- Project Creators
The second level consists in the work of controlling and regulating the material that project creators bring to the platform. Firstly, according to an editorial logic that may be more or less strict, this material is screened (even before being accepted on the platform) and its ‘feasibility’ is gauged—something that takes into account the project’s ‘maturity’, the size of the existing community, the proposed duration of the campaign, the amount requested, and so on. As an example, the ‘refused projects’ section of KissKissBankBank says: ‘We refuse personal projects (vacations, honeymoons, birthdays, funding of a loan…). For projects that meet the criteria of creativity, innovation, or community value, the credibility and seriousness of the project must be clearly expressed in order for it to be presented on the site.’
On the pretext of ensuring the success of a project, the platforms then assist in the normalization of work processes. From this point on, the user’s activities now function in an undiferentiated, and rarely individualized, way. In our interviews, 70% of project creators said that the platform they submitted their project to did not help them during the campaign. Where help is given, it is via ‘recommendations’ and suggestions available online. Ulule ofers project creators ‘five golden rules for a successful project’. KissKissBankBank lists a series of rules for successful fundraising called ‘the fundamentals’, and presents a ‘method’ that strongly encourages project creators to conform to the production of normalized content: straplines, videos, or sequences of ‘powerful’ images, ‘efective’ rewards, a ‘credible’ biography. According to the online guidance given by all platforms, success depends on at least three elements: networking, community building and the visibility of the project. Figures are also presented to rationalize the progress of a successful campaign: if a project reaches 30% of the total requested within the first week, it has more chance of success than otherwise. It seems to us that many of these FAQs suggest what an ‘ideal’ crowdfunding campaign looks like, and encourage users to follow this pattern. A set of normalized organizational processes emerge, often in the form of questions. Project creators are nonetheless free to ignore them. This is how we can read the following declaration by Jean-Sébastien Noël, co-founder of the Quebec platform La Ruche: ‘You’re not obliged to do it, but I’d strongly recommend it to anyone’. Our quantitative study confirms this proposition is a prerequisite for a campaign’s success. If we compare the variables representing a campaign’s success with the variable representing whether or not it followed the platform’s guidelines, it seems that the chances of success or failure are mixed. However, in the case of video production, it does seem that the rate of success is dependent on following the guideline.
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization