The dream is to design and build PhilaMade.com (along with its partner Shopify site) all in one 10-hour Site Nite work session. The event will be brought to life by PhilaMade’s amazing community of volunteer members, video and photo archived, and tweeted/blogged to give onlookers a live peak into a grand experiment.

The man behind the plan and uber-successful crowdfunding campaign is Philadelphia-native, Joe Rinaldi. PhilaMade is dedicated to to celebrating, inspiring and cultivating creative brilliance in the Philadelphia community and we spoke to Joe about his process:

What was the inspiration behind the community programming project you are currently running on RocketHub?  Why is it important to you?

Our RocketHub project was inspired by the grassroots creative organization I've been fortunate enough to help launch over the past two years, PhilaMade. PhilaMade is an organization dedicated to celebrating, inspiring and cultivating creative brilliance in the Philadelphia community. Our membership consists of designers, developers, writers and other folks from the advertising and design community in the Philadelphia area. We host a full slate of programming, ranging from happy hours, to professional development events including town hall meetings, Show & Tell, and round table discussions to karaoke. While our organization has grown tremendously over the last 18 months, and we enjoy an amazing online dialog via Twitter  (@PhilaMade) and Facebook, we have no web presence of our own to date. We've been our own worst client...

It seemed anticlimactic to merely launch a site after all this time, so we raised the stakes creating a grand experiment. Site Nite was born. 

On Site Nite, a handful of designers, developers, UX, project management and content folks, all hailing from a variety of creative teams, are going to walk into a room. After one full 8 hour work session, hopefully all of those same folks will walk out again (some limping I'm sure) along with a freshly minted PhilaMade web site. We're going to document the experience in a variety of ways and publish those accounts to the site. 

What can some seriously talented folks, working collaboratively, accomplish in one fell swoop? We'll soon see.

You've built a whole community around this project. How has your experience been as a crowdfunding pioneer in the world of web development in the Philly area - how are your supporters responding?

The response from the RocketHub team, from our membership, and from the larger audience RocketHub delivered, has been overwhelming. We shattered our goal within two days of launch, and continue to be fueled by generous supporters as we pass the halfway mark of our project. RocketHub gave us a platform to communicate both directly with our group's constituency, as well as a larger, interested audience.  

As a result of this groundswell of support, we've started to identify additional functionality for the site that will go live in subsequent phases, as well as begun investigating other opportunities for PhilaMade to fund future events and projects, all fueled by our growing RocketHub funds. Every penny collected over our goal will be put to good use.

Thank you for your kind words. Any advice for Creatives looking to crowdfund a similar project?

I think it is important to identify a well defined project goal that will by its nature, excite your audience. I'm going to do 'something' awesome, is a pretty hollow promise. Awesome gifts are a good enticement, but creating a goal people are passionate about is more helpful. Creating excitement about the acheivability of this goal raises the stakes, and exponentially increases engagement. 

When designing a crowdfunding community based project, make sure it is something your community wants, and present it to them in an exciting way.

Thank you Joe for bringing your inspired community to RocketHub. Check out this successful project, here.

-Vlad