dustycloud/posts/mediagoblin-campaign-behind-the-scenes.html

title: On the MediaGoblin fundraising campaign part 2: behind the scenes
date: 2013-01-27 17:00
author: Christine Lemmer-Webber
slug: mediagoblin-campaign-behind-the-scenes
---
<div class="outline-text-2" id="text-1">

</div><p>
The last year has had a lot of things happen to it in my life.  I took
on a lot of new responsibilities at my old job at Creative Commons,
<a href="http://mediagoblin.org">MediaGoblin</a> development ran in full swing, we kicked off
<a href="http://lpc.opengameart.org/">Liberated Pixel Cup</a>, I left my job at Creative Commons, we left DeKalb and
moved to Madison, Morgan started her PhD program... but the largest,
most overwhelmingly huge thing that happened in my life this year was
the <a href="http://mediagoblin.org/pages/campaign.html">MediaGoblin campaign</a>.
</p>
<p>
I've never done anything that felt so huge, so life changing, that
used so many of my skills and all of my energy, that felt so draining
and yet felt so gratifying all at once.
</p>
<p>
The campaign was a <a href="http://mediagoblin.org/news/we-did-it.html">huge success</a>, and I've wanted to write about it for
some time.  But even after the campaign ended, it didn't really end;
I've still been busy wrapping it up.  And it's also something that
felt so huge that I have a hard time putting it all down.  So this
will be my attempt.  There will be no tl;dr... knowing of the success
of the campaign is the best tl;dr you will get, so if that's what you
care about, you can stop reading now (you probably already read that
anyway).  If you wanted to know way, way more about behind the scenes
than you might have ever wanted to, here we go.
</p>




<div id="outline-container-2" class="outline-2">
<h2 id="sec-2">Running the campaign</h2>
<div class="outline-text-2" id="text-2">


</div>

<div id="outline-container-2-1" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="sec-2-1">Pre-pre-campaign</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-2-1">


</div></div></div><p>
The first thing that needed to happen for the MediaGoblin campaign to
happen was that I needed to <a href="http://dustycloud.org/blog/leaving-cc-to-work-on-mediagoblin">quit my job</a>.  There's a bit more to it
than sending in a notice saying I was quitting; I knew that I thought
MediaGoblin was my most important work and that I wanted to focus on
it, but how?  I was looking to see if there were some jobs that might
allow me to contribute to free software in some way for most of the
week but then allow me one or two days (preferably two) to focus on
MediaGoblin work.  There were some possibilities, but in the end I
decided that I would not really get as much MediaGoblin work as I
would like done in that manner, and the jobs that were willing to let
me do that were (understandably) somewhat cautious in the amount of
time they could promise me.  At that time I was feeling flustered
that I wasn't giving MediaGoblin enough time, and that every time I
stepped back, even though we had a lot of contributors, contributions
were falling off and the community would go very silent.  I wanted to
be as active as possible, and so I decided I wanted to try to do it
fulltime.
</p>
<p>
Of course, I also had to talk to Morgan; this was a decision that
would affect both of us, and she was starting her program at the
university and that was probably going to be expensive (more expensive
than we anticipated even; it turned out funding was not available this
last semester so we paid for it out of pocket).  However, we had been
saving for a possible life change like this.  Morgan agreed: we had
enough money at hand, I seemed to have some contracting opportunities
if I needed to fall back on them, we had some backup savings, and if I
could find a way to cover enough for us to live on for the next year,
I should do it.  And there was a cost of not doing this: I was at a
strange position in my life where I could actually pursue my life
dreams and possibly make them happen.  What would happen if I didn't
do so?
</p>
<p>
And so I quit my job.  I turned in my notice at work, agreed to work
part time for a few months and then as a contractor afterwards.
</p>
<p>
Morgan and I left our apartment in DeKalb.  There were two weeks
between our old apartment and our new apartment.  We put our things in
storage, and went on a trip: first to Boston for a week, then to New
York.
</p>
<p>
In Boston Morgan and I stayed at the house of friend and MediaGoblin
co-conspirator <a href="http://eximiousproductions.com/">Deb Nicholson</a>.  Morgan took the time to visit museums
and explore Boston; it was her first trip ever there.  Meanwhile, I
visited with free-softwareish friends and talked about
free-software-ish things.  I also spent a lot of time crashing the FSF
office and doing MediaGoblin work from there.  Deb's partner asked me
when I was going to stop working and start vacationing and have a good
time.  I didn't know what he meant... I couldn't have been having a
better time.
</p>
<p>
The most important day of that trip was when Deb, Will Kahn-Greene
(another MediaGoblin co-conspirator) and I met at the FSF offices to
plan out the campaign.  We talked a bit and laid out some general
structure to how the campaign would work.  Then it was time to answer
one of the big questions: were we going to do the campaign through the
FSF or through KickStarter?  (John Sullivan already expressed interest
in us doing it through the FSF if we were interested in doing so.) We
left for a coffee shop to discuss it and finish outlining the
structure of the campaign.  Well, if you read my previous blogpost,
you already know the results: <a href="http://dustycloud.org/blog/mediagoblin-campaign">we went with the FSF</a>.
</p>
<p>
Of course, we still needed to agree that we were going through the
FSF.  We went back to the FSF offices, explained to John that we were
interested in going through the FSF but there were certain features we
needed during the campaign that it didn't appear the FSF had
infrastructure-wise.  We laid them out one for one, and John took
notes on a pad of paper.  "Yes, I think we can do this."
</p>
<p>
Finally, it felt like the campaign was really real.  I was excited.
</p>
<p>
Morgan and I finished up our week in Boston, said goodbye to Deb and
her (now-husband) Ernie for being such awesome hosts, and left for a
week where I'd actually do some real vacationing (only a little bit
of coding, honest) in New York, visited with a number of friends in
the area and had a great time, and finally flew home to move our
stuff between DeKalb and Madison.
</p>
<p>
We moved into our new apartment.  I walked around Madison and fell in
love.  For a couple of days, I just straightened things out, settled
in, and mostly felt fairly relaxed, the most relaxed I had felt in a
long time.
</p>
<p>
But... time to stop relaxing.  Time to start the campaign for real.
Before the launch date, we had a mile-long list of TODO tasks, and a
very short time to get going on them.  I got to work.
</p>




