It has been almost two years since I blogged about the kickstart of Kickstarter (read the original post here).
There’s no question that this previously little and now big dot-com has had a serious impact on how money gets raised for all sorts of different types of projects.  (And hey, it was one of the inspirations for The People of Godspell.)

But just how much money has been raised?

Kickstarter released a whole bunch of stats on their blog this week, announcing to the world not only that they’ve received over 100 million bucks in pledges over their short life span, but also breaking the pledges down by categories.

So how did theater do?  Here are the results:

There have been 931 successfully funded Kickstarter projects which were backed by a total of 50,144 people.  (And I bet a lot of those 50,144 could be converted into commercial theater investors if we could talk to them).

These 50+ thousand folks have put up $4,051,962.62.  And counting.

Pretty good, right?  (You can see the results of the other categories here – including film, which took in 8x the amount that we did.)  What these stats say is that, raising money is hard, Kickstarter has made it easier.

And you know what’s really cool?  Without Kickstarter, many of these projects would never have happened, and that money wouldn’t have gone back into our economy.  Yep,  Kickstarter has had an economic impact.  And it is sizeable.

So should you Kickstart your show?  Well, sure, if it feels right for you, then do it.

But the challenge is that because so many Kickstarters are out there now, you have to be even more creative in attracting donors . . . especially ones that you don’t know (they have a lot of serial funders on Kickstarter, including one guy, who pledged money to more than 700 projects).

But you can do it.

Thanks for the help in helping so many artists and producers, Kickstarter.  Hopefully your success will kick Congress in the butt to allow a just-as-easy for-profit crowd-funding soon enough.

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