Countdown to Tübingen

Funding for specific projects: support raising of the very near future.

It’s been a good month Stateside, considering. Currently, Shalynn and I calculate ourselves to be at 75% of our monthly support needs. That’s a good step from the 60% support we were at when we came back a month ago, and a far cry from the 40% support we were at when we left for Germany in January.

So how do we make the other 25% happen from the field?

We may be considering funding for specific projects, via Kickstarter. Say, for instance, we need to replace/improve some sound equipment at Unterwegs (two out of our three microphones are Radio Shack brand, after all). Instead of going directly into our slightly limited funds, we might create a Kickstarter project to buy the equipment through a sound project… Kickstarter helps us raise the money through patrons of the creative arts; we get our band to record some music on the new equipment; and our Kickstarter supporters at different levels get rewards, ranging from a hand-written “thank you” to an MP3 recording of us performing a song of their choosing.

If we’re clever about it, we can do these projects in such a way that our students get more involved and receive more ownership of Unterwegs. If we’re professional about it, we can get financial support from outside our network of current supporters – possibly even from people more interested in creative endeavors than in Christian ones. Kickstarter has an unusually good record of getting people to support weird projects – if we’re regular about it, we can offset part of that 25%.