<div id="outline-container-2-2" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="sec-2-2">Campaign prep</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-2-2">


</div></div><p>
There was a lot to do before the campaign even started.  We
commissioned MediaGoblin's regular artist Jef van Schendel to do a
special campaign page for the MediaGoblin site.  The FSF did work to
update their infrastructure for our requests.  Deb, Will and I
hammered out the plan for the pitch video, finalized the rewards
plans (I did quite a <a href="http://dustycloud.org/tmp/campaign_estimations.txt">few calculations</a> to make sure the rewards
wouldn't cost so much as to not make the campaign worth it), and then
came the really huge task: the pitch video itself.  Work started in
late August.  The plan was that this would all go live on September
1st.  That gave us less than a month and a half to wrap it up and get
it going.
</p>
<p>
Here is the exact outline of tasks that we planned out:
</p>

<p class="verse">
Aug 23-25:<br />
<ul>
  <li>Timeline nailed down</li>
  <li>Chris's local reference script pieced together</li>
  <li>Agree on amount to pay schendje</li>
  <li>Talk with schendje about pay and timeline</li>
</ul>
Week of Aug 26:<br />
<ul>
  <li>Work with the FSF to find out everything about what the theming is</li>
  <li>Storyboard finished (mid-week)</li>
  <li>Animation tests done</li>
  <li>Ideally, animatic done</li>
  <li>Chris Webber should find out and get to Deb (&amp; Carl) what the aspect ratios / formats best are</li>
  <li>Coordinate any work for audio and video recording with other people</li>
  <li>Deb and Chris work out draft phrasing and page layoutish content</li>
</ul>
Week of Sep 2:<br />
<ul>
  <li>final storyboard signed off on (start of week)</li>
  <li>Reward decisions researched</li>
  <li>As much non-"face recording" work as can be done for the video as</li>
  <li>Deb and I should have videos of ourselves recorded</li>
  <li>Deb should get video of herself recorded to me</li>
  <li>Voiceovers done or mostly so</li>
  <li>Animations done</li>
  <li>Background music, if using, should be looked for</li>
</ul>
Week of Sep 16:<br />
<ul>
  <li>Writing for pitch page done</li>
  <li>FSF should have things working</li>
  <li>Writing for fundraising page done</li>
  <li>Theming should be done</li>
  <li>Donation progress bar should be working</li>
  <li>Video mostly edited</li>
  <li>Talking to reporters?  (or is this next week?)</li>
</ul>
Week of Sep 23:<br />
<ul>
  <li>Final video edits</li>
  <li>Video transcoded and put in place</li>
  <li>Final tests and etc</li>
</ul>
</p>


