This breakdown of what we need to do and why seems exactly like what I had in mind @Sam_Martyn
My idea was (for once !) absolutely not to derail this into a complex discussion about S2O rather just find the best possible way to showcase the nature of this complex and very new feature (even beyond music in terms of spending habits it’s a very “out there” approach to apprehend), so that people find it more welcoming and simple to grasp.
I also think that once there’s a clear breakdown of S2O into clear use cases, it makes it look a lot less like “that’s all we’re about, we hold the secret formula” and a lot more like “we’ve designed this system to push these types of music consumptions patterns which we think are positive, fair and ethical, but we could do more”
Apologies for the delay in response here, but thank you for sharing your wonderful thoughts here!
I am not 100% sure what the status of membership renewal is, despite the fact that it is supposed to be annual, but yes, even just having all current members renew their annual membership would be a great starting point!
As a “reward” for donating €10+ (new annual membership dues, I believe) to our Open Collective Page, I would love to see Resonate be able to include these donors as members of the co-op, so although that’s the plan, I need to see how that could work logistically before offering this.
Finally, I agree that promoting co-op membership, supporter shares, and other “higher-margin” items (things that don’t cost the co-op much) would be some great perks/ rewards to include in this campaign. Thank you for sharing the insightful info about The New Internationalist to help me frame this better in our campaign.
With that said, although I still need to confirm with members of the @executive team that offering rewards for our campaign is allowed, please see some of my reward ideas below, and perhaps we can start conversing about this topic while I work to get the about section changes approved.
Reward Item Ideas
Special Badge & Feature in Our Community Forum
Additional Badges and Features on Our Website & In the Forum
Potential to also have different designs & types of clothing?
Listening Credit
Resonate Artist Music and/or Merch
We could ask artists to allow us to feature their work in our campaigns (maybe for a discount?), and then give them a cut of the support given to get their music/merch?
Music (Business) Consulting/Advising Services?
^ Look to Bundle Everything Above Together in Additional Rewards Packs? ^
Again, all of the above are just ideas, but looking to see what we could offer that would encourage people to donate and feel like they’re “getting their values worth,” if needed.
I love what you mention here too about finding the best possible way to showcase the nature of this complex and very new feature to make it look a lot less like “that’s all we’re about, we hold the secret formula” and a lot more like “we’ve designed this system to push these types of music consumptions patterns which we think are positive, fair and ethical, but we could do more”
100% agree there, and I’m glad we’re on the same page!
Thank you for your contributions, @Sam_Martyn and @LLK. I can’t stress enough how helpful you all have been and are being in this crucial moment; you’re getting at some core things here as it relates to this outward-facing orientation of the co-op and the need for us to articulate things to potential users.
If you need any help around copy, please just shoot me a message.
Great work Sam. I have updated your listening calculator to make it easier to enter data:
Only two things to enter:
number of active listening plays per day
choose one of 3 listening profiles
– Explorer (tends to listen to many tracks once or twice, maybe uses us with other services like bandcamp for purchase / downloads)
– Niche (finds a core niche of music they love on here and listens to it a lot)
– Both (balance of the two above… frequency distribution following the S2O theory)
I have also built in some assumptions about people building up some owned tracks in their library if they stick around for longer - free plays, deducted from the total.
Also assumptions about folks buying listening credit as in our new checkout ‘in bulk’ and getting a discount for doing so. It makes a difference for them and rewards their loyalty.
(I have obviously not included the free plays we give away at the moment, even though these are a significant percentage of our current total listening.)
@zetto.plus, thank you for the kind words, and as I start to transfer all of this work into the Open Collective page, I will definitely want you and any others to review what’s there and suggest any changes for improvement.
@Nick_M this calculator is awesome!! Love how you simplified and personified some of these sections into more listener-profile based selections. Really cool stuff here, and glad I was able to get things started for ya! I think the assumptions are fine for now, and again, I’m not too sure where we can effectively use this tool, but I do envision in the future having it embedded on the website next to, or in the place of, the artist calculator for listener sections on the site.
Definitely other things to tackle before spending any more time here, but at the very least, it can help us “paint a better picture” of potential Stream2Own costs while we promote Resonate moving forward, so thank you!
