New Thing #320: Contributing To A Kickstarter Campaign

Kick_StarterEvery so often, if I can, I try to contribute to the fundraising campaigns for my favorite podcasts. I paid for an app subscription to WTF a while ago and caught up on all of the episodes using it.

I plan on doing one of those texting donations to This American Life the next time one of those rolls around.

The winner of my most recent philanthropy is 99% Invisible, which is running a Kickstarter campaign to increase the number of episodes it puts out as well as its staff…as well as to provide benefits for its staff.

It was a cause I really wanted to contribute to.

I really like 99% Invisible. You should listen to it. It gets me to look at everyday things in a different way. And it's a short podcast, relatively speaking. There's no reason not to listen to it, really.

But this isn't really an advertisement for the podcast. It's about how I was able to contribute to something I really enjoy.

The deal was, if the podcast got 10,000 backers on Kickstarter (at any denomination), one of its sponsors, Mail Chimp, would kick in an extra $20,000.

I figured, I have some money in a Pay Pal account that I don't have designated for much, and I would love to give it to this cause.

So I created my Kickstarter account, popped onto the 99% Invisible page, and saw that Pay Pal was not an option. It actually all runs through Amazon.

But I still gave my money. (I'm even going to get a gift - a little notebook - thrown in, which is totally unexpected.)

I was donor number 9,028 or so - somewhere between 9,028 and 9,040, best I could tell.

I gave on Wednesday night - by Thursday night, less than 24 hours later, they had hit 10,000 backers.

I'm really glad to be a part of that.