<p>
This was a lot to do in not a lot of time (my <a href="http://orgmode.org/">org-mode</a> tree for the
"Crowdfunding campaign" task is 3300 lines of text long, though that
includes post-campaign tasks also, and for the most part I did not
take breaks over this month and a half of work), and one thing I knew
from seeing the success and failure of other campaigns was that things
had to look good.  And more important than anything else, the campaign
video pitch had to be stellar.  We could be cynical about this: we are
catering to a certain amount of flashy visuals and shallowness.  I
remember watching the <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ouya/ouya-a-new-kind-of-video-game-console">Ouya campaign</a> and thinking "they haven't put any
useful substance in this video" and thus feeling very suspicious of it
(I guess it looks like they're making <a href="http://mashable.com/2013/01/03/ouya-unboxed/">real stuff</a> so maybe I should
stop being so wary).  But what really made that campaign raise so much
money?  Was it proof that they had the architectural ability to
produce a console that was really useful?  I really didn't think that
video had much substance in it; it was mostly flashiness.  But it also
was the right kind of flashiness for the audience it was going for,
and it raised the money it needed to raise.
</p>
<p>
Looks aren't everything though either, and I didn't want to make
something vaporous.  Will pointed to
<a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own">Joey Hess's git-annex assistant campaign video</a>
which is kind of awesomely the opposite of the Ouya video: it explains
clearly what it wants to do but doesn't look flashy and shiny at all.
(It probably helps that everyone knows who the heck Joey Hess is.)
And there are also some nicer examples that fall in the middle... <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1331941187/the-tube-open-movie">Tube</a>
is by people I trust and made a kick-ass video that was visually
appealing, felt like it matched the film they were producing, and also
explained what they were doing clearly.  That's the kind of video I
was more interested in making.
</p>
<p>
But I'm not a film-maker, and it was hard to know if this was
something I could really do.  A few years ago I read an interesting
book titled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Animating-Blender-Creating-Animations-Finish/dp/0240810791">Animating With Blender</a> which I thought was more useful
for its instructions on how to organize a film than how to actually
use Blender itself.  It really illuminated how to make a film from
start to finish for me.
</p>
<p>
So the approach we took was very structured, and I took it in steps:
</p>
<ul>
<li>I wrote an outline of the script I imagined.  At this stage, it was
   harder to get feedback I discovered, not really enough info to
   convey the script I had in mind.
</li>
<li>I turned it into an <a href="http://dustycloud.org/misc/pitch_script.txt">actual script</a> with spoken lines and textual
   descriptions of what would be appearing on the screen shot for
   shot.  This was a lot easier to get feedback on; Deb, Will and I
   talked about it, but I especially had a lot of back and forth
   emails with Deb while we ironed out exactly what the lines would
   be.
</li>
<li>With a clear script, I then produced a <a href="http://dustycloud.org/tmp/mediagoblin_animatic.webm">story reel with test audio</a>
   (which I mistakenly called an animatic... it isn't.)  Many of the
   things shown in here were just images that I thought were "close
   enough" to conveying the thing at the moment which I had around.
   There were also the node animations; I spent some time in this
   period carefully deciding what the aesthetics of those two short
   animated scenes would be.
</li>
<li>I searched around to find some appropriate music; I tried a bunch
   of pieces including some folksy acoustic ones and jokingly showed
   Will one with <a href="http://opengameart.org/content/grassy-world-overture-8bitorchestral">a bit of overly-epic chiptune music</a> that I liked.
   Will actually said that this was the right call and I should go
   with it, saying something along the lines of "It <i>should</i> be epic
   and over the top!  This isn't Prairie Home Companion, we aren't
   sitting around eating corn cobs.  This is the fight for the future
   of the internet!"  I went with that one after all.
</li>
<li>I worked on the render tests of <a href="http://dustycloud.org/tmp/nodetest2.webm">the nodes</a> and the <a href="http://dustycloud.org/tmp/police_scan.webm">police scanner</a>.
   Until I got these tests done, I was still afraid that the
   animations were something I wouldn't be able to pull off.
</li>
<li>Deb and I started doing voice and video recordings.  This was a bit
   tough, and in retrospect we should have used some time together to
   visit a professional's house and get said recordings.  As it was,
   we both recorded separately on crappy microphones and not ideal
   camera equipment.  I spent a ton of time cleaning up audio in
   audacity, re-recording stuff myself, and pestering Deb with
   requests of things to re-record.  (I am sure I was annoying about
   this, not to mention that she was in the middle of planning her
   wedding!  Thanks for being patient, Deb.)  I think more than
   anything, I underestimated how important it was to get this part
   down right, and I spent a lot of time being afraid that our crappy
   setups would ruin the video and everyone would dismiss it and not
   donate it because they could hear audio crackle.  (I was probably
   more afraid of this than was rational.)
</li>
<li>I wrote some python scripts to be able to allow me to create the
   animated node graph quickly with adjustments.
</li>
<li>I did the actual animation of the node graph things.  There were
   some hiccups, my police graph rig was hacky, but I have to say,
   this was the most fun thing for me for the entire campaign.
</li>
<li>I made a ton of screenshots of MediaGoblin.
</li>
<li>I made a number of video recordings of me doing certain small
   things like scrolling through <a href="http://identi.ca">identi.ca</a> or starting up a
   MediaGoblin process.  I did more takes of these than is probably
   rational.
</li>
<li>I asked Joar Wandborg to make videos of himself eating and upload them to
   MediaGoblin.  If you re-watch the video you'll know what part I
   mean.
</li>
<li>I knocked out the drawings that appear in the video.
</li>
<li>I abused my friendship with my friend Bassam Kurdali and asked him
   for more Blender tips than is fair or reasonable.
</li>
<li>I did the video editing of the whole shebang in Blender's video
   editor.  I might have had more anxiety about the audio quality
   part, but I had more actual frustration over this than anything
   else.  It wasn't the actual placing the timing or strips of
   things... it was putting videos on the sequence editor and
   battling encoding issues for <i>literally days on end</i>.
</li>
<li>I cut up the audio that we were using and put it in place and made
   the credits.
</li>
<li>And of course, I did the final render.  My computer smoldered for
   a good 9 hours, and the campaign video was complete.
</li>
</ul>


