You want to publish a book, take a trip around the world, organise a large common cycling campaign or to fulfil your ambitions in a theatrical project? But where to take money from? Thousands of brilliant ideas failed to materialise because their authors had no money to start with. But now the times of helplessness are over – all you need is to convince Poland to cough up funds for your project.
Collecting social funds for any purpose has always required specific talents and skills, and many persons did not have the courage and nerve to “beggar” and raise funds from door to door. But when the practice of collecting finance from the society was coined as “crowdfunding”, it started to work! Moreover, it has become fashionable.
It’s not like putting money on the church plate – you know what it’s for
Dreamers advertise their projects on various crowdfunding sites – the most popular of them are the Polish version of Kickstarter – Wspieram.to and PolakPotrafi. In both of these platforms, you can find dozens of ideas that are waiting to be fulfilled, as well as many projects which managed to raise sufficient funds.
Rules are similar – each application goes through the sieve already at the beginning, because it must really deserve to be published; later, it is also verified by visitors of the website, who support the given proposal in the form of a deed – a bank transfer. Fundraisers will accept any amount of transfer, because even the smallest ones can make up huge sums.
Projects do not hang sadly for months; each announcement has a counter with information about the number of days remaining till the end of the campaign, the amount of already collected funds and the level of completion expressed in per cent. Percentages accumulate most quickly when they are near one hundred – apparently, as in real life, success has many fathers, whereas failure is an orphan.
You can contribute to success, too
Each of us can become a founder and change not only the life of the author of the idea for which funds are raised, but also the lives of all of us. A spectacular example of this is the success of the Polish ice skater Zbigniew Bródka, who could take part in the Sochi Winter Olympics also thanks to a campaign at polakpotrafi.pl, which gave millions of Poles the possibility to enjoy a Polish gold medal.
“This type of social financing should develop in Poland. That would be fantastic. Public funds in Poland are very limited and still subject to bureaucratic procedures, and applications for funding are very often rejected either for formal reasons or because of the insufficient number of points in the substantive evaluation part. Apart from that, not everyone can campaign for funds from grants and donations – filling an application is a difficult process, so an idea may be rejected not because of its inherent defectiveness.”
“In the case of social financing, the project will be evaluated by people, not by clerks,” says Karol Pęcherz from the Tymoteusz Karpowicz Foundation, which runs the Tajne Komplety publishing house and the Wroclaw bookshop bearing the same name.
The Foundation has recently announced: "No kidding anymore – since the cash hasn’t turned up, we’re coming to get it” and started to collect money for the publication of a new volume of poetry by Piotr Janicki. On the PolakPotrafi website, his future book is advertised as an "example of energetic, witty and, very importantly, humorous combination of post-modernistic tools with well-grounded poetic conventions and parameters of the pre-modernistic poem, which is rare in Polish poetry."
Close to completion
“We haven’t received any subsidy from the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage for the book by Piotr Janicki; to make matters worse, not more than four applications for book publications can be made to the ministry during one year, which is a severe restriction. Costs of poetry volumes are recouped very rarely, so publishing houses don’t want to risk their own funds without additional support. In the case of crowdfunding, people who contribute their money can be sure that the book will be delivered to them and the economic risk becomes suspended. Thus, the product gains a recipient and the part of distribution-related problems is eliminated. Apart from that, such a campaign promotes the title of the book itself. Fundraising has a huge potential, and I’m convinced that many small publishing houses dealing with independent niche fields of literature in Poland will make use of such social financing,” says Karol Pęcherz.
"Wyrazy uznania" (Words of Appreciation) by Piotr Janicki are very close to raising the sufficient amount of funds. If more money is collected (which sometimes also happens, as payments may be contributed till the displayed deadline), they will be donated for works of other authors that Tajne Komplety intend to publish."
(to be continued)
Barbara Chabior
