Recommended Best Practices for NonDē Finance-Thinking

• Expand the realm of your fundraising/distribution ideas beyond the individual film to include:
  • Your long term career
  • Beyond your career into bettering the collective ecosystem
• General Rules Ted has tried to follow:
  1. Pay it forward
  2. Protect the ecosystem
  3. Do no harm
  4. Provide transparency
• Always have a bias for action — try things out and see how they work
• Momentum is one of your greatest gifts/assets that you have
• You will benefit from having strong plans, you’ll also harm yourself by delaying to get things right, so have a bias for action rather than perfection.

Generating the Audience (& Investors, Donors, etc.)

• CREATIVE GENERATION is key to generating the audience and will play into your financing strategy
  • If you have a consistent cadence of production, it gives the audience confidence and trust in you as an artist/entrepreneur
  • A consistence cadence of release helps you in your fundraising
  • The general question “What are you working on next?” is almost impossible to answer quickly enough as an individual filmmaker, but something you can meet with a coalition
    • ie. NonDē 50 Films Project!
• In this era of creating audiences — to transition them into your community/collaborators, the work you release to them and how you release it can help generate trust & confidence in you. Everything you release is adding to the overall story you’re telling.

How to Generate Trust/Confidence in Your Audience

• Remember, you’re in the culture industry
• Audiences want to see the artist, present yourself as yourself
• A newsletter is a record of who you are — this can help grow trust/confidence over time
• Everyone has a tell, if you’re being inauthentic to yourself, we know
• During distribution, the beating heart of it is the combination of two things that serve each other —
  1. Ask “How do I keep this conversation going?” after someone watches the film;
  2. Recognize/embrace the goal of growing the community at large
• During fundraising: include the goal into your financing to recognize/embrace growing community
  • When someone hears that you’re attuned to their needs and you’re trying to provide for that, that’s how you grow their investment.

The Wisdom of Slow and Long

• The wisdom of slow and long (true in financing and in distribution): when you have an opportunity to slow it down and stay engaged, it has lifted the quality of the work and increased opportunities
• Slow and long is actually conducive to life management!!
• Also more conducive to allowing for the unexpected