The Loud Hands Project

February Update

Loud Hands Project: February Update

It’s been a quiet but productive time for The Loud Hands Project since we passed our initial fundraising goal of $10,000 on January 14th, after just nineteen days. Since then, we’ve:

-given interviews about the project for AWN’s radio show (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/autism-womens-network/2012/02/03/the-loud-hands-project) and on Joyce Bender’s Voice Of America: Disability matters (http://www.voiceamerica.com/episode/59769/ari-neeman)

-worked on finalizing plans for the anthology, website, and future projects and taken an inventory of equipment needs

-begun receiving submissions for the anthology

-expanded our FAQ section on our tumblr (http://theloudhandsproject.tumblr.com/post/16126946761/questions-answered)

-sent out a second call for video clips for a project around autistic community, autistic identity, and passing (http://theloudhandsproject.tumblr.com/post/18096311025/call-for-video-clips)

-finished our first wildly successful Loud Hands Project Blogaround (http://theloudhandsproject.tumblr.com/post/18143366933/third-and-final-part-of-our-blogaround-recap)

-continued raising money—we’re now at $12,170 with 175 donors.

Overall it’s been a successful few weeks of laying a firm foundation, and we’re in a solid place now to gear up for our last two weeks of fundraising. That’s right—we only have 18 days, or two and a half weeks, left to raise money.  Our fundraiser on indiegogo (http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Loud-Hands-Project?a=351448) ends March 15th. How much do you think we can raise by then?

We’d like to make $15,000.

The first 19 days of fundraising was a bit of a wild ride for the autistic community. There was a real hunger and a need for The Loud Hands Project, and people rallied together and pushed to meet the goal. It was equally incredible and overwhelming. We’re wondering if we can recapture that energy for our last 18 days of fundraising. 

We’ve raised enough to build a website this spring and put together our anthology, our founding, guiding document, an explanation of what it means to have loud hands. But the anthology has always been meant as only the beginning for this project, which we envision as an expansive, transmedia forum for both celebrating autistic comunity, identity, and culture and simultaneously insisting that these things exist and are worth perserving. 

That is a huge undertaking. We live in a world that isn’t entiely convinced that autistic people have minds at all—to change the conversation to one that recognizes we have voices at all, let alone valuable ones? That’s going to take an enormous investment of time and effort. Rome wasn’t built on a day, and it definitely wasn’t built without any funds or resources.

Which brings us back to fundraising. 18 days. Our goal: $15,000. Will you help us?

As you can see on indiegogo (http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Loud-Hands-Project?a=351448) we have a few next steps for the project already outlined. If we can make $15,000, we’ll be able to beging production on one of those steps—a video called “About Us, Without Us.” ”About Us, Without Us” is a video about the Autistic community and our place in the conversation around eugenics and the prevention of autism. If we make the $15,000 benchmark, we’ll be able to pay for Julia to go on the road and collect interviews and footage, and cover production, editing, and initial distribution costs. Does this sound valuable to you? Will you help us make this goal?

If you want to see The Loud Hands Project move forward, past the anthology and into a tool for centering autistic voices and experiences in conversations about us, we hope you’ll help us out. Share this update, and the link to our indiegogo page (http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Loud-Hands-Project?a=351448) around. Donate if you can. Tweet it, facebook it, tumblr it, email it to your grandma, your coworkers, your cousins, your best friends and your arch-nemisis. Ask if they’ll pass the project along to their networks, too—the more people who know, the better our chances for success. Tell them why you want to see this project succeed, and ask if they’ll consider making a tax-deductible donation, starting from $10, to get us there. This is not the time to be shy.

We only have 18 days left. Let’s make them count.

We did it!

After 19 days, The Loud Hands project not only met but surpassed out initial goal of $10,000! 

Indiegogo is still encouraging us to fundraise for the remainder of our original campaign—until March 15th. We’re not stopping now that we’ve built up some momentum! The blog tour is going strong, with Amanda and Savannah contributing some lovely posts.  You can see our goals and plans for additional funds here.

