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Thanks Indiegogo! Turks in US raise cash for anti-regime ad in NY Times

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By Noel Young, Correspondent

June 5, 2013 | 3 min read

Three Turkish professionals in the U.S. launched a crowd-sourced fundraising campaign on Indiegogo this week to buy a full-page ad in the New York Times supporting fellow Turkish citizens.

How Indiegogo helped raise the cash

This time it was nothing to do with a proposed ban on drink advertising; it was just frustration over the actions of an "autocratic" government back in Turkey.

The New York-based Turks started the campaign, driven by Twitter, on Sunday . Within hours, it became the fastest major politics funding campaigns in Indiegogo’s history, Forbes magazine reported .

Donations from 50 countries came in at over $2,500 per hour over the first day, then passed the $53,800 goal in about 21 hours. Just 36 hours after launch there was $85,000 in the pot.

The team behind the campaign aren’t activists or fundraisers; they’re self-described tech geeks who just felt compelled to act.

The youngest , Duygu Atacan, an interface designer in New York, watched protesters occupy Gezi Park in a backlash over what many see as heavy-handed actions by an autocratic regime.

“I was seeing everything going on over social media,” Atacan says. “But calling up my grandparents and finding out they hadn’t heard that anything was going on was very frightening.”

The other two members of the group are Murat Aktihanoglu, known in the NY tech community as an entrepreneur and investor, and Oltac Unsal an angel investor and adviser to the World Bank.

To counteract a lack of coverage of events in the Turkish press, the group decided on a full-page print ad in the New York Times which they could then share globally over social media. It os expected to appear in Thursday's paper.

Four thousand people voted for their favorite out of half a dozen versions of the ad. In a run-off between the two ad shown here, ”What’s happening in Turkey,” was the winner.

“It’s not about us, it’s about a crowd coming together,” Unsal told Forbes. “We want to show [the protesters], we heard you. This is an experiment, and I don’t know if it would work for a new [Turkish] constitution, but I’d like to see it.”

The group has had one problem—the campaign is still getting donations and is already over $30,000 over its goal. The three now plan to fund a film documentary about the protests. Film crews are already volunteering.

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