Back in the summer 2014 the convergent media collective was approached by 10bitworks to help them with a fundraiser to purchase a laser cutter for their space. 10bitworks is a 501(3)(c) non-profit that focuses on maintaining a physical space for the greater San Antonio community to come to and interact with like minded makers and hackers, aka people who are passionate about new technology, art, engineering, science and much more.

Andrew Valdez, Christian Rios and joey lopez teamed up to help develop a full on media campaign. joey and Christian developed a call to action video. Andrew Valdez worked on all the graphics for the campaign and all three of them helped with the social media initiative. Mike Perez and Jeremy Zunker, 10bitworks members, developed a custom crowd funding interface. Together with the 10bitworks board we also helped develop the various donation levels.

In order to gain further information about the laser cutter and the culture around them 10bitworks along with the CM crew took a trip up to ATX Hackspace in Austin, Tx to check theirs out.

10bitworks finalized their budget and on 9/18/2014 we launched the campaign and within 43 days we successfully raised over $12,000!

Since installing the laser cutter, there has been a huge community response with makers, hackers, artists and small business owners using it for various tasks. Within the first quarter of 2015 10BitWorks increased their membership by more than 50%! Much of that growth is owed to having available such a useful piece of equipment. 10bitworks is currently developing a laser cutter training module for members to be able to take to be certified in the use of the cutter.

Convergent Media Collective members along with students have also been able to join in on the fun and develop ideas and projects with the cutter as well.

We would like to thank 10bitworks for asking us to team up with them and we look forward to the next collaboration!

Here is the video we made for them: