© Mark W. Pettigrew
Compared to a lot of businesses, and even compared to a lot of nonprofits, I would say that the Artistic Rescue project will have very, very low initial startup costs and operational costs.
Nevertheless, there will be costs, and I will need financial help (e.g., donations) in order to enable me to start and operate the project. I'm creating this blog post in order to discuss those costs, so that the people visiting this site will better understand why I am appealing to people who might be able to help with their financial donations..
Procuring Art to Sell
Naturally, if one is going to sell art prints and other art products in order to raise funds for charities and nonprofits such as Convoy of Hope, World Vision, etc., one needs to have art which can be sold. One of the reasons my "made to order from digital files" model of operations is preferable to one which involves the sale of traditional art products such as oil paintings is that there will be no need for expensive storage spaces or display spaces for the works of art. One can store digital files on inexpensive media such as recordable CDs, recordable DVDs, or even external hard drives with huge amounts of storage capacity. I recently bought a hard disk with 1 terabyte of storage space for a very small amount of money; and of course, I've seen higher capacity disks able to store 2 terabytes or even 3 terabytes. Prices, even for such disks, are going down all the time.
Of course, creating made-to-order products from digital files will require that any artist with whom I work be someone who is capable of digitizing (scanning or photographing) his or her art, or if necessary, paying a professional to do so. The quality of the digital files will have to be high, because the quality of the printed products will only be as good as the quality of the files from which those products are created. But inasmuch as it is a professional expense which will enable such artists to create salable products, I think it is only fair for me to expect contributing artists to create such files themselves.
But who provides the art for such files? One way to get started, of course, is to create the art and design one's self. Fortunately, I am a photographer and artist, and I've created (and scanned and retouched) some very nice images which, I believe are saleable. In particular, I have a number of photos which I created while still living in Chicago. A lot of those images feature photos of flowers and gardens, in particular, partially because there were a lot of photogenic flowers and gardens in Chicago (the motto of which is "a city in a garden"). For such photos, there's no need to have the types of model release which might be legally necessary for some other types of photography. Certainly, I have created more than enough attractive images to get me started.
I realize, of course, that my own photos will not appeal to everyone (since not everyone likes flowers and gardens), so my goal is to eventually expand the selection of images available on this site and related sites. In other words, I want to get other artists involved in the project. Their incentive for doing so, in addition to the fact that they will be helping other people in the human community, will be that selling such projects will enable them to expand the number of people who are exposed to their art, and to do so in such a way as to share in the financial proceeds from those sales.
I will need to learn about art licensing (particularly in terms of how such written legal agreements need to be written) if I am going to work directly with such artists, and I will need to make connections with artists so that I can make them aware of the Artistic Rescue Project as one possible option for selling their art images in the form of made-to-order products. The town of Bellingham, where I currently live, should be a particularly good place to make connections with artists who might wish to market their art in this manner, without signing any agreements which would hinder their ability to continue to market their artistic creations via more traditional options such as physical art galleries. There is a big community of talented visual artists in Bellingham.
It may also be possible for me to attract additional artists to the project, by means of ads in Professional Artist magazine (formerly known as Art Calendar magazine).
Regardless of whether I am trying to attract artists on a national scale via ads in Professional Artist or trying to attract local artists in Bellingham, there will be associated expenses in terms of advertising. But of course, I will try to use "guerilla marketing" techniques (such as press releases and free press release distribution services) as much as possible, in order to limit my expenses.
The desire to expand the project to include additional artists who will undoubtedly want to receive fair remuneration helps to explain, in part, why 100% of the proceeds from art products sold from the organization cannot go directly to the charitable organizations for which it is being created. And of course, there's the fact that I will also need to earn a living so that I can survive long enough to enable me to take the project to the next level! But I am not looking to get rich as a result of my creation and management of this project. I just need sufficient remuneration to enable me to focus all of my attention on this project and on other aspects of the Christian Arts Initiative. Therefore, minimizing unnecessary expenses will be a high priority of mine.
Another option for obtaining salable image files, without the need for me to go through the hassle and expense of contacting artists and setting up proper licensing agreements with each artist, will be to go through a site such as Veer.com. Such "microstock" sites offer their huge catalog of images with various types of licensing agreements, including some which enable one to legally sell printed products made from those images.
Taking one image as an example, if one wished to sell this image in
the form of an 11x17 inch print from their XXLarge file (necessary for a high-quality print of that size) one would need to pay $30 for the file itself, and one would also need to buy their Product For Resale license for $176. For that $206, one would have the right to sell up to 100,000 paper prints based on that image!