I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone for their overwhelming support for the project. It speaks to the real need for Loud Hands and Autistic culture and community, and the potential this project has to change things—a potential everyone who donated or helped spread the word or laid the groundwork for this project to even be conceived of has helped realize—is terrifying and explosive. I can’t possibly take it lightly, or even begin to comprehend what this means.

Thank you, everyone, for your support. Stay tuned—we’re here to stay.

We’re over 90% of the way there!

The Loud Hands project has passed the $9000 mark! We have less than $1000 left to raise before we meet our original goal. Our goal is to make that before our first three weeks are up.

SO.

Now is the time to remind your friends, families, acquaintances, arch-rivals, and bitter enemies about The Loud Hands Project and make a donation! Spread the word! Let’s do this!

Week Two Report

It’s time for our weekly check-in! Here’s what we got up to in our second week:

• We raised another thousand dollars! 
• We passed 100 discrete donors!
• As of this writing, we’ve raised $7443 and received 117 donations. Wow!

We’ve also had an active web presence this week.

• We were indiegogo’s featured project on their twitter account on Sunday and in their newsletter on Wednesday. Thanks indiegogo!
• We have a post up today on the TASH blog!
• We now have 82 followers on twitter, 221 on Facebooks, and 36 on tumblr.
• Our blogaround started. You can see Monday’s post over at Shift Journal, and the blogaround will last through January. We’ll be linking to the posts here as they apear. Let us know if you’d like to participate!
• Speaking of blogging, we have blog badges! Take one!

We’ve also started to talk a bit more about the project as a whole. 

• We’ve updated our project description on indiegogo. Check it out, and tell us what you think.
• We’ve also updated our FAQ section. Helpful?

Oh, and we published our preliminary submissions guidelines for the anthology. Those might interest some of you.

Overall, it’s been a wildly successful week! Stay tuned to see what we have in store for this week—we’ve still got a lot to do. Fundraising isn’t over until March 15th—we’ve got some serious campaigning to do.

Quick and easy signal-boost

We are indiegogo’s featured campaign of the day on twitter! Please tweet @loud_hands and @indiegogo using the hashtag #loudhandsproject and tell them why the project matters to you! We’re in need of a signal-boost, and this could provide that. 

We have blog badges!

The Loud Hands Project now has blog badges available! They come in a small and an expanded size. 

170x193 pixels

170x300 pixels 

 
Not sure how to make a blog badge? 

A blog badge is an image that is linked to a site. It doesn’t have to go in your blog’s side bar or anything like that. Some people put them in their forum signatures as well.  It is a good idea to upload images for blog badges to your own website so that you don’t over use other people’s bandwidth. For example, the graphic designer is using her own wordpress media library to host hers, and that is what is in the sample code below.  Some sites like wordpress have different tools to make it easier for you.

If you are putting them on a forum, they might use a slightly different coding system. But the basic code is as follows:  <a href=”http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Loud-Hands-Project“><img src=”http://crackedmirrorinshalott.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/lhpbb1-2-4med.jpg“></a> This will come out looking like the larger blog badge above.

If you want it to have an image description, the code will look like this:  <a href=”http://www.indiegogo.com/The-Loud-Hands-Project“><img src=”http://crackedmirrorinshalott.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/lhpbb1-2-4med.jpg” alt=”Blog Badge- Large. A large white person is holding a sign up that says ‘The Loud Hands Project’. Below this image, text reads ‘The Loud Hands Project’ and ‘Autistic People, Speaking.’ Below that it reads ‘Watch the Video. Read About the Project. Support the Work. Visit indiegogo for more about The Loud Hands Project.’”></a> 

Here are two examples of image descriptions for these blog badges. You could also choose to write your own. Image descriptions are important, because they let users using screen readers to be full participants online. 

Blog Badge- Small. A large white person is holding a sign up that says “The Loud Hands Project”. Below this image, text reads “The Loud Hands Project” and “Autistic People, Speaking”.

