Kickstarter: crowd source funding having an impact in Savannah

In my Man About Town column today in Do — Man About Town: Kickstarter-amped Glitter+Gold opens at Little Beasts — I make a preliminary attempt to get a handle on the ways in which the crowd source funding website Kickstarter is transforming the world of arts funding.

I say “preliminary” because I think we’re inevitably going to see more Kickstarter projects, more projects funding through rival services like it, and other inventive ways for creative people to raise money for new ventures — whether those be art shows, independent films, student projects, new products, and so forth and so on.

Click here to see the 11 projects currently being funded here in Savannah (as of today). Scroll down to sort by other Georgia cities, including Tybee.

Click here to see the 68 Savannah-based projects that have received full funding.

I led off today’s column with Glitter+Gold, which opens on Friday, April 13th at Little Beasts at Bull and 32nd streets, but there have already been two other successfully funded projects in April.

In addition to some that I mention in my column today, I’d also note the high-quality product of campaigns like Ain’t Bad Magazine and Dare Dukes’s new record Thugs and China Dolls, among many others. More info on those successful projects below:

There were just three Savannah Kickstarter projects funded in 2010, 38 in 2011, and 27 so far in less than 4 months of 2012.

That’s a remarkable trend and it’s certainly going to have a profound — and almost certainly positive — impact on the local cultural scene.