Wellington Gear Re-homing Crowdfunding Suggestions

Wellington
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#1

After a rather successful meeting (found here), the committee and members in attendance concluded on the what and the how of creating a more long term and permanent solution to storing our wonderful gear library.

Crowdfunding seemed to be a popular source for those wanting to contribute. What we wanted to do however was provide reward tiers for certain amounts to make it beneficial for the community (in addition to the benefit of good storage for the gear of course!)

In this thread, we’d like suggestions on what you think could be nice to offer, as well as how much you think someone would need to pledge in order to get it. Preferably, it is something you, or someone you have discussed with can offer.

In addition, if you had ideas on fundraising events, please comment too!

An example could be “You and 3 of your friends are THE hero in your own personal LARP run for a few hours by [cool GM], complete with crew!” - For $500

Wellington Gear Re-homing Meeting Minutes - 21 May
#2

Personally I like to fundraise by running games - its just that I don’t have time over the next few months, because I’m already running games (I’m helping to run a game in June. I’m helping to run a game in July. I’m running two games at Phoenix at the end of August, which will burn me for September - and that’s pretty much our fundraising window).

But, a small game might not be too much hassle. So, for crowdfunding, I could offer the premier of my latest larp, The Kyme Summit. Its 6 players, so we can work out what is a suitable fundraising price for it to run in Wellington (I can cover venue costs - its a 2 hour game, and small, so that’s not much). In case anyone is wondering, no, I can not offer this outside of Wellington - I have spent my carbon for the year.

#3

At the meeting there were 4 or 5 people offering to donate a hundred dollars to get this done and because it would be easier for them than fundraising. One of the joking suggestions was getting to write your name on the container in vivid marker. We could up that to getting your name on a nice little plaque of key supporters stuck to the door. From a quick google, it would cost us $50 - $100 (so, up to 10% of money raised by that method, assuming no-one else joined in), but it would be a nice little token.

Another option is that I could do another batch of shields, aimed at people wanting something for Saga. Assuming Saga is fine with the standard corflute, foam, and plastic bowl construction…

#4

I have kids who have gone through Kohanga Reo, primary school, intermediate and high school and I tell you the #1 rule for fundraising is this:

Attract punters from outside your community

To this end, I reckon a kids-oriented, light & fluffy, everybody wins, linear style simple fantasy battle adventure is a good idea. You select a good park/free location in which you offer a 1 hour + adventure for small groups (6-8) and then you set up a series of encounters for the kids to enjoy. Market it to local schools (within say a 10 minute drive of the location).

Book groups into 15 minute slots, give each group a couple of guides to make sure they follow the linear path and you’re done. Parents can either follow along to take photos and watch, or else drop them off, have a coffee at the local cafe and then pick the kids up afterwards.

I’ve run lots of these (e.g. as fundraisers for the Green Party), as long as the rules are simple e.g. the following types of character class:

fighter - can use shield
mage - can use magik (spell packets, buffs etc)
healer - non-combat and can heal
rogue - can us a sneak ability for subterfuge encounters

then the kids pick it up with minimal training required.

I reckon you could charge $15/kid of this - they get an adventure they’ve never had before and will rave to their parents for days about it. So you could get $1000 for processing 10 groups in the space of around 4 hours plus setup/packdown. It does take a good marketing and communications strategy, but it’s a fundraiser makes good money and everyone has fun (it is a lot of fun to battle kids :wink: )

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#5

We could turn Nik’s idea of a larp costume market into a fundraiser. I have plenty of costume bits I never use that I could donate to something like that.

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#6

I’d be quite happy for something like that - maybe we could do fabric and so forth? People have a small koha for getting in, there’s baking and warm drinks - people might be a bit iffy about “donating” costume items that were expensive, which is fair enough, but then we could have a “general” table and more specific stuff for people to sell individually.

Someone also mentioned a “season pass” to larps, which I think is quite cool.

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#7

[quote=“RobotPie, post:6, topic:21691”]
Someone also mentioned a “season pass” to larps, which I think is quite cool.[/quote]

Auckland effectively did this with its Summer Season, which charged an overall rate rather than on a per-larp basis as we do. It effectively shifts income forward, which is what we want. However, there’s sticking points. Most obviously, it requires that there are actually larps being run (and ideally advertised so people can see what they’re getting) - so we’d need GM’s to make credible commitments up front of games which will happen, months ahead of their normal timetable (we want to move revenue from after October to June or July, so we can get this done before the AGM). It creates a contingent liability in the accounts (and also morally) of “games we owe season-pass holders”, which is problematic if these games get cancelled or don’t happen, and if we sell too many of them and other things go very badly we may end up without enough revenue at the time to pay the expenses on those games as they happen (this is a very low risk however).

If we want to do it for the end of this year, we would need game commitments for October and early December (we already have The Omega Delivery for November), and maybe September as well. If we want to do it for next year, we already know we’ll have games in June and July (because Wellygeddon / ComicCon), so we’d need some rough commitments of games, but not necessarily timing. We’d also need to make sure that GM’s, many of whom don’t run as projects but happily donate their profits to NZLARPS, are on board with this.

Pricing-wise, would people expect a discount beyond the normal NZLARPS rate, or would they pay extra as a fundraising thing? If the latter, we could just sell “solidarity” tickets to games, but that doesn’t shift revenue (though really, we could do that anyway).

#8

Adding fabric/other crafting goods in makes it even more appealing. I’d be so keen for this. :smiley:

#9

I wonder if we could get cosplayers involved as well - there might be a bit of interest, since there’s a bit of crossover. Maybe book out somewhere like Brooklyn community hall (it’s not central, but there are buses and TBH if anyone wants to deal with Thistle Hall good luck to them) and charge maybe $10 a stall/table or something. Make it a general craft/nerd fair and see if we can get some free advertising as well.

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#10

I have been involved in craft market fundraisers before and main amount raised was from stall fees. Also a raffle. If we had a stall of donated goods for NZ Larp’s (plus raffle of a bunch of donated goods e.g. A shield, dice etc) and then sold stall spaces to ppl who wanted to sell their own gear?

Could also do a baked goods and tea/coffee stall?

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