Show Me The Money

Securing funding for any new endeavour is often a lengthy and exhaustive process. Simply having a great idea is not enough. Many obstacles lie in wait, from interest-heavy loans to signing over a large percentage of your prospective profits to potential investors. Fund it, Ireland’s newest crowd-funding initiative, aims to cut through all that red tape. Following in the footsteps of Kickstarter and IndieGoGo, Fund It aims to provide the financial support needed for creative arts to flourish by appealing for donations from the public.

The www.fundit.ie website lists a wide range of projects that any individual can help to fund. From music to film, food to theatre and more, the entire spectrum of the creative arts is covered. Each project is unique and has its own parameters, from the target budget to the ‘ladder system’ that offers specific rewards to would-be supporters.
Once a project is live, the creator has 40 days to hit their designated target. This “All or Nothing” method dictates that a project must reach or exceed its target – or no funding will be received. A total of 8% is deducted from the amount raised (5% goes to Fund it directly, while 3% is used to cover banking charges) – but should an artist fail to hit the target, there is no charge.
One musician attempting to take advantage of the platform is Irish singer-songwriter Nina Hynes. Now based in Berlin, she’s seeking €10,000 to record her new album. Such a relatively high budget posed initial problems.
“You need to have a very big social network to register for ten grand,” she explains, “and it looked like I wouldn’t qualify for it. But friends with bigger profiles than me offered to share the link, including The Swell Season.
“I didn’t have a figure in mind”, she adds. “I just calculated how much everything would cost and factored that in. It’s expensive to get the vinyl package done, and then there’s the choir, flights and other musicians to consider, so it all adds up.”
The vinyl package is a key component for Hynes’ Goldmine project. Having written several albums that went unrecorded, it’s important that this one is presented in the right fashion.
“I don’t buy CDs, I buy vinyl,” she says. “I figure if you’re going to create something, you should try and do it as beautifully as you can.”
The nature of crowd-funding affords some artists the opportunity to focus more effectively on the promotional aspect. Rory O’Brien of Kerry-based instrumental band Ten Past Seven freely admits that he and his bandmates are “pretty terrible when it comes to the whole social networking thing.” Technophobia aside, signing up for Fund It has given the band a huge degree of creative freedom.
“I’m in college, our drummer works and our bassist is trying to set up his own business, so time is at a premium,” he explains. “It wouldn’t really be in our interests to be a full-time band at the moment, so we’re trying to make the best of it. We want to spend time on pre-production. This allows us to use the time that we’d normally use to book and promote gigs and rehearse and travel, to making people aware of this project and put all our efforts into it.”
All in all, it sounds like a very good deal to me. Maybe they should change their name to The Fundusbank!