Actress Reagan Gomez. Photo Provided By: VIBE

Reagan Gomez has come a long way since playing Zaria on Robert Townsend’s The Parent Hood.

Gomez has appeared in any and everything from Jerry Maguire, Carmen: A Hipopera, the music video to The Young Gunz’s “No Better Love,” and all the way up to The Cleveland Show and Family Guy.

To paraphase the Wu Tang Clan’s GZA while appearing on “The Chappelle Show,” Gomez has truly ‘diversified her bonds!’

She didn’t even have to go to Wu Tang Financial to get that advice either!!

She’s eclectic. 

The voice of Roberta Tubbs can also add an additional trait to her repertoire: a savvy crowd-funding marketer.

Back in 2013, Gomez used top crowd-funding site indiegogo to fund her independent sci-fi web series, called “Surviving the Dead.” It was successful. With a strong social media following via Twitter, you’d think the process would be easy for folks to latch on and give give give.

To the contrary, it takes much work. “It’s always hard because even though people know me from The Parent Hood or another film or The Cleveland Show or Steven Universe or whatever I’m still not Jada Pinkett I’m not Will Smith,” Reagan Gomez told me on Scoop B Radio.

“Even when I look at Spike Lee and how he raised over a million dollars and whatever it was I wouldn’t even feel confident giving on Indie Go-Go, Kick Start , or whatever trying to raise money even for our budgets for the web series it’s not easy and I remember when we did Indie Go-Go the first time it was in  2012 or 2013 and this was before anyone had a Go Fund Me.”

 Check out Reagan Gomez’s Chat with Brandon ‘Scoop B’ Robinson on Scoop B Radio

Gomez broke it down further:

“Crowd funding was still very new so for me to get out there and put videos like: ‘hey I know you seen me on whatever TV show but can you loan me $5?’ It was like very like what the f**k is this? Everybody thought it was a scam and I really had to explain like: ‘no it’s not a scam. I’m not a millionaire and I really want to start creating original content and be able to tell our story.’ And once people started knowing what it was I wanted to do and hearing about the project and hearing about the cast I wanted to have, then we had a successful Indie Go-Go campaign.”

According to Gomez, the project has had ups and downs, but she’s become consistent:

“Our first season I think our goal was $25k and we raised just under $14k,” she said. “We didn’t reach our goal, but raised a nice chunk of change. I mean for the second season we only raised five grand so it’s up and down each crowd funding campaign that you do is totally different. Just because you were successful in the last one doesn’t mean you’re going to be successful in your next one. So we raised a nice chunk of change for Surviving as well but for Surviving I had to take a huge chunk out of our savings in order to make the show be what I wanted it to be, because I knew because of the genre and the type of show I wanted it to be the production value had to be there. It had to look like a show you would see on TV. I had the cast, I had the story, but I just wanted to make sure that I had the crew and the EP and everyone else to help bring my vision to life. And make sure that it looked great because that’s the first thing you’re going to see, you’re going to see how it looks, what kind of camera did we use, the color; you know what I’m saying? I didn’t want it to look janky! So for Surviving, even though we did the Indie Go-Go campaign we had to take a huge chunk out of our savings.” 

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The post Scoop B: Reagan Gomez Is A Crowd-Funding Marketing Genius appeared first on RESPECT. | The Photo Journal of Hip-Hop Culture.