Finding A User Narrative for Obeah Opera

Photo: Stefan Klauke

When you’re imagining a creative project that will interface with the public, finding the voice and heart of it is the first step. The second is knowing who that user is and helping them to easily interface with your project.   I knew that my senior project would be a crowdfunding campaign for the musical theatre production Obeah Opera. The production had at its heart high cultural value as a non-traditional opera sung entirely a cappella. My challenge was to transition Obeah Opera’s value proposition into the crowdfunding page and then target users who would come to the page and encourage them to make a contribution.

My journey to giving the crowdfunding campaign a voice and defining who my users were was guided by three major assignments – Personas, the Video Story, and the Final Scenario. I imagined three Personas of different ages and cultures all having one connection of loving the performing arts in Toronto. Because I get a lot of my inspiration visually, as soon as I’d found an image for the first persona 20 something Melanie, the rest took shape. Molly, my 50 something philanthropist was born out of my strategy of having a celebrity spokesperson for Obeah Opera, but my last persona had to undergo a complete overhaul.   The in-class critique session was extremely helpful in getting feedback on a close to final draft of what might be missing from my personas. When one classmate questioned “how do you get the middle-aged conservative white dude to donate to your campaign if he’s never heard of Obeah Opera before?” I knew my female powerhouse fundraiser had to become someone else. Hence my third persona became Gerald a famous creative director and visionary looking for the next great performing arts star.

Choosing a platform to tell my Video Story about Obeah Opera was a challenge. I had no idea what would work for me to effectively tell this story until I found haikudeck.com which promised to help me tell me story in a simple, beautiful and fun way. I decided to use two of my personas that were at opposite ends of the spectrum as users on the Rockethub page and create a conversation between them. Each would be informed by who they are but through their love of theatre would come together and contribute to the Rockethub crowdfunding page.   The assignment allowed my to create a new interactive narrative for Obeah Opera that would not have come to mind before. I went on to challenge myself by composing my script as a series of haiku poems. My initial thought on what constituted an interactive narrative (how to tell stories digitally and online) vs. what I ended up learning was so much more. I learned that at the center of everything there was always the user and that I had to focus on user needs and tell the story in a unique way to meet their needs.

The Final Scenario project brought everything I’d learned home into one assignment. By focusing on the worst vs. best case scenario of my project, optimization vs. ubiquity, customization vs. design, and being able to observe, explore, modify and change the project I finished at a more insightful state and had a greater understanding of the transitions, limits and how to amplify the usage of the crowdfunding page. My first discovery was exploring responsiveness vs. resolution. The Rockethub page was highly responsive but what I discovered through usability testing and this assignment was that the main video was the slowest. The act of having to click the play button made it so. So a future state was an Obeah Opera page with video that plays when you arrive on the landing page. The Rockethub page was optimized for crowdfunding on the web and highly responsive so the user could access it from any device. The only place that the page could not live was on a terminal as it defeated the immediacy of crowdfunding.

I discovered that I could manipulate the page by customization i.e., building in a share function by encouraging users to come back to the page after funding it and sharing their rewards level images with friends. And sending mp3 files with an a cappella thank you by the creator of Obeah Opera. Finally, I had the opportunity to step into the user’s shoes by observing their journey to the page from different social media platforms. I learned that the most seamless transition was through Facebook and Twitter because the user found the link in their FB or Twitter posts. The same can be said for pledging money to the page.  When the user signed in through their social media they did not need an additional password like they would when signing in using their email address. I learned that paying through PayPal meant that you have to leave the Rockethub page temporarily to go to PayPal.  Despite this, the process was seamless.

I also learned creative ways to get the user to come back to the Rockethub page by charting a series of exits at different points on the page. The Final Scenario assignment provided a deeper understanding of my user experience on Rockethub and allowed me to create a page that was more interactive despite the site’s software template.

Why You Never Have to say Goodbye to your Mentor

I’ve spent twenty hours working with my mentor over a five week period and it’s been great! When you work with a good mentor you won’t feel so alone with whatever endeavor it is they’re helping you to undertake. In my case it was mounting a crowdfunding campaign for Obeah Opera on Rockethub. It wasn’t an easy project to take on. Trying to raise $12,000 in about 8 weeks without a brand and ad buys was challenging. However, in order to launch on International Women’s Day, the team and I jumped into action and shot the main appeal video for the Rockethub page, set up the page and waited until it was approved. Then we set up the profile pictures and banners for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and a content calendar to plan posts for Facebook and Twitter.  Before we new it March 8^th was here and we launched. We didn’t have any Goods/Rewards on the page but we planned on getting them up sooner than later.

