Last edited 12:01 p.m., Sept. 13, 2012Converting from 35 mm film to digital systems is no small, or inexpensive, task for nonprofit art-house Moxie Cinema. With the theater anticipating its supply of movies such as “The Artist” or “Midnight in Paris” to be delivered exclusively on digital hard drives by early 2013, Moxie Executive Director Mike Stevens is utilizing a new crowdsourcing website to help make a conversion to digital systems a reality.
Stevens is anticipating the switch to two digital projection systems would cost around $160,000.
“I got a call from our film buyer, and he said, ‘Mike, you have to start getting very serious very quickly,” Stevens said, noting when he learned about the fundraising website,
CauseMomentum.org, he jumped right on board.
Louise Knauer, senior vice president of communications and marketing for Community Foundation of the Ozarks, said CFO launched
CauseMomentum.org on Aug. 10 as a fundraising platform for the more than 400 nonprofit members it serves.
“There are national sites out there – KickStarter, DonorChoose, IndieGoGo – but they are for-profit sites, for the most part,” Knauer said. “Our goal is to be an anchor for our region, and we thought it was a long-term value-added option to have a local platform where money can be generated locally, stay in our communities, and we could offer it at the lowest possible cost for the partners.”
As of Sept. 6, the Moxie’s Digital or Death campaign had raised $7,800 toward its $10,000 goal to help pay for incidentals tied to the digital conversion – what Stevens considers a first step.
Theaters nationwide have been converting to digital systems steadily since 2005 when the six largest studios in Hollywood worked together to release digital specification standards through a joint venture called Digital Cinema Initiatives.
Michael Karagosian, president of Calabasas, Calif.-based digital consultancy MKPE, said the U.S. reached a tipping point in digital conversion in August 2011 when half of theater owners had converted to digital projectors. Noting costs can run up to $100,000 per screen, Karagosian predicts a 75 percent digital conversion rate by the end of the year.
“It’s only getting more expensive to make these prints as fewer people are making them,” said Stevens, at the Moxie. “We’re becoming a boutique operation instead of the norm.”
Stevens said he has been weighing a variety of fundraising options to generate the money to pay for the switch, and he thought it would be a good ida to get a jump on the efforts through CFO’s new site.
At recent meetings and through newsletters, CFO has let its nonprofit partners – such as the Moxie, Ozark Greenways and Children’s Smile Center – know about the website, which is currently in alpha phase.
The website features seven projects seeking funding, and Knauer said the organizations that expressed the most interest were selected.
“We wanted a nice cross-section of our regional partners,” she said, noting a beta launch is planned in January. “After the first of the year, any eligible nonprofit would be able to participate.”
Costs for participating nonprofits include credit card transaction fees – which Knauer said donors can choose to pay – and a 1 percent administrative fee. Knauer said CFO would approve most any project a member organization wanted to establish, but personnel salary increases, for example, would not be allowed.
Marlin, a division of advertising group Marlin Network, developed and operates the CauseMomentum site and worked with Springfield software design firm Mostly Serious to create responsive apps for CFO’s member agencies as they work to raise money.
Of the site’s first seven projects, donor activity has ranged widely.
With 16 days remaining before the Sept. 21 deadline, the Nixa Education Foundation’s Virtual Book Drive reached 107 percent of its $500 goal, but The Arc of the Ozarks Let Your Senses Roll campaign had only raised 2 percent of its $11,000 goal.
Knauer said CFO and the Marlin team are still making modifications to the site, and she expects the organization will announce a formal launch around the first of the year.
Whitney Keith, community outreach coordinator for the Fordland Clinic, a nonprofit community health center in Webster County, said she hasn’t been disheartened by a lack of donations received through the clinic’s campaign on the startup site.
Through Sept. 6, the Dental Kits for Kids project – which intends to provide dental supplies to 626 students in the Fordland school district – raised $30, or 3 percent of its $856 goal.
If a project does not reach its financial goal by the campaign deadline, CFO can deliver pledges to the organization if the donor checks the “donate regardless of goal being reached” checkbox at the time of the donation, according to Knauer.
Otherwise, the pledge will be placed in the donor’s account and the balance would be available to pledge to another project, she said.
Keith at the Fordland Clinic said a campaign flop wouldn’t discourage the organization from using the website in the future.
“Right now, we have a lot of asks going on, so if (CFO) opens it back up in January once all the kinks are worked out, we’d really be interested in doing another project because that is our slow time of the year,” Keith said, pointing to the recent Price Cutter Charity Championship and the Masquerade Ball benefit scheduled Oct. 27 as contributing to its busy season in collecting donations.
While crowdsourcing sites such as CFO’s offer a new alternative for nonprofits, not everyone is committed to the idea.
John Toner, director of the County and Ambler Theaters in suburban Philadelphia and member of an informal association of art-house theaters that includes the Moxie, said he did not use a crowdsourcing site to raise the $310,000 toward his theater’s digital convergence. Crowder said the nonprofit theater preferred to directly educate its members and theater attendees for a couple of months as it began to ask for donations last year.
Now, he’s recommending fellow theater owners such as Stevens keep in mind their current efforts because funding the next generation of digital equipment may only be a few years away. Toner said he’d love to get 10 years out of the new equipment the theater is installing, but he doesn’t think that’s likely.
“The fear is it would be more like five to seven years,” Toner said.[[In-content Ad]]