This is where I would like to add some more specific asks, along with potential rewards/exchanges for donations.
I am a bit unsure of what all of Resonate’s current offerings are, and the rules around them, but my main goal here is to showcase our current offerings (membership, support shares, t-shirt, etc.), while also adding a few “bundle” and recurring options to encourage higher/repeat donations.
As you will see, I need a bit of help here, but here are my initial suggested tiers.
€2 or more Donor - Because you care.
€5 or more Backer - Be recognized in our community forum with a special Resonate renewal supporter badge.
€10 or more Membership - Become a Resonate member for 1 year and receive co-op voting rights and other member benefits.
€35 or more Resonate T-Shirt - "Music Ecosystem” by illustrator Bridget M, one of a series made for Resonate. On a classic white tee with a limited edition black & yellow print.
€100 or more Supporter - Receive Resonate Supporter Shares that will act as an additional “I owe you” (IOU) for your donation.
€200 or more Sponsor - Receive all of the offerings available (Resonate Renewal Community Forum Badge, 1 Year Resonate Membership, Resonate T-Shirt, Supporter Shares - from remaining donation).
A few more notes: I saw the “or more” vocabulary on other crowdfunding pages during my research, but I’m not too sure how that works. I think what it means is that if, for example, someone just wanted a T-Shirt, but decided to donate €60, then they would receive their T-Shirt, and Resonate would keep what’s left over from the €60. However, I believe that if they wanted a T-Shirt and membership, they would have to donate separately to each tier to receive both. Definitely trying to balance not being confusing/non-transparent here with also being able to increase our donation amount per person, so let me know your thoughts here.
@sganesh are we able to offer membership like this? - Thinking we can somehow reach out to donors here to collect any additional info needed and then just enter it in on the back end? @Hakanto, do you know how supporter shares work, and what the vocabulary should look like here? - Thinking a similar process flow for donors here compared to new members, but not sure. @zetto.plus do you have any added expertise here that you can share when it comes to how we should showcase our tiers and the vocabulary that should be used?
Tagging the above folks just to get the conversation going, but I would love to hear from everyone if you have any thoughts here.
Alright everyone, I just wanted to provide another update on this campaign.
I know this thread is fairly long, so if you’re just tuning in, no worries! All you need to do is read this (albeit also long) post to get the latest update on everything.
A few things worth noting about the above changes:
Although I think showcasing different donation amounts as different tiers is an improvement, since we aren’t offering anything in return based on specific donations, the names are a bit superficial. I also wanted to point out that each tier is set to a “flexible frequency” so based on each donation amount, donors can select one of the 3 frequency options (one-time, monthly, yearly). The current default donation for each tier is the amount of that tier, with a monthly frequency.
In trying to offer membership, supporter shares, and other potential perks with different donation tiers, we encountered some issues since Open Collective doesn’t collect donors’ information, therefore prohibiting us from following up with donors to give them what we would be offering (membership, supporter shares, t-shirts, etc.). There may be some work-arounds here, but for now, this seems like it only lends us to keeping our current tier setup in the near term, until we can reassess and find potential work arounds/improvements in the future.
It is worth noting however that it seems like other successful Open Collective Pages also have similar issues. To separate their tiers and express their appreciation for higher donations though, other pages like Babel offer more general rewards like showcasing donor’s logos on their website/in their spaces, and/or offering more premium support options for larger donors. I am not exactly sure how they confirm this information either, but my assumption is that they just use the information that donors provide via their open collective accounts, so donors would need to be registered through Open Collective first in order for this promise to be fulfilled? I am a bit new to the Open Collective space, so if anyone knows more about Open Collective, or how some of these rewards could be fulfilled, please reply below!
The last thing I wanted to mention after doing more research on Open Collective is that it seems like the tiers that have the most donors on some of the more supported pages are the “Donation” tier - pay any amount; any frequency, and the €2($2)/month tier. Right now, our current minimum donation is €5 (flexible frequency), and we also have a “Donation” tier - pay any amount; any frequency, as previously mentioned on other pages. In keeping with my original thought at the start of this thread:
…I would like to propose that we also add a €2 (flexible frequency) tier for people to see when they come to the page. Hopefully this will encourage people to still contribute financially, even if it is just a few euros.
