When Collaboration Fails

First off, thank you to everyone who had contributed [comments/pledges] to our attempt to raise enough investment, in order to print a famous engineers Top Trumps© style deck of cards.

Hopefully by now, you will all have seen your pledges returned via pay-pal.

Once the time had elapsed, and the project closed, we decided set aside some time to take a close look at why we may have failed, this time round. Learn from the experience.

Firstly, the definition of a collaborative failure is;

• Project did not reach intended goal. In this case - there were not enough pledges or the target was set too high.
• It did not get the recognition it needed. This is possible, but the amount of views on our blog alone would have secured us victory. So not convinced that recognition was a real reason for failure.
• Inadequate credibility. Very possible. We had seen enough interest from our engineering community - but perhaps there was not enough official weighting to the proceedings to call enough of us into action. Not one retweet by the IStructE, or ICE or ASCE, ACE... or indeed any engineering institution, community or group. This would not look good.
• The message was lost. More likely to be the real cause. You simply did not know what was going on. Why we were doing this, and how it would help...WHY?!

The lack of a common vision was apparent from some of the comments coming in. Unfortunately - by the time we began to recognise the lack of direction, it was too late to change the project details.

It occurred to us that this was not a collaborative effort at all, and this was why it ultimately failed.

The project suffered because crowd funding is still quite a new thing to all of us. Again it had became obvious by chatting to a few of those who asked questions, that the idea of crowd funding was alien to them. Understanding it was just another thing to learn. 

Another small detail which proved to be a barrier to success was pay-pal. What a joke. More and more people are signing up for pay-pal accounts to pay for online merchandise, but if you are anything like me, I hate the thought of having to pay 80p to pay-pal for what was effectively supposed to be a fun project. 

The list above is heavily staked in favour of failure, and the straw which broke the camels back, was that the investment target was set far too high. 

In reality, only a very small target was required to get this project off the ground. We genuinely believed that we wouldn't be able to provide everyone with a deck of cards - so we raised the target amount to support a heavier response and pledge rate. You live and learn.

What next?

Well we know that some of you still want this project to happen. We want it to happen too.

So we will make it happen from this end and let you know when we have printed them of ready for distribution. It's a great idea and deserves to see the light of day.

Many thanks, and please give us your comments.

Engine[er]