Capital News Service Photo The first annual Rogers City Murals on Main festival featured five state, national and international artists who painted the downtown area.

ROGERS CITY — In 2023, a Rogers City art studio committee asked for $50,000 from the community to start a mural festival.

It was difficult to convince the city government to fund the project at first, as many in the 2,900-resident community didn’t see public art as a priority, said Stone House Studio director Katy Carignan.

But after six months of promoting her campaign and soliciting support from residents, friends and even Facebook users, she was able to pay for artists from around the world to come to the northeastern Michigan community and paint murals on downtown buildings.

Carignan raised the money through donation-based crowdsourcing, a funding model going strong in Michigan as the global crowdfunding market sees a rapid expansion.

Crowdfunding has been making public space improvements happen across the state for over a decade.

In 2024, projects ranged from the La Joya Gardens Community Space in Detroit to the Besser Museum, a history museum in Alpena.

Others included renovations to a mountain bike trail in Marquette, a butterfly house in Port Austin and a market structure in Cadillac.

And this year, Sault Ste. Marie is crowdsourcing funds for improvements to their I-500 Snowmobile Raceway, making it a year-round destination.

Crowdfunding is simple in concept:

An individual, business or organization can create a campaign through an online platform, and anyone can contribute.

Websites like Kickstarter and GoFundMe have become well-known for supporting business startups and philanthropic causes respectively, but most local project organizers run their campaigns through Patronicity.

Carignan said the website was a great tool to sell the festival to donors, who could see examples of urban murals and get regular updates on the project.

Most of the state’s municipal crowdfunding for projects like the Rogers City Mural Festival are conducted in partnership with the Michigan Economic Development Corp. (MEDC) through its Public Spaces Community Places initiative.

The initiative’s key benefit for partners is that it matches a project’s goal for up to $50,000, and provides guides and resources on how to run a successful campaign.

Rogers City was the MEDC’s smallest community to set a $50,000 goal.

Unsure at first about the prospects of success, Carignan said she was surprised at the amount of support from residents.

Within six months, Carignan’s project met its goal. Over 60% of the money came from small donors who chipped in less than $500 each, she said.

“I always stress this with people that it’s about the $5 donation, the $10 donation, the $25 donation,” she said. “They add up.”

Crowdfunding gives more flexibility with how project money is spent compared to grants, said Michigan Government Finance Officers Association board member Kristin Collins, the finance director and city treasurer in Sault Ste. Marie.

But it requires significantly more work than grant writing.

“It’s incredibly labor intensive,” Collins said. “For the same amount of money, you have to do a lot of record-keeping.”

On Friday, the Sault Area Convention & Visitors Bureau launched a Patronicity campaign to fund the last $100,000 of its $2.5 million overhaul of the city’s I-500 Raceway, the host of the International I-500 Snowmobile Endurance Race for the past 56 years.

Eighty percent of the raceway improvements were funded by a grant from the U.S. Economic Development Association and the rest have been funded from other sources, said bureau President Linda Hoath.

“This is our last push,” she said. “It’s a big picture, but this is one little portion of it, and it’s defined.”

According to the website, the campaign will fund a heated pavilion that will host vendors during races and events during the offseason. The campaign deadline is April 2.

Investment in Michigan’s public space projects is worth the effort, said Rogers City Downtown Development Authority Executive Director Kaelie Fessler.