We love Emily Schoen for many reasons. She’s our rockstar project manager, a beautiful dancer with Keigwin + Co and Kyle Abraham, and she has a fun and unique choreographic voice that we’re seeing get more and more recognition by the minute.
We shared our highlight video from Emily’s residency showing at Gibney Dance a few months ago on our blog and through our email newsletter, and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival’s Ella Baff loved the video so much, she invited Emily to bring more of her work to Inside/Out this summer!
Now, Emily’s raising money to pay for travel, accommodation and all ten of her awesome dancers on IndieGoGo. When we succeeded in raising over $10,000 for my upcoming dance documentary Where Women Don’t Dance, we applied a lot of our Nel Shelby Productions video and marketing skills along the way.
Amy Jacobus, my marketing manager, helped shape and run my campaign, and we thought it’d be great to collaborate on more crowdfunding projects with other artists. With crowdfunding, we get to put our creative video ideas, interview and editing skills to use for the campaign video and video clips to share along the way. And we can also offer campaign planning and marketing advice from Amy.
Emily is the first choreographer we’ve worked with in this way, from the beginning of the campaign with an eye to the end of the project, and we’re just blown away by how well it’s going so far! She raised 95% of her goal in just 1 week!
Emily filmed her own interviews with herself and dancers and we used the footage she had from these interviews, plus some footage of her dances (some we had filmed ourselves and some we hadn’t) to create the main video for the campaign and a few smaller videos along the way. In the end, crowdfunding is only going to be successful if you have a plan…really great video is important, but getting your message out is most important, and we love helping with that!
We’re proud of our videos, of our campaign ideas, and of Emily’s energy behind the plan. Of course, we’re also just proud to promote and support more great dance!
Take a look at Emily’s campaign and keep checking in this month to watch how things develop! Congratulations, Emily!!