Sponsume: Crowdfunding

How did Sponsume first come into being?

I first became interested in the works of Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus - often regarded as the “godfather” of microfinance - while studying. Yunus showed that communities do not necessarily need banks and traditional investors to fund innovative ideas. Aggregating many small stakes supporting and benefiting one big idea often does the trick. 

At the time my interest in microfinance was merely academic. It is only after the financial crisis a few years later that I realised something had to be done to enable people to directly fund what they were truly interested in. 

The usual intermediaries - banks, public bodies, music labels - were failing genuine innovators and creators. The web, on the other hand, offered a great, easy and cost-effective way of putting innovators in contact with their potential backers. That’s how Sponsume started. 

What have been your most successful creative projects on the site?

We recently helped fund a very innovative group of young musicians and artists called Go Opera. Their project Go Traviata will bring the best bits of classic Italian Operas to the warehouses of east London this summer. Go Opera raised £6,000 through Sponsume – more than the £5,000 they were hoping for.

In a different vein, our site funded a courageous investigative documentary by freelance journalist Michael Watts, exposing the terrible human rights abuses that have been taking place in a mining village in Peru. These abuses are thought to have been committed by British Mining company Monterrico Metals. Michael’s project raised £4,360 in a couple of weeks. His project, Undermining Justice, was selected by Sheffield Doc/Fest as one of their top picks for this year.

How central do you believe crowdfunding to be in the future of fundraising/distribution/publicity?

It’s still early days for crowdfunding, but Sponsume shows that the concept works. As more and more people become aware of the huge potential of crowdfunding, the amounts raised will increase and the scope of crowdfunding will expand to other areas too.

Has Sponsume changed since its inception – if so, how?

The website keeps changing. From the start, we wanted to let the public shape the platform and turn it into what it wanted to be, with the kind of projects people wanted to see. And this is pretty much what happened. We started by crowdfunding documentary projects, and since then the platform expanded to many other areas (most notably theatre, music, publishing, fine arts and photography).

The emphasis was initially very much the funding part of crowdfunding, but it became clear after a few campaigns that there was much more to crowdfunding than just funding.

Successful project creators were the first ones to realise that a key part of their campaign was their ability to build their own public, create a direct relationship with their supporters and develop a network of advocates defending their project on the web and in the real world.

For more information, visit Sponsume and read our crowdfunding guide. 

Apply for our Sky Arts Ignition: Futures Fund and win £30,000 for your creative idea.