PostSecret’s Secret: The Dynamic Duo of Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding

Frank Warren, the creator of PostSecret, was receiving a lot of secrets about war.

Veterans, soldiers, army spouses, and soldiers’ children were mailing in postcards that told secrets of separation, fear, desperation, the horrors of war and the joy of being reunited.

The secrets range from sweet–“I support our troops by emailing naked pictures to my solider in Iraq!”–to disturbing–“If I die [my parents] can’t be told why.”

The PostSecret project is unique in that it is entirely crowdsourced: people share their secrets anonymously on homemade postcards, and some of those secrets make it onto the blog and into videos. When Warren decided that these stories of war needed to be shared beyond PostSecret.com, he asked Fireman Creative to produce the Soldier’s Secrets video. In keeping with PostSecret’s philosophy of crowdsourcing, he asked the community to help fund the video production via Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website.

Crowdfunding enabled Warren to produce the video, and it also helped him raise an additional $2000 for Vet2Vet, a suicide prevention hotline for veterans.