Our 10-Day Countdown is done, and our album is released, but at one week out I’m not done with the love letters just yet. Today is for the Brighter Light Campaign backers, who made the album possible through their support, enthuasiam, and.
The backstory: Back in December of 2018 we launched a crowdfunding campaign on Pledge Music to help us finish mixing, mastering, and producing our album. We were overwhelmed by the response: within the first 2 weeks, we were 75% to our goal. Then, with 3 weeks and only 7% left to reach our goal, PledgeMusic announced they were in deep financial trouble, and suspended all campaigns and payments. While this was incredibly frustrating, we were actually one of the lucky ones: because our campaign never reached its goal, no one was actually charged, giving us the option of taking our business–and hopefully our backers–elsewhere.
The reboot: So we threw our backs in to it, drew on the expertise and support of friends and colleagues, and developed our own campaign store and matching website right here, powered by MusicSpace, a locally-sourced platform for artist websites, content, and commerce, developed by our good friends at Redefined. Huge shoutout here (though he’ll probably kill me for mentioning him) to Paul Armstrong–the man does so much for Boston music from behind the scenes and he helped me through building a new gorgeous new website, porting over my old info, and setting me up with a campaign store. Moreover–he left me with the keys to the site and the know-how to maintain and grow it on my own. I announced the new campaign publicly and then reached out to every backer individually with my story and links to their original item on my new store.
Here’s the amazing part: I had no idea if people would follow us from Pledge to my own site. It’s a big ask to get people to contribute once, not to mention twice with news stories swirling around about the demise of crowdfunding. However, the response from my awesome community of friends and original backers was immediate, incredibly generous, and overwhelmingly supportive. Not did people back us again, they contributed even more the second time around. They shared the campaign with their own communities, along with our sob story. In less than 10 days our campaign was fully funded again, and we went on to nearly double the original amount.
I can’t thank you all enough for this. In addition to making the album possible, you’ve confirmed my faith in this amazing community of musicians and music-lovers, friends and fans, and music family. Thank you.