Building the aquarium through crowdfunding?

[drpepper]

While your optimism is appreciated, there are unfortunately several flaws to your comparison. First of all, you are limited to the Oklahoma City area population for all of your funding. Dallas and Tulsa already have aquariums so you likely aren't getting any support outside of this area..

I indeed considered that, if I didn't, I wouldn't put 1000, 5000 donors in my calculation.

You're also ignoring ROI. In Silicon Valley, people invest thousands to make millions, and millions to make billions. There is essentially zero ROI in an aquarium in the midwestern US. You will find donors to help support an already functioning aquarium, but I see little to no chance of crowdfunding the actual creation of this kind of project.

Brought up the investors thing just to stress the power of good marketing, you can do a lot of thing if you can sell your ideas. I believe I didn't mention investors anywhere in my calculation. Anyway, $5,000 for a lifetime family ticket to a world-class aquarium (assuming it's not a lame $100M aquarium) doesn't sound like a reasonable ROI to you.

[Mike_M]

I indeed considered that, if I didn't, I wouldn't put 1000, 5000 donors in my calculation.



Brought up the investors thing just to stress the power of good marketing, you can do a lot of thing if you can sell your ideas. I believe I didn't mention investors anywhere in my calculation. Anyway, $5,000 for a lifetime family ticket to a world-class aquarium (assuming it's not a lame $100M aquarium) doesn't sound like a reasonable ROI to you.

Brought up the investors thing just to stress the power of good marketing, you can do a lot of thing if you can sell your ideas. I believe I didn't mention investors anywhere in my calculation. Anyway, $5,000 for a lifetime family ticket to a world-class aquarium (assuming it's not a lame $100M aquarium) doesn't sound like a reasonable ROI to you.[/QUOTE]

Okay, so you are tapping out all of Oklahoma's wealthy donors just to build this. You're giving roughly 3600 families free admission for the first 5+ years for a single donation. Those families will almost assuredly share their free admission with their friends, so lets assume somewhere around 7000 families that will not pay admission for 5 years. Schools usually pay less than half price for field trip admission.

Also, if it is crowd-funded, who runs the project? Who hires the contractors? Who liasons with the government? Who is in charge? An aquarium doesn't just build itself.