It may not be the end of the tax year quite yet but many freelances have just submitted their tax returns for HMRC to calculate tax owed before the 31 October cut off date. With this in mind, FEU Training will be rolling out two, one-day workshops Money Matters in Manchester on 17 November and on 1 December in London. This month's Hot Topic is finance. Yes, money, money, money. We all need to make it, save it and get it to work for us. After all, if we don't who will?
Following on from last month's Social Media October, we thought it would be helpful to point all you creatives to the growing number of people using crowdfunding platforms to finance creative projects. Whether you want to put on a play, make a film, record an album or exhibit some work, there are now some UK-based platforms. I recently wrote a feature about this from which I have taken a few snippets.
“We really accept all kinds of creative projects and try to be as inclusive as possible” says Sponsume founder Gregory Vincent. “That’s kind of the idea of crowdfunding; helping to support projects that are slightly out of the mainstream opinion find a niche that may be able to support them. It’s very important to the arts.” Projects are “lightly vetted” once they have been submitted to make sure they are “sound” while ”the real vetting is done by the public, which I’ve found to be very efficient”, says Vincent.
The first crowdfunding platforms were established a couple of years ago in the US with sites such as Kickstarter and Indigogo. In the last six months, a number of crowdfunding platforms with a creative and arts focus have sprung up in the UK and Europe including Sponsume, which was one of the first websites to go online in the UK last August, wefund and wedidthis. While Sponsume caters for creative and entrepreneurial projects, wefund considers all creative projects and wedidthis, which launched early this year, focuses solely on the arts.