As we are a social enterprise, our priority is to share the success with the people who worked on the project. Success is shared financially and also by investing profits back into providing opportunities for participants to gain skills and work experience. We have been running a 30-day Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to fund the project and it ends in morning of September 10, 2016 (GMT). So far we have raised £6,820, but we hope this total will increase before then. Of the total amount:
£1,750 goes towards the prize money for the contest's Top 20 photographers
about 9% of the final total goes to pay Kickstarter and Visa
about £1,400 is for postage costs
every photograph sold though the Kickstarter earns the photographer £8.50. By Tuesday September 6 that was £560 for 66 photograph orders. (if you are one of the people who have ordered a photograph, we will contact you this weekend to ask you to choose which one/s you want!)
The design of the calendar is done at no charge by Carter Wong Design. The developing of the photos was done with a discount by Snappy Snaps Muswell Hill and the final bill covered by Fujifilm. Fujifilm are printing all photos sold on the Kickstarter at no charge (they also provided the one-time-use cameras).
The rest of the money goes towards printing 6,000 calendars. So, we have raised about £2,490 towards our £11,100 printing bill so far. If we keep selling strongly on Kickstarter before this Saturday we will have enough to pay the first 1/3 of the printing bill and the rest will be paid from selling from this website from September 11 and in the market from 10 October. Once we're in the market selling we will continue to pay off the printing bill (instalments are due in November and December). To pay the printing bill for 6,000 calendars and we will need to sell 1,733 calendars in the market to break even (we will get 50% of the sale price, the vendor 50%). We will be selling the calendar online for £9.99 on our website from September 11 until Christmas, but on Kickstarter for £8.99 up until then. Vendors who work on the market stall are self employed and earn a percentage of each sale they make (50%), so the person affected by homelessness earns £5 and Cafe Art earns £5 from each calendar. We have had strong international support. Around 45% of our supporters are from the UK, 20% from Germany and 18% from the USA. Read feedback from last year's calendar buyers here. We had a very large donation from an individual from Hong Kong whose daughter lives in the UK, which we are very grateful for. Selling the calendar in the market and on the street Calendar sales training starts in a few weeks. Vendors will be given four-hour slots on Saturday and Sundays. This year we will offer the vendors the chance to sell the calendar on the streets of London too, using the same bylaws and selling model as The Big Issue newspaper. Profits let us do what we are focusing on achieving for people affected by homelessness: we not only set up a photography training course, but we were able to buy new picture frames and focus on our goals to empower people affected by homelessness though art.Order the 2017 MyLondon calendar on Kickstarter before September 10 and save 10%!