Boosted Stories: Period 7

As part of this cohort, multidisciplinary creative Geoffery Matautia crowdfunded for Period 7. Their project successfully raised $10,000 towards a planned arts holiday programme due to launch in February 2023. We had a chat to Geoffrey to hear about their experience as part of Boosted X Moana and get their tips and tricks for a successful campaign.

Who are you, and what was the name of your Boosted Project?
My name is Geoffery Matautia and my project was 'Period 7'.

Outside of Period 7, how would you describe yourself as a creative?
I am a Photographer. I have a Bachelors in Graphic Design, but photography is mostly my practice.

If you could summarise your Boosted Crowdfunding project ‘Period 7’, what would it be.
We are crowdfunding to increase youth participation in the arts and introduce a holiday programme in 2023.

If you could give 3 keys to a successful project on Boosted, what would they be?
Easy!

1. Be one hundred and ten percent invested in your crowdfunding campaign
2. Know your crowdfunding audience
3. Make supporting your campaign accessible to everyone

What do you think made your Boosted X Moana campaign so successful?

What really worked for us was having a strong affinity for the Kaupapa and what we were doing already. Having the experience of doing the grass roots thing, with no funding and no idea of how it would turn out but the passion was the thing that pushed it really. I think on our part, being driven to make something happen was what pieced it all together. Especially in our first call, having a clear idea of what we wanted to achieve and the outcomes – we had already done little workshops here and there across the year, but then having something to work towards in a bigger sense, like a culmination of all the little things we had done, helped the vision. I think that pre-work influenced a lot of the decisions that we wanted the output to be and who we wanted it for.

I think that it was really important that we had a clear Idea of what we wanted to do from the day that we sent that email so that we didn't have to figure it out in the period between when we started it and when we launched. I think you can have a cool idea but I think there needs to be some kind of definite output, what the deliverable is, target audience, who you are serving. It's important to have a clear idea and deliverables from the start because it’s hard to figure it out in those 3 or 4 weeks between applying and launching.

How did you decide crowdfunding was right for the project?

The first two Boosted X Moana campaigns I missed out because I didn’t think the idea was fleshed out enough when I came to Boosted. One thing that drew me to Boosted was the accessibility aspect of the Boosted X Moana funding. It was still funding - but it wasn’t grant funding. You didn’t need to be charitable trust, or have all these accolades or have to have a track record of funding in the past.

We knew that we had community backing before the crowdfunding, so it was almost a trial run to see if that community support would translate to monetary support as well. It worked, and I think that is a testament to the work we have done with the community.

How did you find your first experience crowdfunding?

I think it was a positive for us because it gave us some accountability to the things we were doing. It also we ensured that we had deliverables outside of the people who were organising it, meaning wasn’t a transactional donation where it only served us. It was important that the deliverables were giving back to the community.

For myself it was a positive experience seeing the names on the side bar, and seeing people we didn’t expect to donate, donate. And now we have the emails of the people who shared that with us, so the experience was a real relationship builder, and it kind of aligned with the community aspects of our project. The CNZ match fund was cool as it was a great incentive. Some people felt like they didn’t donate enough, but every donation matters and it was good to be able to say it would all be matched up until the $5K mark.

One of the great things about Boosted is that everyone funding is an artist, so they can get creative with how they campaign. How did you incorporated your own artistic style into your boosted campaign?

It was pretty lax, we only did about 3 posts on Period 7 before we hit our target so that was pretty cool. I guess just accessing that dropbox of Boosted visual assets was really easy and brought a sense of legitimacy to our crowdfunding, having the Boosted, Arts Foundation and Creative New Zealand logos. I guess the way we utilised them was ensuring people had other options to give, rather than just money, to our campaign.

I think a big push for us was when we made graphics for people to share on their stories – and that was enough for us to bring in donations towards our target. So we just played around with the Boosted X Moana graphics and remixed bits of it – like the progress bar.

We just wanted to use the graphics that were given to us in a way that was easy content, so people didn’t have to watch a long video to get a sense of what it was, so we did like mostly static content or short GIFs/videos.

I think that was a key part of it. I don’t think videos work best all the time as people won't watch it unless they want to. I think it was important too for the people that wanted to support us but didn’t have the monetary means to donate, sharing the project was their donation, and that could spread it further.