Full interview - C.P. Baumgartner
Cloed Priscilla Baumgartner about her role in the Magdas project:
- Story telling
- Social media (facebook, twitter, instagram)
- Crowd sourcing (photographer, video, etc.)
- Crowd Funding initiator
- CROWD recruiting for relatively new BAWAG website
She calls her profession “Baustellenmarketing” (= could be translated as construction site marketing), by that she means the combination of the just mentioned areas of responsibility. She insists that she is not an artist in this project, but she coordinates Marketing and PR. Cloed also describes her work multiple times as crowd sourcing.
Her appearance in the Magdas process was relatively late (August 2014) and parallel the crowd funding started. She is/was highly involved in the PR process from August until December 2014, which can be seen in events, that she initiated, like the “flowMARKET” (13th December 2014).
Crowd funding for her is an exciting new tool, which she started using recently: It is all about gathering a crowd, which is “investing” into your project and “rewarding” them with storytelling. It is interplay between investing and rewarding.
During summer 2014 Cloed and Clemens (Foschi) got together and discussed the possibilities of Magdas Hotel and crowd funding. At this time Cloed was studying Information management. Because of that she had the proper background, connections and resources. During her research BAWAG became beware of the project and got in touch with the project management. They showed a high interest in launching the Magdas Hotel as a flagship project on their upcoming crowd funding website. Although the new homepage had nearly any crowd, the business venture of 25.000 € was successful. Cloed mentioned that an already existing and more popular webpage would have led to a higher amount of crowd sourced money because the Magdas Hotel is very representative. Unfortunately the crowd funding process started way too late to search for another page for funding (the project was already in the process of construction). The BAWAG used e.g. bank statements to print the Magdas logo on – for PR.
She explains that there is a difference between the Magdas and other “normal” crowd funded projects, because the Magdas could survive without the additional crowd funding budget unlike many projects, which could only be started with the money. The public Relation did not start, until her crowd funding actions kicked off.
In difference to other –similar – projects, the Magdas Hotel involves a lot of different people who all have a voice, she said.
To the façade concept: She really likes the idea, but she regrets because of the time pressure she was not able to link the façade concept to the whole crowd funding machinery (e.g. instead of a T-Shirt the copper panels could have been a reward for funding money).
