For our last Saturday in São Paulo, we spent the morning talking about a Brazilian crowdfunding platform called Catarse.
I first learned about Catarse last year. I spent that summer in the Philippines together with Fellows from Kaya Collaborative, and two Fellows and I identified crowdfunding for equity as an opportunity to build our own company. We stumbled upon Catarse in our research, and they struck us as a great model to build upon due to countless cultural, historical, and socioeconomic parallels between Brazil and the Philippines.
Like in the Philippines, Kickstarter and the crowdfunding community didn't have an established presence in Brazil because the largest crowdfunding companies require US-based bank accounts or are predominantly only English-speaking. Rather than wait for a Kickstarter or GoFundMe to come to Brazil, Catarse took matters into their own hands and built an entire platform (in Portuguese) from scratch to bring the crowdfunding concept and community to Brazil. In keeping with this founding ethos (and to our gratitude), they've made the platform open source and entirely available on GitHub.
Thanks to Campus Brasil, we had the chance to speak with Luis Ribeiro, a Catarse founder who came over seven hours by bus to be with us. Luis shared the story of how they founded Catarse, their business model, and some of the most notable success stories of projects crowdfunded through their platform. The most salient point to come from these was that the narrative is the brand.
Catarse is Portuguese for catharsis, alluding to the release of long-held, strong, repressed emotions and the relief felt from such a release. Catharis most commonly refers to the climactic emotional resolution felt in drama and theater, and in that vein, Catarse promotes creative and artistic ventures seeking to effect social change that might struggle to find funding through traditional means because they don't promise a large monetary return. Crowdfunding and crowdfunded projects admittedly do not bring in a lot of revenues, and there's not necessarily a problem with that. Luis posed the question to us of how we can economically value positive social impact, and it's interesting to see through Catarse that people do value such impacts. People choose to crowdfund these projects not because they promise profits but because they tell a story worth telling.
A notable example is the "Pimp My Carroça" campaign. A street artist raised money to bring attention, and ultimately dignity, through art to a hitherto invisible part of Brazilian society: The workers who collect people's recycling in hand-drawn carriages to sell for money. "Your waste is my wealth."
What makes Catarse a uniquely Brazilian company rather than just a carbon copy of Kickstarter in Brazil? One way is how they collect the crowdfunded money. Although credit and debit card penetrations in Brazil are among the highest in Latin America, they still lag behind the rates in North America and Europe. This complicates things for a platform entirely built upon online communication and transactions. Catarse recognized this and instead also allows backers to pledge their money through boletos, a payment method run by the Brazilian Federation of Banks that lets you take a written request for money and process it at any ATM, bank branch, and many supermarkets.
Luis told us that this is very common in Brazil and thus creates trust between the creator and the customer. Crowdfunding could be a completely foreign concept to a Brazilian who stumbles upon a project online one day (and it was, considering the lack of any community here just ten years ago). But when they see such a project promoted in Portuguese, created by everyday Brazilians, identifying a uniquely Brazilian issue, and being offered in ways that they are used to, it creates an immediate sense of familiarity–that this is a Brazilian venture, servicing Brazilians in a Brazilian way.
What did we learn from this? We saw that crowdfunding is patterned more off of human behavior than off of traditional business models, and we can also see that there is value in a bottom line driven by a desire to do social good instead of for pure profit.
Kickstarter is proof that crowdfunding can work in America, but there is nothing to suggest that the way Kickstarter does it is the only way to do it. Instead, the concept has to be adapted to local customs and culture so that the locals can approach and access it. And waiting for someone else to bring this to you might be waiting for a day that will never come. Instead, you might have to build it yourself. Catarse itself is proof of this.
This, in short, is the essence of crowdfunding. Creators have more ideas than their resources can keep up with, and those willing to share the needed resources are often those who most understand and sympathize with the impetus behind those ideas. Catarse's stated mission is to connect those backers with those creators, to create a community that believes anything can be built, so long as you tell a good story in doing so. As a musician, organizer, and creator myself, I can't think of anything more cathartic than that.
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