One of the first things my mentor helped me to do was to test the usability of the Rockethub page. He put his money where his mouth was and made a donation to see what that process was like. As a result of that test we discovered that there was a 30% surcharge on all donations in Canadian funds. When we contacted Rockethub they informed us as they did my mentor that it was due to the exchange rate. Despite the fact that Rockethub is a global crowdfunding site and you could choose what currency to fund the project in, transactions were conducted in USD. When the Canadian dollar was on par with the U.S. this was never an issue but now that the Canadian dollar was low, we suffered the consequences.   The benefit of that early test donation helped us alert our potential supporters to the fact that there was a surcharge. As my mentor pointed out very accurately, it was best to let potential contributors know about the surcharge as we didn’t want to have any negative blow back on the campaign.

The other helpful strategy that my mentor suggested I do as one of the project leaders on the page was to ask ten of my closest friends and colleagues to evaluate the Rockthub site and in the process of doing so actually make a contribution. This was instrumental in getting the campaign going and I owe my friends and colleagues a latte and then some, when I see them again.

My mentor helped me get the campaign off the ground and is continuing to help once the rewards are uploaded to the Rockethub page by emailing his influencers to help get the word out before the campaign is over on May 3, 2015. My mentor and I will continue our mentor/mentee relationship after the campaign is over as I have no plans of every saying goodbye to him any time soon and the feeling is mutual!

Leaning In And Taking A Chance With Obeah Opera

Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann Courtesy: Nightwood Theatre

I did it! I started a crowdfunding campaign to raise $12,000 for Obeah Opera, an amazing musical theatre production that’s slated to be performed during the Pan Am Parapan Am Games in Toronto this summer. Part of the initial challenge was trying to decide which crowdfunding platform to choose from and at that time I was contemplating between Indiegogo and Kickstarter. With some advice from fellow team members, I didn’t end up with either of those options. I went with Rockethub.com instead. It was touted as being a site for artistic creators from around the world, so as a Canadian based campaign we felt that we would fit right in as one of many campaigns in the global Rockethub community.   But once that challenge was met there were others to contend with.

Part of our strategy, and we thought we had a creative one, was teaming Obeah Opera’s creator Nicole Brooks with a known entity in the music world to help pitch the project. However, when you’re dealing with a busy working artist and their schedules don’t sync with yours, you’ll have a problem. And we did. At the end of the day we shot Nicole doing the main video ask solo. What we were able to do to compensate was getting support from our celebrity to share the Rockethub campaign via their Facebook and Twitter.

Another component of our strategy was to rebrand Obeah Opera’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with a fabulous logo with banners and an amazing profile picture of Nicole. We had the picture but after a brief period of time to create the logo the creative team wasn’t able to sign-off on a final look. We ended up going to a place-holder plan b of a text banner combined with the profile picture of Nicole.   Not having a brand had another huge consequence. Without a logo we couldn’t do the planned Facebook ad buys. So instead of the 100 followers per week that we were aiming to reach via social media, we had 10 – 20. This meant an 80% loss of traffic that we wanted to drive to the Rockethub page.

We haven’t given up on seeing the social media strategy come to fruition. Another designer has been working on the logo and the plan b is still to launch it, even though the Rockethub campaign ends at 11am on May 3^rd, 2015. If the Facebook ad buys can kick in with the re-brand of Obeah Opera’s social media platforms, we might have a fighting chance of reaching 1/3 of our fundraising goal.

Can Influencers Turn Your Campaign Around?

I’ve just completed the first task assigned by my mentor. I approached a group of close friends to do a user test on my Rockethub crowdfunding page for the musical theatre production Obeah Opera. Of the thirteen emails I sent out I have now received seven responses and out of the seven, six people contributed on the Rockethub page. I’m now about to go into the next phase of my strategy and that is getting influencers to share the link to the Obeah Opera Rockethub page with their community.

My mentor and I began creating a list of ten influencers who we could approach to share the Rockethub page with their communities on social media. So far I have a list of five people but instead of waiting until I reached ten my mentor encouraged me to start writing my email requests right away to the people that I had. As a result I drafted one main email that I can edit based on who my influencer is and my relationship with them. It took a couple of drafts but my mentor was on hand to vet them and guide me in my approach. What I was asking of them had to be clear. How I presented that ask in the email had to be easy for them to turnaround and execute.   So the ask was to share our crowdfunding and social media links with their community and I provided those links one right after the other. I have already sent out five emails and I’ve compiled an additional four people so I’m one short of ten. My objective is to complete my list and send the remaining emails to my influencers before I meet with my mentor again next week.

Because we now have only 37 days left in our crowdfunding campaign to raise $12,000 and we are only 2% funded, my mentor suggested that we plan a second working meeting this week to actively send out the rest of those emails from my list and I will see if he’s willing to start sending out to his list.   Yes, he didn’t make me do the list alone. He is so supportive of this campaign that he is also willing to use his contacts to help get the $ total moving upward on Rockethub. I have a great mentor on my side. He takes time out of his busy schedule to devote to my cause. And he’s not just prepared to give advice but to champion a project using his own resources and contacts because he believes in it. Now that’s what I call paying it forward.