In-depth interviews: Kickstarter artists

Based on my pilot interview with Lucy Sparrow, I identified ten other Kickstarter cases that were suitable for in-depth interviews; cases I could draw from to learn about successes, challenges, and promising practices. In what follows, I outline how I identified and narrowed down successful cases to ten interviewees.

Step one: finding 656 successful cases

Following my pilot study with Lucy Sparrow and my LEGO trials, I designed a process for identifying additional cases. On Kickstarter’s website, geographical locations are filtered by one of two categories: broader and nearby locations. When I clicked on ‘broader location’ a prompt came up showing the United Kingdom and then England, Greater London, and London. Under ‘nearby location’, Kickstarter displayed Greater London, London, Edinburgh, Greater Manchester, and East Sussex.

I focused on Kickstarter cases in the United Kingdom because the main research question did not bear on regional differences and this focus enabled me to have in-person meetings with these starters. Moreover, the internet and social media effectively reduce boundaries between geographical locations, and the main actions in this research project occurred within these virtual spaces. In other words, even though the artists I collaborated

with are located in England, they have audience members worldwide and the insights they obtained through their interactions could therefore be generalised. Given these

considerations, I do not believe geographical locations should determine how artists launch their projects and develop their careers through social media and crowdfunding platforms.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that geography has no influence on artists’ careers. I believe the art market varies to a greater or lesser extent by location. Specifically, art patrons have different tastes, artists have different creative styles, and art market

ecosystems vary. However, these factors are not highly relevant to this study, because the internet allows artists to better connect with and anticipate the interests and needs of their audience base no matter where they are geographically located. This is the main reason why I did not focus on differences between geographical locations in choosing cases to study.

In terms of process, I began by sorting cases through Kickstarter’s search filter. I set criteria for this using the categories—‘art, place’—England UK, and sorted by popularity. At this stage, I found 1,705 campaigns on Kickstarter during the period 1 January, 2014 to 1 January, 2016. I then entered ‘popularity, successful cases, and >100% raised’ in the search filter to narrow my cases further. By following this process, I identified 656 successful cases and 1049 unsuccessful ones.

In terms of my operating philosophy, I was guided by the assumption that if I wanted to launch my own successful campaign I should model the success of others and learn what they did to achieve their success. A key part of my research project was, therefore, asking participants to answer relevant questions based on their successful campaigns, such as comparing the advantages and disadvantages of using Kickstarter with the traditional market. This fed into my overall objective of addressing two principal questions: (1) why do artists use crowdfunding and social media to establish their art careers? And (2) how can

they be successful in using crowdfunding/social media platforms in their art careers? Given the fact that I selected my cases according to their positive results on

Kickstarter, all of the artists were successful and could offer promising practices based on their own experiences that could be used to guide others (myself included). Hence, the founders had to be positive about the benefits of social media; otherwise, there was little chance that they would be successful on these platforms. Of course, artists can still have successful careers without social media or crowdfunding platforms. They are not the focus of this study, however.

Step two: Narrowing focus

After identifying 656 successful cases, my next step was to decide, in a principled manner, how to reduce the number to a realistic one for interviewing purposes. Broadly surveying the 656 cases, I decided to filter them based upon the funders’ working context.

Appreciating that the funders of successful campaigns are a diverse group – everything from museums, galleries, university departments, companies, full-time

professional artists, amateur artists, and private workshops to small creative groups – they also have different resources to support campaigns, and may make choices based upon individual artists’ backgrounds. Given that the purpose of this project was to find solutions for individual creators who are not supported by galleries or large organizations, those artists who are so supported were not included as my research subjects.

Step three: the ‘top 10’ successful cases

Although I decided to use individual artists as my cases, this group still numbered over 100, which far exceeded my capacity for conducting in-depth interviews. My third step, therefore, was to set up detailed categories.

To inform this process, I appreciated the fact that, in the art market, the ‘winner- takes-all’ mentality is held by art patrons and results in a significant disparity in income levels between artists (Abbing, 2002). For example, the more popular artists are, the more opportunities they have to earn a higher income than others. In the end, most artists

experience enduring poverty, or take on jobs to supplement what they earn through their art. Moreover, oftentimes galleries cooperate with established artists and deal with the business affairs for them, freeing established artists from the need to use crowdfunding and social media platforms to sustain their careers. Even though I appreciated this, I also believed that changes in the art market are inevitable, owing to social media and crowdfunding platforms, and that this may create more balance in the future.

Based on these considerations, I refined my search criteria to ‘emerging/beginning artist’ as my primary cases, and identified individuals based on their biographies presented on their Kickstarter campaign pages. This whittled the potential subject pool down to 45 artists.

My next task was to identify which artists would make the best cases. In other words, who among the 45 artists would be best positioned to answer the questions I had prepared? Digging deeper, I investigated the results of each of these artists’ projects and discovered that some of them had launched two, or even three, campaigns. It seemed safe to assume that these artists believed that crowdfunding platforms and social media could help them to develop their art careers, and that they also had strong reasons to continue using Kickstarter and social media. Based on this observation, I chose 10 artists as my cases, and I conducted my in-depth interviews with them because they had either (1) launched at least two successful campaigns, or (2) they had at least one very successful campaign, which I determined to be a campaign that generated over £5000, or exceeded their original goal by over 200%.