Gig Buddies Update

An update on Gig Buddies from Paul Richards

Since City Camp in March I’ve felt a bit like the character Rhubarb in the classic children’s TV cartoon ‘Roobarb and Custard’. In every episode he always disappeared off in to his garden shed and worked on a crazy invention, and you never knew what it was going to be until he had finally finished and opened the door. I’ve felt like the last six months have been a bit like that, there’s been loads of things happening behind the scenes which has largely involved writing funding bids. We were also asked to be part of the Good For Nothing ‘Summer Of Love’ weekend camp in June where a team of lovely people gave up their weekend to help with techie things like a Facebook app, social media marketing ideas, branding ideas, a funders pack and press release type things.

We also had a trial run in the Brighton Festival Fringe where we had some ‘buddies’ come along to the launch of a new compilation we’d put out (Wild Things 3). However, we don’t want to properly publicise what we’re up to until we know that we have the funding in place to employ a part-time project worker.

And the good news is that we’ve just heard we’ve been successful in our grant applications meaning that we’re hoping to reveal what we’ve been building in our ‘shed’ within the next month or two.

We’ve also just heard that we’ve been successful in being part of the National Council for Voluntary Service’s Crowd Funding Challenge 2012. We’re new to crowd-funding but it looks like a potential great way to sustainably fund Gig Buddies. You can follow our weekly challenges and progress on twitter. #crowdfunding2012

There’s still a bit of banging and sawing to do but we’re not far off now!