The enthusiasm of the media and politicians should also be tempered somewhat in regard to the real economic significance of crowdfunding, particularly in the cultural field, when we look at the revenues of the sector as a whole (Picard 2018) or compare them to the cumulative totals of existing public funding channels. The figures given here are only indicative, due to the heterogeneity of the criteria used by diferent European countries and debates about the use of statistics in the cultural domain (Benhamou and Chantepie 2016: 8–18). We may hypothesize that, in certain regards, cultural platforms still ofer terrain for experimentation, with a view to expanding and establishing them in other economic sectors—the aim being to ideologically prepare the ground for this propagation, and to minimize the risk involved by encouraging optimal participation among lenders and backers. It is within this optic that many banks have built partnerships with platforms, or created their own, going beyond mere transaction management—for example, committing themselves to participate if funds are successfully raised. La Banque Postale, longstanding partner of KissKissBankBank (and its lending and investment spinofs), finally acquired the company in June 2017. Contrary to the media and academic discourse that presents crowdfunding as an alternative, we see an increasing integration of these platforms into the existing financial sector. Furthermore, these apparatuses are presented as tools which complement existing sources of credit, something that is reassuring to potential investors and particularly to banking institutions.4
- The Importance of Education
Like many other web entrepreneurs, the managers of crowdfunding platforms take on the appearance of educators—evangelists, even—whose mission is to spread their new ideas—their Good News—within communities or social groups that lag behind or are still hostile to this new ‘way of the world’. Accordingly, certain platforms have opened training centres, such as Proartischool, the Kickstarter Campus and the Indiegogo Education Centre. The statements of the founders of South African platforms Thundafund and Backabuddy give eloquent examples of their belief in this pedagogical mission: one speaks of ‘the spirit of ubuntu’ and the way in which their platform will be able to ‘build on’ vernacular systems of collective financing in Africa ‘by using a specific tone [...] and using the same jargon, that of community-based care’. His colleague confirms this:
Yeah, I think again it’s education around the tone of the projects. The projects that tend to do well are those that have some sort of a positive outcome. So of course, because its causes and individuals there’s usually crisis-based projects […]. So we’ve got to help them change the tone […] and often this is a psychology thing, that’s my training. To help them and actually take over the wording, campaigning, this is what you do, because otherwise people have quite a sort of negative response. So a lot of the work is really involved in that, in managing all of the campaign creators […]. It really, really takes quite a lot of hand holding.
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization