Neil and I spent summer 2012 in the Spanish Mediterranean photographing the Ibiza wall lizard for a book. We funded that project on a crowd-sourced fundraising platform called Kickstarter.com. Here’s how Kickstarter.com works: you propose a project and a minimum budget needed to complete the project. People check out your proposal on the Kickstarter website and can donate any amount to funding your project. If those donations add up to more than your minimum budget, you’re funded. If not, no one who pledged their support has to pay anything.
It’s hard to convince people that they should give you money to spend a summer in an island paradise. From the start, Neil and I knew that raising the money to fund our expedition to Spain would be tough. Incredibly, 290 generous individuals supported our project and helped us raise the $20,000 we needed to fund our expedition and, eventually, to print our book.
The success of our project depended on hundreds of small donations and a few big ones. Every donation counted, but a few big ones were especially helpful. One person, William Burdette, was particularly generous, donating $1000 to two people he had never met. For those who donated to our project, you know that at every different level of monetary contribution, backers receive different incentives or “rewards” for their pledge. For our biggest donors, we promised to send them personalized thank-you videos from the field.
This video is dedicated to Bill Burdette. Thank you Bill, for contributing to the creation of the first-ever book about the Ibiza wall lizard and for helping us have the experience of a lifetime:
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