Funding Your Project
Promotion
Not every deviant has the financial capacity to assist your project, but every deviant can contribute by helping you promote your project. After all, even if these certain individuals cannot be able to donate, they may be able to find you the people who can. In your project announcement journals, make sure to emphasize that anyone can help by:
- Adding the journal to their favorites to bump it up to the Journal Portal
- Writing a journal or a poll promoting the project
- Encouraging their friends to help out and spread the word
Collecting Donations
Another thing to keep in mind is how you plan on collecting donations. Does your project require deviantART Points or real money? How and where do you want deviants to donate?
Points
For most projects, I would highly recommend using DeviantART Points to fund your contest. Not only are points quicker and easier for people to donate with, but they are also more common as anyone on dA has access to points (in comparison to PayPal).
One way to collect points is to add a Donation Widget to the top of your profile where it's easily viewable to those passing by. You could also create a separate Donation Account for collecting funds if you find that easier for you to keep track of donated points. Both methods are perfectly acceptable, so do what works best for you.
PayPal
If your project requires real money, I suggest utilizing both PayPal and the DeviantART Points system to maximize the number of people who can help. For those who want to donate in genuine money, they could send their donations using PayPal. For those who want to donate in points, you could set up a Commission Widget or Premium Content download where they could donate. The points gathered through these means can be converted into real money (with a 20% cut) that can then be used to fund your project.
Regardless of how you want people to donate, make sure to clearly state in every promotion journal where people can go to donate especially if your project requires a lot of funds. Sometimes people don't donate because they simply don't know how, so make it as easy as possible for people to help!
Fundraising
While a simple of collecting donations is sufficient for your project, sometimes you may need more creative ways of fund-raising. Here are some of the different methods you can use to help gather funds:
Features
One of the most effective and simple ways to fund-raise is to offer features to those who donate points or money as an incentive to support your project. You can make things very simple by featuring everyone who donates even one point, or you can devise a more elaborate feature system (ie 20 points = 1 thumb feature, 50 points = 2 thumb features, etc.)
You don't have to be the only person who does features either. Let people know that they can help out by featuring donors so that those who donate can be featured not just by you, but by several others as well!
Commissions
Let people know that you are taking commissions to help fund your project. That way, people who are interested in your commissions and those who maybe did not want to donate completely for free will be able to support your fund-raiser. Once again, if you can get others to help out with this, that can certainly be beneficial. Not only can these deviants help your project, but they also get a free feature for their commissions!
Others
There are probably also many other, less common ways of advertising such as offering llamas to donors or featuring donor commissions. If you have any creative ideas, don't be afraid to try them out.
TL;DR
Even if your project requires a lot of funding, you can still make your project a success by promoting your project and making it as easy and desirable as possible to donate. 
Thank you for reading, and I hope this article was helpful for you! If you have any questions or comments, please let me know below! 
