Brendan Montgomery

Vancouver based crowdfunding platform Crowdfundr is running a promotional campaign for Canadian comic creators in partnership with TCAF and the Doug Wright Awards. This campaign aims to help Canadian creators fund their crowdfunding projects using their innovative platform and additional marketing form this campaign.

Creators benefit from additional marketing across multiple channels, success coaches for campaign advice, and if tabling at TCAF free promotional bookmarks for the event. Creators must register online to participate, and be running their crowdfunding campaign on the CrowdFundr platform between April 1 and May 30, 2023. Creators thinking of launching a project around that time should consider the opportunity for extra promotion. You don’t have to be attending TCAF to participate as any Canadian creator can run a campaign online, it was only the printed bookmarks for promotion that are limited to TCAF. If you are going to TCAF then come say hi as Sequential Magazine has its first booth at the convention!

In addition to this special spotlight promotional campaign, the CrowdFundr platform has benefits over the usual Kickstarter. I’ve moved our Sequential Magazine online store to the platform since they have a setting for running a store as well. So based off this experience I do highly recommend the platform for the following main reasons:

  • Multiple funding options, all or nothing or keep everything. Choices for paying their fees include asking customers to cover it (so its free for you) or tip crowdfundr for the service. Can be a typical crowdfunding or a way to take pre-orders even.
  • When you reach your goal you can collect funds right away without waiting for campaign to end to begin orders or paying contributors faster. For stores every order goes straight to you (paypal or stripe)
  • Indie publishers can easily manage multiple campaigns and contributors and use your own branding on pages. Individual creators can still utilize some of these extra professional tools.
  • When a campaign ends, the same website becomes the store to continue selling the project so people who find it later can still purchase.
  • I don’t sell a large volume of issues so using it as a store has no monthly fee which is great so creators could do all their products here in one place for free. Launch new campaigns then keep selling in a store continuously.
  • Being Canadian based there’s no currency exchange and friendly local support

For an example the recent Dishman campaign by Black Eye books was funded but is still available to order through the campaign. With the features of Crowdfundr Professional, indie publishers can brand their crowdfunding campaigns with their logo, set colours and fonts, and send branded promotional and transactional emails. With organisation-level analytics, widgets, and integrations, publishers get more effective marketing and reporting. For collaboration, Crowdfundr Professional includes the ability to invite teammates, creators, promoters, and vendors at the organisation level and to assign them different roles and tasks across all campaigns. All funds from all campaigns flow directly to the indie business. Crowdfundr never touches or holds the funds. CrowdFundr launched mid 2022 but the company behind it has been fundraising for charities since 2009 with their FundRazr.

Any and all support for Canadian comics is appreciated here at Sequential!