That would be a lot of sales potential, even if one were talking about cheap posters created with offset printing. But that's not the type of sales I'm contemplating. I'm contemplating selling such images in the form of high quality frameable (or framed) giclee prints which are likely to last between 100 and 200 years. I've seen such prints selling (at a Chicago art gallery) for as much as $5,000! Admittedly, that was for a very nice giclee print made from original art by painter Frederick Phillips, and that isn't likely with less popular artists. But it isn't uncommon for large giclee prints to sell for several hundred dollars apiece. At such prices, an investment of just $206 would be a very good investment if it enabled one to legally sell a particular image in printed form.
Not all of the licenses associated with Veer.com cost the same. Some images which represent particularly demanding art work may cost considerably more. And some may not be available with "Products for Resale" licenses. So it will be necessary to do some shopping on that site in order to find appropriate images. Even so, it should be a whole lot easier than it would be using some other methods.
The added benefit of selling images in this manner would be that one would have access to the entire Veer collection of images, which (from what I've seen) seems to be huge. And I know of at least two other good microstock companies, and the quality of their images is growing, compared to what they offered just a few years ago.
What I need, therefore, will be investors who will put some money into this project so that I'll have the funds needed for the purpose of legally acquiring the files and licenses I'll need in order to be able to create saleable products, without relying solely on my own photos and art images.
Meanwhile, as stated earlier, my own images should be sufficient to enable me to get started.
WEB SITE AND E-COMMERCE EXPENSES
In order to properly operate this new project of mine, in relation to the Artistic Rescue Project, there are going to be a need for a means of displaying the art available for sale, and there will also be a need for a means of conducting those financial transactions in a safe manner which inspires confidence on the part of buyers.
In the short term, chances are good that I will use a method involving PayPal Buy Now buttons. That isn't as sophisticated as an integrated online shopping cart, but as long as the number of products being sold is fairly limited, that should enable me to get the project running to the extent that money is coming in on a reasonably regular basis.
This blog is the means by which I will set up those Pay Pal transactions. That, in combination with a PDF catalog of products containing instructions for ordering each product shown in the catalog (with the URL for each blog post containing a Buy Now button for each product being sold) should make ordering a fairly simple process.
Let's say (for example) that you find an image, on page 4 of the current PDF catalog of available designs and products. That page may contain text informing you that the Buy Now button for that particular product can be found in a particular blog post with a particular web address. Simply visit that blog post, check to be sure that the product connected with the Buy Now button included in that blog post is the product you want to buy, and then click the Buy Now button in order to place your order and pay for the product (via PayPal, a respected payment method). It may not be a particularly sophisticated way of doing things, but it's more than feasible in the interim until such time as I'm able to set up a more sophisticated e-commerce storefront.
Nevertheless, because I acknowledge the rather primitive nature of this method of e-commerce, I am going to need funding in the near future for the purpose of paying web hosting costs for a more full-featured web site, as well as an e-commerce shopping cart solution such as one which involves one of the new Instant Storefront systems being offered by Chase (where I currently do my banking).
In the short term, this free blog furnished by Blogger.com should suffice for the purpose of offering a lot of useful information about the Artistic Rescue Project. In the long run, however, a more full-featured site will be needed (which is not to say that the blog will go away, since it will continue to serve a useful purpose).
The web hosting plan I'm currently considering for the primary site is the 1&1 Dual Unlimited plan. For that web hosting plan, they charge $10 a month. Not only that, but one gets the first three months of hosting for free.
Not bad! Of course, one does need to read the fine print at this page. You have to agree to prepay for a minimum contract period of 12 months and there are also setup fees. Even so, I find it pretty amazing to contemplate just how much one can get for one's money these days in terms of web hosting.
The "dual" part of the name of the plan refers to the fact that they host the site on two different computer systems, in order to greatly reduce the probability that anyone visiting the site will ever be unable to reach any part of the site because part of it is "down". The "unlimited" part of the name refers to the fact that it offers unlimited storage space, unlimited monthly traffic volume, unlimited numbers of e-mail accounts (with the limitation that each account cannot store more than 2GB of incoming messages), etc. Now, I recently read an article which made me aware that one needs to take care to read the fine print whenever a web services company makes any such claim regarding "unlimited" anything, but even so, this looks very worthwhile.
If you've read enough in this blog post and previous posts to convince you that the project is well thought out, and enough to convince you that it serves a very worthy cause, please send me an e-mail or call me at 360-318-3703 to further discuss the possibility of working together in order to make this project a reality. Thanks!