Blog Badge- large. A large white person is holding a sign up that says “The Loud Hands Project”. Below this image, text reads “The Loud Hands Project” and “Autistic People, Speaking”. Below that it reads “Watch the Video. Read About the Project. Support the Work. Visit indiegogo for more about The Loud Hands Project.”

Please share widely!

(With thanks to Savannah, who designed the badges and helped script this explanation!)

Week One Report

It’s time for our weekly check-in! Here’s a brief summary of what we did in just our very first week:

In terms of fundraising:

• We raised over $3000 in our first 24 hours.
• We surpassed our halfway mark of $5000 after four days.
• We were a featured project on the indiegogo homepage.
• In our first 7 days, we made over $6000—$6223 at this writing.
• We have now received 88 discrete donations, or votes of confidence.

In other news, we:

• Prepared some basic scripts those of us who need them can use to tell people about the project.
• Started a FAQ section.
• Created this tumblr, as well as our Facebook and Twitter accounts.
• Gained 170 supporters on Facebook and 66 on Twitter.
• Our youtube video has been viewed 1951 times.

Moving forward this week, we plan to:

• Share more about our vision for this project and its scope.
• Start a twitter campaign—follow us there and get ready to work some hashtags.
• Give some interviews (and link to them here, obviously.)
• See if we can make $10,000 dollars.
• Put up some flyers for you all to print out and share around.
• Stim in public.

Join us!

Halfway there!

(Woooooah, livin’ on a prayer……) (etc.)

In the past four days, the following things have happened:

-The Loud Hands Project has launched.
-55 people have sent us a vote of confidence by funding us.
-We’ve reached our halfway goal of $5000.
-We’ve become a featured campaign on the indiegogo home page.

This project is advancing beyond our wildest dreams. We are humbled and in awe of the enthusiastic support we’ve received. PLEASE keep sharing the project around so we can stay a featured campaign on indiegogo and keep generating awareness and momentum. As a reminder, we have a facebook page as well as a twitter account (right now we’re asking people to tweet us reasons why the project matters to them under the hashtag #loudhandsproject.) “Like” us, follow us, and keep spreading the word and sharing the link to this campaign around. We have scripts for that!

Excitedly,

Julia Bascom, project organizer

Scripts!

We’re received multiple requests from various people for scripts they might use when sharing the project around. Since this project is by and for Autistic people, we totally understand—the amount of scripting that’s gone into the project itself already is pretty revealing.

The only way the fundraising for this project can really succeed is via social media and word-of-mouth. This means emailing the indiegogo link around to all your various contacts and asking them to take a look and consider making a small donation. Most people won’t, but a few might, and that adds up. 

Of course, these emails and conversations can be tricky, especially with people who don’t spend a lot of time thinking about autism or disability in their daily lives. This can cause a lot of anxiety. 

For general audiences, the following script can work. Obviously, feel free to tweak it, ignore it, and mess around with it as you please. In fact, if you find another revision or script works for you, please let us know, and we’ll share it here. The more minds, the better!

Hi. I wanted to show you this project. It’s a group of Autistic people speaking for themselves and working on creating an anthology and website for future projects so that more people can hear them. They’ve already made a video, which is pretty cool and which you can see at the link. A lot of people are supporting this project, and are really excited about it. They’re trying to raise $10,000 dollars to cover their starting costs, and they made $3000 in their first day. I think it would be really cool if we could help. Donations start at $10 and are tax-deductible; will you join me?

For audiences already involved in disability rights, autism, or special ed, but not necessarily Autistic community/culture or neurodiversity, the above script might work, or you could try this one:

Hi. Have you heard about The Loud Hands Project yet? It’s a transmedia publishing effort by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network dedicated to amplifying the voices of Autistic people speaking, however they do, as they make the world one we all can share. They’ve already made a video, and right now they’re raising money for their first anthology and the creation of a website for future projects. A lot of people are supporting this project, and the Autistic community is really excited about it. They’re trying to raise $10,000 dollars to cover their starting costs, and they made $3000 in their first day. I think it would be really cool if we could help. Donations start at $10 and are tax-deductible; will you join me?

Or you could switch them around. Or write your own and show it to us, and we’ll put it up!