<p>
When you work on something like that for that long, it's hard to
not mostly just focus on all the mistakes you made.  But honestly, I
am damned proud of that campaign video.  I think it sent all the
right messages clearly, I think it looks awesome, and I think it was
the right length.  I feel good about it.
</p>
<p>
There was quite a bit more to do also and we ended up being a bit
farther behind than I expected by a week and a half.  Still, we got
all that done in only a little over a month and a half.
</p>
<p>
Finally, everything was ready: the video, the campaign page text, the
rewards decisions, the little icons that went with the rewards (done
by my friend Alex Camelio), the FSF donations page... it was time to
launch.
</p>




<div id="outline-container-2-3" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="sec-2-3">The campaign begins</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-2-3">


</div></div><p>
<a href="http://mediagoblin.org/news/crowdfunding-campaign-launches.html">We launched!</a>
</p>
<p>
The campaign launch was exciting.  We put out a blogpost, the FSF put
out notices to their own campaign, a lot of people spread the message
on various channels, and money started to come in.  At this point I
was relieved that things had finally set off; I thought I might have
a chance to finally relax in comparison to all the pre-campaign work
I had done.
</p>
<p>
Well, I was very wrong there. :)
</p>
<p>
Before I get into what happened, Will put together an
<a href="http://bluesock.org/~willg/cgi-bin/campaign.cgi">analytics script</a>.  It's interesting to look at:
</p>
<p>
<img src="http://dustycloud.org/misc/mediagoblin_campaign_graph.png" alt="http://dustycloud.org/misc/mediagoblin_campaign_graph.png" />
</p>
<p>
Initially things went easily: the people who were most likely to
donate jumped onto donate.  I remember going out to lunch with a
MediaGoblin donor who turned out to be from Madison; over the course
of lunch, the campaign went up $600.  But it didn't stay easy.
</p>
<p>
What I discovered is what anyone who's had to do fundraising already
knows: it's a real slog.  You have to keep up momentum, and for a
large part, that means getting out messaging every day.  We had a lot
of advantages: Deb knows a lot of people in the tech media, we had the
FSF as a connection, we had a solid video and good branding, we had an
awesome feature (3d media support!) land mid-campaign, and so on.
</p>
<p>
The details are kind of boring and I'm not going to go into them, but
what I learned the hard way is two things:
</p><ul>
<li>There's a point where fundraising slows down.  You can see that on
   the graph already.
</li>
<li>If you step away from messaging, things basically grind to a halt.
</li>
<li>It's really hard to keep messaging interesting for a whole month,
   though.
</li>
</ul>


