So You Want to Crowdfund Your RTW Vacation?

Hi There Crowdfunding RTW Vacationer!

You probably got this post emailed to you by either myself or another traveler in response to your request for us to crowdfund your next trip.   For everyone else, this one is not for you.

I can understand that you don’t have enough money to travel on and need a bit of help; most of us don’t reach our ultimate goal either (I know we didn’t).  We make our plans, save up what we can, and hope that our over-spending is minimal such that we can do it all on the funds we managed to save.

After all, financing a RTW trip can be a tricky thing.  You wouldn’t have considered crowdfunding if you weren’t in the same boat either.  It is a popular thing to do these days and we get several emails a month from people asking us to donate, share, and write about their campaigns on our sites.

I see from your Kickstarter/Indiegogo/other crowdfunding page that in return for our donation you would be willing to write a book/build a website/or produce some other “creative” form of media to be the best there is in the industry. 

That is awesome!  We’d love to welcome you to the club as many of us have blogs, books, and websites dedicated to the amazing world of travel.

What I am curious about is why it takes $20,000, $50,000, or even $100,000 for you to do so? 

We started our website in 2008 with zero dollars in funding and about $2,000 to our name.  Our travel expenses have totaled well over $40,000 in the last five years and we’re on another trip that will likely push us well over the six-figure mark.  But there is a reason that the spending was spread out over five years, and it was because we had to work hard to earn it.  Luckily we used that period to work on our site, add quality content, and make it become all of the things we dreamed it would be.

That one doesn’t happen overnight, unlike your crowdfunding campaign.

In that time we’ve grown to be one of the largest travel blogs on the planet, earned enough income to cover the entirety of our travel spending up until this point, and even released a well received book all on our own dime.  We’re not doing this because we’re looking to recoup the money in a business sense, but because we’re passionate about traveling and would do it regardless of if we made money back. 

Even now if you were to add up the time we “work” versus our income it would amount to less than minimum wage.  But that is another topic altogether.

If you received this post in an email from another traveler, they likely have a similar story to ours as above.

What you don’t see is that nearly all of our travels are funded by ourselves.  Not our friends, parents, trust funds, or even partnerships with companies (although that does help here and there).   In our time building up this site we worked full time in a field completely separate from travel writing and only wrote in our free time while we saved the necessary funds to live our dream.

It was long, tiring, and the activities we did to add to our savings consumed just about every waking minute of our life.  Lunch breaks from the day job were spent blogging as well as every available hour on nights and weekends.  Vacations, well, that is when we worked full time for the blog, and we never turned off.

My reason for publishing this post is not to brag about how we’ve traveled over the years or how hard we’ve worked to do what we do.  Nor is it a put down to your dream of doing so.  Everyone we know wants to travel and we’re really pumped you want to do it too.  It is one of the most universal dreams on the planet.  My reason for publishing this post is over the concern for your fundraising method:

No one is going to give you money.

A crowdfunding campaign for your vacation is like sitting out on a street corner and holding up a sign saying you want money for booze.  Honest, but immoral. 

An incentive to donate is great, but when all you are offering is a postcard or mentioning a brand in the crowdfunding page you are not thinking outside of the box.  We could create our own crowdfunding campaign to get mentioned if we like and don’t need to donate $15 to get a postcard from some place around the world.  Most writers I know would easily send a postcard to a fan for free if they only asked. 

As far as bigger sponsorships in exchange for brand recognition on a website?  Even the largest and most experienced writers can barely get those, and there are thousands out there who are already established working for that same goal.

I guess to put it simply we need to say this:  You need to do better.

If I am going to be persuaded to give to your crowdfunding campaign, you need to wow me.  Convince me of your cause to the point where I’m willing to open my wallet for you (which for a travel goal means you likely won’t), or perhaps offer incentives that far exceed the value of the donation.  What is $15 worth to you?  Try comparing it to something that would be worth $20, $25, or $30 otherwise.

You’ll be operating at a poor hourly rate, but at least you’ll be earning money.  I can only rattle off the number of things I did for pennies just to save money to travel before we started making a proper income several years later.  It was poor use of my time, sure, but a dollar more in the bank is a dollar more you can spend on your trip and an hour working is an hour occupied where you’re not spending money.

If you can’t bring yourself to do that, well, you probably shouldn’t crowdfund your dream trip.

That just leaves a few other options:

1. Get a (second or third) job and work for the money.
2. Find a hobby, perfect it, and sell your time to people who need it. 
3. Do menial chores and make up the difference.
4. Build your site anyway and make it succeed purely off of your passion.
5. Save longer.
6. Combine all of the above for the biggest bang

Notice the one thing that isn’t on the list?  Asking other people for money in exchange for nothing of value in return. 

Now, I spent an hour of my time writing this letter.  So in order to repay me, please send $100 via PayPal to [email protected] to cover my freelance rate.  I may have done nothing for you except save you some time on your campaign, and I’m not offering any perks, but I would love it if you gave me some money anyway. 

After all, that is what you just asked me to do.

Sincerely,
-Living the Dream

Disclaimer: This post was written because we receive many emails per month asking for donations, write-ups, shares, and promotion of crowdfunding pages so others can travel.  While we are not against crowdfunding for traveling, as many great businesses were founded via this method, we are not fans of people just asking for money as a handout for something that has no return for anyone but the person asking for it.  If you are a regular reader of this site who stumbled upon this post, we are not directing this at you.  We just couldn’t take the barrage of emails any longer and had to respond and start a conversation.

So, what are your thoughts on crowdfunding for travel?  Would you do it or have you done it?  Would you donate to someone who is?  Let us know by commenting below!  But be warned, linking to your own campaign will not be published!

Jeremy is the primary author of Living the Dream as well as several other travel related sites, and has visited 34 countries throughout North America, Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East.