything. This, along with the flexible, ongoing fundraising function, is why you go to GoFundMe, because there aren’t really rules. If you need money and a way to easily display why, GoFundMe is your go-to.

• There was a CollegeHumor video about it once. This counts as a quirk. It’s a great video.

So which should I use?

My go-to recommendation these days is Kickstarter. It has the best reputation overall psychologically because it’s always been exclusively all-or-nothing, it has a functional and ever-improving website that’s easy to use and easy to communicate with for support reasons, and it’s the most familiar to pledgers (it’s near Google-level in language- “doing a Kickstarter” is almost as common as “doing a crowdfunding campaign”). Familiarity isn’t everything, but clean UI is. They also don’t try to trick your pledgers into tipping them, which is big in my book.

I categorically do not recommend GoFundMe for creative projects- everything about it works against you if you aren’t fundraising for personal or nonprofit reasons. It is, however, the backbone of the American healthcare system. Late stage capitalism is working as expected, folks!

Seed&Spark has less baggage psychologically than IndieGoGo because they were never a flexible fundraising platform. Despite their hard 80% funded line to receive your funds, there’s less risk if you don’t hit the heights you hoped because of how you can use their loans system to offset your goal a bit. I have had, personally, and been personally reached out to about, a number of technical concerns with their website, which is something else to keep in mind. I recommend Seed&Spark for college students and brand new folks who can’t afford someone like me and just need advice… but no one said you can’t get their feedback and then launch with that in mind on a different platform afterwards.

Did I miss something? Did something change since the writing of this article? Do you have an experience with one of these platforms you want to share with other fundraisers? Shoot me an email (brianna.castellini@gmail.com) and I’ll do my best to keep this post updated… at least until 2027, when I’ll write a new one ;)

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Bri Castellini is an independent filmmaker, a romance author, and, regrettably, a podcaster. She’s known for the 2017 short film Ace and Anxious (writer/director, 165k+ views on YouTube) and for her podcasts Burn, Noticed and Breaking Out of Breaking In, covering the USA television show Burn Notice and practical filmmaking advice, respectively. She can lick her elbow (not clickbait). Full work history and ways to hire her as a consultant can be found on her website BriCastellini.com