One Spark, The World’s First Crowdfunding Festival, Comes To Berlin #SAtN

OOne Spark, “The World’s Crowdfunding Festival,” is a global platform to connect artists, entrepreneurs and visionaries with the resources they need to get projects off the ground.

In this Stand Above The Noise interview, Travis Todd, a co-managing director of One Spark Berlin, shed light on some of the event’s details and talked on the crowdfunding scene (in short: it’s in a healthy shape!)

One Spark Berlin will be held September 12-14. For three days, creators and startups from art, innovation, music, science & health and technology will showcase their best ideas and projects in Berlin – for a chance to connect with millions of euros in funding.

00:00:19 – Travis Todd & One Spark introduction
00:01:10 – The concept of an “offline” and real-time crowdfunding
00:01:29 – Success story of the One Spark events held in the US
00:01:55 – Is online crowdfunding scene in a good shape?
00:02:55 – Advices to creators running crowdfunding campaigns

Full transcription:

One Spark

My name is Travis Todd and I am co managing director of One Spark Berlin. One Spark is the world’s Crowdfunding Festival, the idea is to help connect creators with resources, so that includes financial resources, human resources, anything they need to succeed and the creators are in art, music, science, technology and innovation. It’s a festival that brings together these creators, brings together the public and then allows the public to distribute money to the creators based on voting, so they get to experience the creators live because they meet them, they can hear musicians perform, they get to see artists create, they get to see films and meet App developers and then they get to choose which ones they like the best and distribute money to them live in person.

The idea is to really put the people back into the Crowdfunding system, right everything was happening online, we’re going to bring off-line, we’re going to put people face to face again, allow them to contribute to projects live and in person and it’s been very successful in the US with two events. The first one had 130, 000 attendees funded over 400 different projects. The second one in April of 2014 had over 260,000 attendees and funded over 600 projects, so it’s been very successful. This is the first event in Europe, the first event in Berlin and likely to be the first the only event in Europe for years to come.

There is every reason to believe that crowdfunding is going to be around for a really long time, I mean, it’s really becoming the democratization of capital. Traditionally you go to a bank or to an investor to try and get money, but this is your chance to kind of raise money from people from a community that cares. I think, there has been far more successful examples of Crowdfunding then unsuccessful. I think there is something like 800 new Crowdfunding platforms that are supposed to come up this year, so I think you definitely going to see online Crowdfunding happening much much more in the future and specially has a kind of first step for young creator. That’s where we also come into help see the people that they are actually investing in their companies.

I think you much less likely to forget to give some reward, if you seen them in person, like in person contribute into a project. I think just a lot of the things that you have talked about at We Spin as well as just making sure you have a concise package, you know what your messaging is, you know what you are trying to get across, what’s you are trying to sell what your product is whether it’s you as a person or your brand or your actual creation makes sure that you can promote that in a clear and cohesive way. But that’s also kind of where our festival allows you to almost have a boot campaign in this, right. If you are talking to thousands of people per day, you learn pretty quickly what makes them go “Aha, I get it, I’d like to be a part of that or I’m not sure what you are talking about.” You can really hone in that message.

I would say, the best thing you can do is just really get out there and start talking to people in person. We are doing a Crowdfunding campaign and you can go there and support us, the address is beonespark.com/berlin/ and you can also sign up there, contribute to the campaign, win some cool stuff, we got like hand distilled limited edition vodka as a reward, like some cool T-shirts, early access passes to some of the VIP events and things like that and yes, so just go to beonespark.com/berlin/ and sign up and stay in contact and we are able to see you in September.