I've backed several crowdfunded projects (nearly all of which have turned out well in the end, but also nearly all of which have been late), been involved with some of the work behind one but never run one myself - although I know a couple of people who have (on Kickstarter, to publish a book and a board game respectively) and could pass along questions if you have any specific queries?
Based on the (probably too many!) projects I've seen and followed (and sometimes backed), If you were to try and use Kickstarter or a similar platform to publish a DVD, my advice would be to:
- Use a well-known and trusted platform. I'd not heard of Crowdfunder before seeing the link on the Living Woods page after you mentioned it above, and I'd be reticent to give it my card number as a result. Kickstarter is popular and well-known, and IndieGoGo is probably the next-most-well-known option (although they have a bit of a bad name for the perception that their "flexible funding" option allows creators to run off with your money and not make anything).
- If you can possibly manage, keep the most-obvious reward (usually a copy of the product you're making) to around the £15 mark - higher than that, and it's out of impulse-purchase territory for a lot of people.
- If you have any pretence to offer your product to Americans, it would really help if you could find someone with a US bank account to officially run the project (read: hand the money off) because a lot of Americans a) are frightened of other currencies and b) have banks which refuse to let them spend their money in foreign countries, believe it or not. On one hand, the US is a big audience; on the other, they're already well-served; on the other other, they seem to have a curious fascination with British people and accents so long as they don't perceive us as being condescending, and if you can play off that, you may be in with a chance anyway!
- Offer multiple reward levels at multiple prices, ranging from a $/£1 "moral support" tier, a $20-5/£12-5 "get the DVD I'm making" tier right the way up to a £whatever "get the DVD, plus a Workshop Essentials T-Shirt, plus some stickers, plus the entire DVD back-catalogue, plus...". Think about those "and that's not all, you'll also get..." shopping-channel adverts for pen sets that come with vacuum cleaners and leather binders and office chairs and car polishing kits and so on - people are often willing to be enticed into spending some more money to get something that's sometimes even quite trivial. The come-and-get-a-weekend's-tuition suggestion would probably be a great top-tier reward! (Especially if you make cake, from what I've heard...)
- Lay out exactly what a backer will get in each reward clearly in a chart on the front page of the campaign, with a nice image mockup of the package alongside.
- Come up with some "stretch goals", so that if you reach your chosen funding level and then get even more on top, you start adding some trinkets to everyone's reward. It seems weird, but some people really do go and corral all their friends into backing your campaign in order to get a branded tote bag to carry their DVDs in or whatever. Obviously this all needs to be carefully budgeted to make sure you can actually afford to produce all the trinkets and still have enough money for the production of the DVD, and the best stretch goals are really things that upgrade the product you're trying to get funded - extra scenes, better audio quality, printed full-scale plans, etc.
- Get a sample video shot - even if it means borrowing a mate's mobile phone to record in a decent resolution, modern mobiles do surprisingly well at video - so you can run one in the intro to the KS campaign. It's not super-spiffy, but Adobe sell a cut-down version of Premier called "Premier Elements" for fairly reasonably money if you don't have any other software which can process HD video well enough to edit a demo video.
- Spend some time and/or ask a friend to help getting the KS page and the sample video nicely dressed up with some fancy and modern graphic design - the musical intros to your existing videos are fine for a DVD audience, but today's YouTube-saturated public will almost certainly prefer something snappier... and the world of YouTube woodworking is surprisingly short on decent graphic design, so a bit of production work could potentially go a long way. (I guess 'cause most YouTube woodworkers are still just one or two people running a thing from home.)
- Try and determine what time of year is best for asking woodworking people for money (I know, for example, that in board games it's generally considered a bad idea to run a campaign in January (because everyone's recovering from Christmas) or September (because there's a big gaming trade-show/convention in October and people will save their money for new releases)). Try and make sure that your campaign will end on a weekend afternoon/evening so that people have the best chance of being around to make last-minute contributions.
- Show your pre-launch campaign page around for feedback, because there'll inevitably be something that you forgot or some way in which your presentation could be improved that you just didn't think of on your own.
- Have a plan for marketing your campaign - you need to tell people about it, having it on a crowdfunding site only gives you the means to take people's money, not the audience!
- Have - and make clear to backers - a plan for actually producing the content and getting it to them. A lot of people are as wary of KS and similar sites as PeterMillard above, and a sound business plan will help assuage some of their fears. I know if I look at a campaign and it doesn't mention that the creator knows what kind of cut KS will take of the money they raise, that's a big red flag for me.
- Prepare to devote more time than you expected to running and marketing the campaign right up to the day it closes - I've not heard of a single person running a crowdfunding campaign who doesn't say it's exhausting.
However, it would also be worth considering the YouTube-media-empire options - where you get paid a cut of the advertising money YouTube makes off of your videos - although you'd probably have to move on to project videos sooner or later! I've enjoyed watching John Heisz renovating his house on YouTube - it's a bit late to monetise your workshop build (unless you want to write up a book with all those photos you took - another potential backer reward), but you surely have around-the-house projects that you could video, explain, upload and try and make a bit of cash from?
Personally I very much doubt that most people can tell the difference between 4k and 1080p on their computer/tablet/phone screens, so I wouldn't bother going any higher than HD if I were making videos for YouTube - particularly if there was a monetary cost difference for me and not just one of time spent editing and rendering video. You're making videos for people now, with the viewing equipment they have today - not magical future-computers with fantasy screens that barely exist yet.
Alternatively to YouTube, have you seen
Patreon? It's a site where you can set yourself up as a creator and people promise to pay you a small sum every time you make something. Often Patreon backers are given small rewards (bits of exclusive content, trinkets etc.) to act as an incentive. My partner backs a digital artist who produces video art walkthroughs/tutorials that you get access to if you back her for $10 a month... and this artist rakes in something ridiculous like $30k a month in this manner.
