Crowdfunding has become a powerful tool for podcasters looking to fund their projects, but how exactly does it work? In this interview we speak to The Europeans, an award-winning team of independent journalists with extensive experience of crowdfunding. For their latest mini-series podcast they chose 4fund.com - find out why!
What is The Europeans Podcast?
Keeping up with European politics can feel overwhelming. In an age of clickbait headlines and social media posts filled with statements taken out of context, finding a reliable source of information isn’t easy. That’s why professional, rigorous journalism is more important than ever.
The Europeans is an independent media outlet dedicated to cutting through the noise! This award-winning team brings fresh, engaging and entertaining perspectives to the continent's most important stories, making complex issues easier to digest in their weekly weekly podcast.
What started in 2017 as a side project between two long-distance friends, journalist Katy Lee in Paris and opera singer Dominic Kraemer in Amsterdam, has since grown into a full-fledged team. They're now joined by Katz Laszlo, an Amsterdam-based producer who explores how politics and climate change affect people's lives; Warsaw-based reporter Wojciech Oleksiak, who focuses on human rights in Central and Eastern Europe; composer Jim Barne, the musical mastermind behind the show's distinctive sound; and designer Rosa ter Kuile (RTiiiKA), who gives The Europeans its distinctive visual style.
Over the past eight years, their work has been featured in The Financial Times, The New York Times and The Observer, among others. The Guardian has described them as “gleefully eclectic, intimate, quirky and invariably informative.” Whether they’re investigating the ethics of oat milk or amplifying unheard voices in European society, the team is passionate about telling the stories that often go overlooked.
Now, they’ve taken on an exciting new challenge: a brand-new podcast series launching this year!
A New Crowdfunded Mini-Series
'Who Does It Best?' is a mini-series exploring how different European countries tackle some of today’s most pressing issues. Through fair and independent reporting, they’ll investigate which country has the smartest, most effective and most imaginative policies on three key topics: childcare, housing and drug policy.
The series has been made possible through a crowdfunding campaign on 4fund.com, which has already raised over €15,000! We had the pleasure of speaking with the team about what inspired the series and why the support of their listeners means everything.
From Idea to Crowdfunded Podcast – An Interview with The Europeans
Tell us how the whole idea for the podcast started: Where did it come from? Katy and Dominic started The Europeans in 2017. They both wanted to listen to a podcast about European politics that wasn’t dry, boring and mostly aimed at people working in Brussels. They couldn’t find one, so they decided to start one themselves! Like a lot of Europeans, both of them also found themselves in a strange situation where they sometimes knew more about US politics than the politics of neighbouring countries. The podcast was their way of trying to fix that, along with having fun by interviewing people who are doing all kinds of interesting things around the continent, from artists to chefs.Please give us more details about your new podcast series. What is it going to be about? ‘Who Does It Best?’ is going to be a three-part podcast series, released in autumn 2025, that investigates which country in Europe has the best and most creative policies when it comes to three issues that shape our lives in a big way: housing crises, childcare systems, and attitudes towards recreational drugs and addiction. We are living in a quite depressing moment in world politics, and this is our way of tackling things with a more constructive approach – looking at policies that touch our day-to-day lives, and also actually work, in the hope of encouraging our governments to copy each other when they have good ideas.
Perhaps you could give us a behind-the-scenes look at how the work is going so far?It’s going great! So far, we’ve mostly been researching how these issues are approached when it comes to the policies of various governments around Europe, and for each of them, it’s a huge range. Something we're realising every day is just how incredibly vast the "umbrella" topics we pitched to our listeners are – housing, childcare and drugs. Each of these topics could easily fill an entire series on its own. So, a lot of our work at the present is figuring out what would be most useful and interesting for our listeners and which countries have the most effective policies. This is also where we want to invite our supporters to join the discussion, letting us know how well the policies work where they are, including based on their personal experiences. This, we think, will help us narrow down these topics.
Live show at the Amsterdam Podcastfestival 2021. Photo: Elisabetta Agyeiwaa
(source: https://www.europeanspodcast.com/media-assets)
Many people are unaware of how much it costs to maintain a podcast. Could you say how much time and money it requires?
We make two types of podcast at The Europeans: the chatty, conversation-based ones you’ll hear on our feed most weeks and the much more ambitious narrative or investigative episodes that we tend to make just a few of each year after working on them for many months. Even the chatty ones take far more work than most people realise – we don’t just turn up and talk into a microphone! It’s incredibly important to us and our reputation that our podcasts are well-researched and fact-checked, particularly when we’re talking about the domestic politics of countries that are not our own. The costs of making a narrative or investigative episode will be, at the very least, six times that of a normal episode, given all the research time, scripting time, sound design and often travel costs that go into making them. In the US, budgets for these kinds of projects often start at €15,000 - €20,000 per episode, which might seem surprising to an outsider. However, once you see the amount of editing, fact-checking, and additional reporting that goes into creating an award-winning piece, you start to realise that such quality is incredibly labour-intensive and, therefore, expensive. Also, radio documentaries are still vastly cheaper than film.
(source: https://www.europeanspodcast.com/media-assets)
And how did you come up with crowdfunding as a way of funding your journalism?
