The Phillips Collection crowdsourcing effort, an attempt to raise $45,000 in a month to support a website abut Jacob Lawrence, has failed miserably. When the drive ended on Dec. 10, only $2,988–a mere 7 percent of the goal–had been pledged. And that took 41 supporters, for an average contribution of about $73.
All of the background is here, in my previous post on the subject.
Why would this campaign fail? I can think of several possibilities, or a combination of some of them:
–Not enough visibility for the campaign. I checked the Phillips’s Facebook page and saw just three posts about the campaign. Now, I’m guessing there were emails to supporters, perhaps a little local press, maybe some Tweets? Whatever it was, it was likely not enough.
–An over-ambitious goal. Raising $45,000 in a month from the grass roots is hard and time. Raising it for a future website, which can’t/won’t be seen for months, is harder. And there was some skepticism about the full, $125,000 cost of the website–why so much?
–An artist whose name isn’t that well known in the public. Sad, but true.
–In the visual arts, crowdfunding is less than it’s cracked up to be, most of the time. Previously, we know that the Hirshhorn failed in its attempt to crowdfund an Ai Weiwei work: it raised $555 of a $35,000 goal. The Freer-Sackler tried it for its Yoga exhibition, but few of the links then in use work now. This one does work–it shows support from 616 donors, but no total donated. This article, however, says the Freer-Sackler raised $174,000 for the show, including $70,000 from Whole Foods.
Yoga has a vast following, though, and I’ll bet the Whole Foods connection helped, too.
I’m thinking that crowdfunding is a gimmick, and one that, most of the time, requires another gimmick to make it work.
That’s the new Phillips logo above, btw. I think I like it.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Phillips CollectionÂ