<p>
There was a week where I <a href="http://mediagoblin.org/news/fsws-2012-wrap-up.html">went to the Federated Social Web Summit</a> and
also flew in to help CC with interviews for a position it was hiring
for.  I thought it was really important to go, and it turned out to be
a useful thing to blog about after.  But during that week, money
basically stopped coming in altogether because I also dropped off of
messaging.  It probably would have slowed anyway, but it was hard to
not be gripped by anxiety by everything just totally grinding to a
halt fundraising wise.  There's a certain part during fundraising
where your feeling of self worth is proportional to how fast the
fundraising level is climbing, so in times like that, it can be hard.
</p>
<p>
Luckily, one major thing happened for us: the FSF helped secure a
<a href="http://mediagoblin.org/news/10k-campaign-matching.html">10k matching grant</a>.  (You might see a huge spike on the graph; that's
the 10k grant coming in.)  As important as the 10k grant itself was,
when things were slow, it gave us an extra thing to rally around.  I'm
very grateful to the FSF that they helped us line this up; I don't
even know where I'd begin to start such a thing myself.
</p>
<p>
Anyway, a ton of anxiety later, the campaign did wrap up.  We shot for
60k and it was clear we weren't going to make it.  But we also set the
campaign a bit higher than we needed it to be.  I told Deb and Will
that "if we could just make 40k, I'd feel like it was a success".  As
the time came closer I wrote John saying that I was considering doing
something crazy like lowering our final goal to 40k, since I was
afraid nobody would donate at the end if it didn't look like we'd get
close to our real goal (maybe they'd think it was Kickstarter-style
and would think "well, they won't make it anyway").  John advised me
that the end of these things tend to be tough but sit tight.  So I
did.
</p>
<p>
We made 43k and I felt pretty awesome about it.  We declared the
campaign a <a href="http://mediagoblin.org/news/we-did-it.html">huge success</a>, and meant it.
</p>




<div id="outline-container-2-4" class="outline-3">
<h3 id="sec-2-4">Post-campaign: rewards and a new routine</h3>
<div class="outline-text-3" id="text-2-4">


</div></div><p>
The campaign is over, but that doesn't mean the work is over.  There's
been about a month of work after the end of the campaign spent working
on trying to finish the rewards of donors to the campaign.  I've
actually enjoyed it; one thing about the campaign that I really like
is that it's allowed me to mix in excuses to make good use of my
artwork.  (You may have noticed that the MediaGoblin project itself is
sneakily set up to make use of my favorite skills in different ways.)
But of course, the purpose of the campaign wasn't to fund rewards, it
was to fund me working on MediaGoblin for a year.  (Or, well at one
point we thought there was the possibility that maybe we'd shoot so
far over the campaign that we could pay multiple people... clearly
that didn't happen :))  Thankfully, that's almost all done.  I've
finished all the artwork and Morgan has helped a whole lot on
ordering things and vectorizing the mascot for the shirt and so on.
</p>
<p>
Last week was the first time I finally felt like I spent a full,
solid week on MediaGoblin doing code reviews, coding, and a bit of
administrative work.
</p>
<p>
It felt awesome.
</p>





<div id="outline-container-3" class="outline-2">
<h2 id="sec-3">Was it worth it?</h2>
<div class="outline-text-2" id="text-3">


</div></div><p>
I think it was worth it.  I think it's also common to think about a
campaign like this as "you set up the thing, then the money rolls in".
Well, I don't know if that was true for other campaigns.  It certainly
wasn't true for ours.  It was a lot of work.
</p>
<p>
After all the costs of the campaign are removed, the "income" from the
campaign will be a bit less than $35000 (I will be making the files
related to the finances of the campaign public).  Keep in mind also
that the campaign started in September, so since I'm promising to work
on MediaGoblin full time for all of 2013, that's not just a year,
that's nearly 1 1/3 years (so that's closer to $26000/year if it were
really a salary).  That's not a huge salary for a programmer.  It's
both significantly less than half of what I made at CC, and less than
what I made at my first time job as a datacenter monkey, and both of
those had benefits.  We're paying for our own insurance as-is.  We can
make it through 2013, but partway through the year I will also need to
figure out how to fund things going forward.
</p>
<p>
But it's also enough... not on its own, but as said, we have some
savings, and I have some contracting that I can do.  And it's actually
also pretty good; sure, we didn't meet our goal, but there are other
awesome projects like <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1331941187/the-tube-open-movie">Tube</a>, <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joeyh/git-annex-assistant-like-dropbox-but-with-your-own">git-annex-assistant</a>, and <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-photo-service-for-your-s3-or-dropbox-a">OpenPhoto</a>, and
actually if you look at those you realize we did pretty damned well.
</p>
<p>
And it's afforded a rare opportunity: to do exactly what I want and
believe in for a year.  And that's something that I wouldn't have
been able to justify otherwise.
</p>
<p>
And so... I'm looking forward to this next year!
</p>

<p>
<b>Addendum:</b> One thing I forgot to mention in all this is that during
the middle of the MediaGoblin campaign, I got a lot of help from the
community itself as they stepped up to take care of the codebase when
I was in campaign-madness-mode.  (Not to mention all the community
help in promoting the campaign, or even in making MediaGoblin into
anything at all!)  So thanks, all. :)
</p>