In addition to what I proposed above, feel free to leave your own ideas for improvement to the entire page (about section, layout, tiers, etc.) in the replies below. Although I think what is there now is “good enough”, I am looking forward to improving things as time goes on. (@richjensen, @brndnkng, @SueJ, @Hakanto, @zetto.plus, @peter, @LLK, @SolarDesalination, @thehouseorgan, and anyone else reading this who has potential opinions/improvements here).
Phew! Okay, so to summarize what’s been done here so far:
Initial Research on Crowdfunding Campaigns - DONE
Initial Draft of Resonate Crowdfunding Campaign - DONE
Draft of New About Section - DONE
Implementation of New About Section - DONE
General Improvements to the Open Collective Page (re-designing page layout, adding progress bar, updating account info, etc.) - DONE
Review of Donation Tiers and Implementation of Improvements - DONE
Next Steps:
Continually make improvements as new ideas come to the forefront.
Create a communications plan to promote the campaign to the public so we can collect donations throughout the month of February.
Finalize this plan, start promoting, and start collecting donations!!!
Overall, again, thank you to everyone who has offered time and support here, even if that’s just staying in touch with this thread, and I look forward to helping Resonate raise some much needed funds!
After last week’s fundraising meeting, in an effort to consolidate donation tiers, we ended up deciding against the €2 (flexible frequency) tier for right now as people who would like to make this contribution still have the option to do so in the default “Donation” tier.
With the consolidation of tiers, this is what our setup looks like:
Donation = Pay what you can, flexible frequency
Friend = Starts at €10/month
Backer = Starts at €25/month
Sponsor = Starts at €50 (flexible frequency)
Patron = Starts at €100 (flexible frequency)
Advocate = Starts at €500 (flexible frequency)
With this said, if anyone has any objections/improvements to these tiers, we would be happy to update things, as we will keep an eye on incoming donations and continually improve based on how the campaign is performing.
Now that we’ve finalized the tiers (for now), this campaign is currently LIVE!!
Our next step is to promote the campaign as much as we can!
Please consider donating to this campaign yourself, but even if you aren’t able to donate, we would really appreciate it if you could share our campaign with your communities and networks.
Some ways to do this include:
Posting about Resonate and our campaign on your social media accounts.
Posting or messaging in other communities, forums, networks, etc. that you are a part of to let them know about Resonate and our fundraising goals.
Sending a promotional email to your contact lists and/or mentioning us in your blog or newsletter.
Featuring our campaign on your website or other outreach platforms/channels.
Old fashioned “word-of-mouth”/text or message communication with friends and family.
If you’re looking for an idea of what to say, feel free to either repost or quote some of the things coming from Resonate’s socials and things here in the forum, or you can talk about your relationship with Resonate and why you’re passionate to see Resonate succeed!
We also have an integration with Twitter set up so that every time someone with an open collective account (who has also linked to their twitter profile in their open collective profile) donates, a tweet is sent out thanking them for the amount they donated. You can read more about this integration HERE, but if anyone has any objection to this, let me know as I can work to turn this off.
Another thing that could be helpful is if anyone wanted to create content with/for Resonate to add more credibility to what we’re doing here and deepen our communication of our goals and vision with others. Short videos, audio clips, pictures, etc. Feel free to get creative here and tag us on social media or drop it in the forum so we can help spread the word!
These are all just some ideas I had, but the main goal is to extend our reach as much as we can, so whatever you feel comfortable with doing would be much appreciated!
From Resonate’s end, I would say next steps for @communications would be:
Send out an email to everyone with a Resonate account notifying them of our open collective campaign. (@melis_tailored/@sganesh)
Reach out directly to some of our partner organizations, press, media outlets, other communities/networks, etc. for support (both financial and promotional). (@Sam_Martyn, @melis_tailored, @richjensen, @sganesh, @zetto.plus, @peter, and anyone else who has helped here before)
I thought I heard we have connections to people at Open Collective, so would anyone be able to reach out here to see what we would need to do to potentially have our page featured on their site? (@richjensen or others?)
Continue to talk about the fundraising campaign on all Resonate social media accounts with the option to use copy from the Open Collective About Page Section to encourage people to learn more and donate. (@brndnkng, @melis_tailored, @zetto.plus, and anyone else who has access to Resonate socials).
