Pledge your support to 2nd Floor Rear 2015 here!
Even DIY art festivals have bills to pay. Since we don’t take in money from sales or advertising, and aren’t yet a 501c3, we have to get creative about where the money comes from. We did a little summer fundraiser with Threewalls and ten generous artists, and entry fees from accepted project proposals will cover printing, but we still have a long way to go. That’s why we’re calling on you, our crazy, wonderful collaborators, fans, and supporters to give a little to our 2015 Indiegogo campaign, and get a lot in return.
Here’s a summary of what we need and what we’re offering:
What We Need
$2,675 minimum, by January 24.
This will cover our basic operational budget. We believe that creative labor is valuable labor, and should be paid labor. While nobody’s going to get rich off this, offering our contract staff small stipends is, for us, a matter of integrity. We also need to pay for posters, festival maps, and we like to buy our volunteers the occasional pizza.
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What You Get
$1 A Subliminal Hug | Subliminal hugs are made to order per each $1 pledge. After incubating each subliminal hug for an undisclosed period of time, we carefully stuff them into tiny cannons and shoot them across the ether. Subliminal hugs can take anywhere between 30 seconds to eight business days to arrive. Expect to experience a light pressure and waves of inexplicable contentment upon receipt.
$5 Custom Tweet + FB Status Update | The festival admins are pretty good at the internet. Donate $5, and we’ll write a special Tweet/Facebook status update just for you. Example: “Jane Doe just gave us 5 bucks. Let’s cheer for Jane! *Hooray!* We don’t know Jane very well, but we picture her as the kind of person who appreciates squirrels for their tenacity, but refrains from volunteering this information in casual conversation.”
$15 Handmade Card | A handmade thank-you card, like Mom used to buy at the store, except not from a store. These cards will be gorgeously weird. We hope you like googly eyes.
$30 Warm-in-the-Winter Festival Readiness Kit | A warm-in-the-winter festival readiness kit* tucked inside a custom 2FR15 tote bag. We strongly recommend this reward, as it will contain things you will wish you had handy when the winter art hopping starts to get real.
$50 Real Art from a Real 2FR15 Artist | A limited edition artists’ thing, made by an artist affiliated with 2FR15. Once we’ve made it halfway to our fundraising goal, we’ll reveal the artist and the limited edition thing.
$100+ New BFFs | Invitation to the 2FR15 pre-festival “family dinner,” sometime in mid-late January. You’ll get to hang with the folks that make the festival tick, including this year’s artists, curators, producers and advisors. We are nice, and mostly probably don’t bite…but we do have a lot of opinions and weird ideas, and would rather talk about them than play Yahtzee. You’ve been warned. (Bonus points: For every $50 you add on to the $100, you’ll get an invite for one guest (so $150 = you and one guest, $200 = you and two guests, and so on))
Contest! Highest single donation: Become a local legend | We’ll get someone who is good at drawing to whip up a portrait of you. We’ll pair this portrait with a (tasteful) statement about how great you are (like , “This is Steve. Steve smiles and makes eye contact, but not in a creepy way.”), and send it off to our friends at Busy Beaver Button Company. They will make 100 buttons. We will distribute these during the festival. You will be famous(ish)!.
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Donating comes with one more reward: the sweet satisfaction of knowing that you contributed to the work and livelihoods of some of Chicago’s most exciting working artists. Also, did we mention that funding helps keep the festival free? For the fourth year in a row, there are no tickets to buy, no cover charge, and we want to keep it that way.
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What You Do Now
Follow this link, pledge your support, and share the campaign on your social media site of choice (and hey, there’s nothing wrong with good ol’ fashioned email). And know that we deeply, really appreciate it, and we’re stoked to bring you another great festival. You’ve earned it.
2nd Floor Rear 