Don’t PledgeMe anymore – I’m giving your money back.

Why we’ve chosen to stop a crowdfunding campaign for the Hillary Clinton / Young Lover film.
 
Our crowdfunding campaign has quickly become a friendfunding one, and that just wasn’t the point.
 
Hillary Clinton / Young Lover is a funny film for the US market. Geoff and I came up with the idea because we think it could make a lot of money. Or a relative lot of money anyway, if we can keep the costs down and get very lucky. Also, we’ve never made a film, so we’re curious. It’s an easy project to get other people excited by and we’ve assembled a great team, led by director Dean Hewison. We’ve taken some great meetings, and hold high hopes – not just that it will get made, but that it will get made well. We’re gathering our budget from several sources – visionary patrons, a dedicated agency that treats us as talent worthy of development, and perhaps one or more companies that feel our project makes an investment grade business case.
 
Our PledgeMe campaign was intended to be like a pop-up store that brought us to the attention of people who didn’t know about us, and offered them something tangible to own or give away in the lead up to Christmas. We have a published book, I can do the show in people’s homes, and we came up with the idea of Cougar’s Only Night because we thought it would be naughty and fun.
 
After three weeks we’ve attracted 16 pledges. Three Young Lover Activity guides, five tickets to ‘Cougars Only’ night and eight Trembling Kisses. We know exactly who you people are. And that's the problem. You people are wonderful. You’re our friends, but you already know all about us. We can’t tell you how much we appreciate your faith and love, but we’re not learning anything new here. We simply haven’t been able to reach anyone new with this campaign, so it’s not doing what we wanted it to do.
 
If you bought a Young Lover Activity Guide and you still want one, get it touch – I’ll sell it to you at RRP plus postage – $18.
 
If you bought a ticket to Cougar Night, and you still want to be or send a loved one, get in touch – we’ve got a big season at Circa 29 Jan – 20 Feb. You can buy a normal ticket for about $35 and we’ll make sure each PledgeMe Cougar gets her fake rose and her glass of rosé – for free, on us.
 
If you bought a Trembling Kiss, thank you, but we really can’t be bothered approximating that. It was a reward designed for people who wanted to be part of this, but didn’t have the money or inclination to go higher than $10 – and as I’ve said, this campaign wasn’t about help. It was about selling items of value to a wide audience of micro-payers and using the profits to invest in the film.
 
Lastly, if you’d like to be involved in the film, you can get in touch. We’re shooting at Avalon in January, and you can be a well-fed extra if you like, and if you have other skills you’d like to offer, we may be able to include you.
 
So the lesson here is that Fonterra didn’t get rich because bobby calves had a taste for milk. In this metaphor you’re our bobby calves. We want to separate you from our teats so we can sell our milk to emerging markets. We want to free you up to do whatever bobby calves do when they’ve taken leave from their milking mums. If you know what that is, tell us. We don't read the news and we know nothing about farming.
 
Love,
 
Arthur, Geoff & Dean.