Have pinned posts on all socials referencing our funding needs and ways people can support us.
Continue to make regular posts about our fundraising efforts and why people should support Resonate.
Make a pinned post in the forum about our campaign being live now for people to share and donate to. (@Hakanto)
I will be posting updates on the open collective page to current and future donors (which will also be automatically posted on Twitter via the integration mentioned above), as well as doing some direct out reach to some of my communities & networks, and promo on my personal social accounts to get the word out, but many of you here probably have a lot better connections than I do, so feel free to reach out yourselves, or we can coordinate some additional opportunities as well.
My reasoning for tagging people above was because I have associated them with tasks like this in the past based on my knowledge of their access to Resonate accounts/relationships, but I am more than happy to take on the work here as well for these areas. I mainly only have time on the weekends to really work on Resonate, so any additional support here would be helpful, but I also don’t want to subject anyone to extra work without touching base with them first, so I’d be happy to chat more about the “game plan” here at everyone’s convenience.
Thank you again to everyone who has helped out here! I know I’ve spent some time on this project myself, but my work here doesn’t matter much in my view unless we get the results (aka funds) that we need to keep going, so let’s come together and get things moving!
Feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns you may have, and I’m really looking forward to helping Resonate grow!
As a first update on our Open Collective page for those who have already donated, does the below message sound appropriate? After this update, I will try to keep our open collective donors involved with more frequent updates as things progress. Thank you for your thoughts in advance.
–
"Hi all,
I wanted to personally thank everyone who has donated to our Open Collective page so far. The Resonate community has been working extremely hard the past few years, and your donations mean the world to us.
It is so great to see the support from others, and I know everyone at Resonate is committed to building something truly great to help the music industry and everyone that’s involved in it.
The development team has made some amazing strides the past few years that you can continue to stay in touch with in our community forum, but as we prepare to scale the Resonate ecosystem, we are going to need even more support to make this happen.
As a result, we’ve spent the past month working to update this open collective page, and now it is time for us to get the word out to others so they can donate to Resonate as well!
If you know of anyone who may be interested in supporting Resonate, please point them to this open collective page, and again, thank you to everyone who has supported Resonate in the past, and to those who continue to do so.
Also, as we begin reaching out to people these next few weeks, I was wondering if there was any way that we could maybe track which channels some of the donations are coming from?
This isn’t a must have, but for my work during the day, whenever we promote an event or something, it’s always ideal for us to have a tracking link associated with each different communication channel. I’m a bit new to this in general, but in my experience, I believe our links only track the number of people who follow a specific link and/or click on the campaign. This helps us see which channel is performing the best, where some issues may be occurring during the communication process, and it helps us improve our communication strategy for next time.
Our normal go-to for this type of tracking is by using parts of a Google UTM tracking link, but I am assuming this would be frowned upon/unable to be seen in the context of Resonate, so I was wondering if @Nick_M or anyone else has any thoughts for potential substitutes here.
Again, maybe a little bit much right now, but I just thought I would throw this out there since it would be good for Resonate to have a way to keep an eye on these types of metrics in the future so we could be more efficient with our communication. Thanks!
Apologies for being away from this thread for so long, but I felt that I never really wrapped up this Open Collective Crowdfunding Campaign, so I wanted to sort of close things out here.
First and foremost, I wanted to give a big thank you to everyone who helped out on this project. A good amount of work went into this campaign, and everyone’s attention, feedback, and support, in this thread and beyond, really helped bring this campaign to life.
Over the course of this campaign, we raised €4,044 (about $4,254) in donations, and Resonate was also able to raise over €5,243 (about $5,516) from listener memberships & supporter shares through the website. In total, that’s over €9,287 (about $9,770)! Resonate workers have been able to use this support to do some crucial behind the scenes work to set Resonate up for the next stage of building the co-op, so awesome work everyone!
If you want to learn more about the work the Resonate team was able to do with the help of this campaign, you can read the Open Collective Campaign Wrap-Up Report that’s linked below:
It was amazing to see everyone come together for this initiative to do something great, and we’re so grateful that our team was able to leverage your support to do some amazing things!