In the beginning, the podcast was a personal project that we made entirely for free, but as it became more successful and took up more time, we soon realised this was unsustainable. For several years now we’ve been funding The Europeans via Patreon, where listeners can support us with regular donations each month to help us cover our running costs. But generous as our listeners are, the money we’ve been able to raise in this way hasn’t been enough to cover the costs of making our more ambitious narrative and investigative episodes, which we both love making and are important for us to make as they’re often the best at gaining major attention and helping us to grow our audience. For these episodes, we’ve previously had to rely on grant funding from the European Cultural Foundation, Journalismfund Europe and other organisations. However, the competition for these grants has become increasingly tough in recent years as funding is in short supply, so we’ve often found ourselves spending many hours on a lengthy application process, only to be unsuccessful. What’s more, we are not eligible for most national pots of money because of language restrictions, so we only have a few pan-European funds to choose from. The loyalty of our listeners is our best asset – and the percentage of our listeners who donate and engage regularly is something other outlets, even ones much bigger than ours, frequently envy. So, for this series, we decided to lean into that best asset, and try a different approach: using 4fund.com to crowdfund the money needed specifically to create our next mini-series, in contrast to Patreon, which we use to raise funding for our general production costs across the entire year.
While you’re regularly funded by Patreon supporters, this fundraiser on 4fund.com seems like a different experience. How does it compare to your usual approach to crowdfunding?
Launching our crowdfunding campaign on 4fund.com honestly felt like a leap into the unknown. We were so worried that people would hate our idea or not want to contribute because we already ask them every week on the podcast to chip in to cover our production costs. But to our surprise and delight, there was immediately a fantastic response from our listeners, and we were amazed by how quickly we met our target.
This is the first time we’ve produced a limited podcast series with 100% crowdfunding: along with the €15,000 we’ve raised via 4fund.com, we’re also adding in €14,500 raised via Patreon along with €8,000 gifted to The Europeans by an incredibly generous couple of listeners. Since ‘Who Does It Best?‘ is the first series we’ve made that is 100% funded by our listeners, we feel that our audience are our editors and bosses for this series. So it’s important for us that we’re accountable to them about how things are going, and we’ll be sharing lots more updates about how the production is progressing than we normally might do.
Why did you choose 4fund.com for your next crowdfunding campaign?
We looked at a few different options, particularly Kickstarter, which is a familiar name for many in the English-speaking world. However, we were very dismayed by the high percentage of the money we raised that we would have had to hand over to the platform. Of course, it’s reasonable for companies to charge a fee for the use of their platforms, but we’re a very small organisation, and every cent really matters for this project.
Funnily enough, despite one of our producers, Wojciech, being Polish and living in Warsaw, it was our Dutch producer Katz who was tasked with finding the best platform for us and suggested 4fund.com as a frontrunner. It wasn't until she presented the rest of the team with her findings that Wojciech realised that 4fund is the international version of Zrzutka.pl, which he knew as a household name for crowdfunding in Poland. After the rest of our team took a look around the 4fund website, we were quickly convinced that this would be the best option for us as we’d be able to keep every cent we raised.
Producers Katz Laszlo and Wojciech Oleksiak. Photo: The Europeans
(source: https://www.europeanspodcast.com/media-assets)
You've built an incredible community. How do you feel about the strong connection you've made with your supporters and their influence on the growth of your podcast?
Journalism can be a pretty thankless job, and honestly, the main reason we keep making The Europeans is that we have such a kind, thoughtful, enthusiastic audience. Even when we get an email that’s critical of the way we’ve covered an issue, it’s usually written in an extremely gentle way, which is incredibly rare in 2025!
Most podcasts that have survived as long as ours are either hosted by celebrities or are produced by large media outlets that can pour funding into their production. The fact that we’ve been able to keep The Europeans going for more than seven years now is down to the listeners who finance us. But it’s also down to listeners helping to spread the word about the show. In our earliest years, especially, when we had no money at all to spend on promoting the show, we relied entirely on word of mouth to grow our audience. And given that it can be quite hard to discover new podcasts, we still find today that a lot of new listeners discover The Europeans because a friend recommended the show to them. So we often tell our listeners that if they’re able to support us financially, that’s amazing, and we’re hugely grateful for it. But if they don’t have any spare cash, telling their friends is a brilliant way to help us too – and clearly, many of them seem to be doing this.
Besides your fantastic listeners, what else inspires you to produce new episodes and series?
Europe is an endlessly complex and fascinating continent, which, luckily for u,s means we’re unlikely to run out of inspiration for new episodes and series anytime soon. Every week, members of our team will drop an article from one European country or another about something that’s been happening onto our chat, saying something along the lines of, ‘Wouldn’t this make a great special episode?’ At this rate, we’ll probably be making podcasts for the rest of the century!
Do you have any advice for people who would want to start crowdfunding for their projects?
Bounce the idea off some friends and loved ones before you launch it. By the time we actually launched our crowdfunding page on 4fund.com, it had been the subject of discussions with various trusted people around us who helped us to hone the concept, which was really useful for making sure that we had managed to explain what we were trying to do as clearly and enticingly as possible.
The other piece of advice is: don’t let your fear of failure stop you from launching a crowdfunding initiative! We were so worried that this campaign was going to be a total flop. If we’d been held back by this kind of thinking, we’d never be making this series now. You never know unless you try.
Could you give us a sneak peek of future projects?
We can’t say much about it yet, but we are about to start collaborating in a big way with various radio stations across Europe, which we’re really excited about! We’ll be telling our listeners more about this in a special little episode soon. Stay tuned!
'Who Does It Best?' – Crowdfunding Success
A new three-part podcast series from The Europeans launches in autumn 2025. This ambitious project has been made possible thanks to a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign on 4fund.com, where they've already exceeded their €15,000 target. But the journey doesn't end there. Their campaign is still open, meaning backers can continue to contribute and help them achieve even more and become even more financially independent.Follow The Europeans on their Instagram, Facebook and X profiles to get the latest updates on their journalism work!
