All posts tagged: crowd sourcing

3 Solid Reasons Why Kickstarter Money Is Far Better Than Foundation Grants

Published by Deepa Chaudhary

Every early entrepreneur dreams of getting funding especially funding free from constraints. Flexibility and freedom to do what it takes to build the startup can be amazingly empowering. With dreams comes some amount of dread in the form of the magical investor and their mysterious ways. New articles are published every day about approaching investors, talking terms and long fund raising cycles. What if I told you there is another way an enchanting path that gets you to your funding dream only on the basis of your idea or product, the demand for it and some creative marketing. I present Kickstarter and the rise of  crowdfunding. I must admit, until now I never fully understood the power of crowdfunding and how its so much better than traditional funders like Foundations — at least not until I spoke to Meredith of Ricefield Collective. Meredith recently raised a close to $100k dollars using Kickstarter to set up a social enterprise to help the indigenous people of the Philippines. Her idea was to teach these indigenous folk who have been …

More than Me Hits its Fundraising Target with 60 Investors on 33needs.com

Published by Deepa Chaudhary

More Than Me, a Liberia based social venture is the first to meet its fundraising target on 33needs.com – 60 people have pooled in varied amounts from as little as $5 to fund More Than Me’s new social venture. Their ask was compelling – We’re starting a company, More Than Me, to manufacture and design laptop cases (made by local Liberian women), initially to be sold at college campus stores. We’ll use profits from sales to fund the education of girls. 50% of the kids in Liberia, West Africa are not in school — and more than half of them are girls. Without education, these girls have limited future opportunities and social mobility, thus perpetuating the cycle of poverty. More than Me’s target was to raise US$3000 and they have ended up raising a little bit more than the goal in just 30 days from 60 people. Katie Meyler, Founder of More than Me was thrilled to have her venture financed this quickly – Boom!!! We did it — or, more like, you did it! …

Groupon’s G-Team Offers a Great Deal to Nonprofits

Published by Deepa Chaudhary

Groupon has revolutionized the way people consume goods and services through its innovative daily deals / collective buying model. In just 3 years since its inception Groupon has expanded to over 500 cities in 35 countries and has a subscriber base of over 51 million which it hopes to grow to 150 million by end of 2011. With millions of people getting hooked to their daily deals, Groupon is committed to provide its userbase a great way to discover their own cities and fun and meaningful ways to get involved in bettering their communities. In July 2010, Groupon launched G-Team, their philanthropic initiative which aims to harness the power of their growing subscriber base and their killer business model of ‘collective buying’ for community good. About G-Team G-Team are social action campaigns around fundraising and civic engagement based on the similar collective action model as of Groupon. While Groupon makes it easier for people to get great deals only if certain number of people buy the deal, G-Team campaigns makes it easier to create real …

33needs : A Brand New Way to Raise Funds to Fix the World’s Biggest Problems

Published by Deepa Chaudhary

33needs is an online platform that allows social enterprises (for-profit companies in the business of doing good) to raise funds from people anywhere in the world. The funders are the everyday common people who put in small amounts of money to help social businesses to kick start or scale. This new fundraising model called crowd-financing already exist in other sectors (kickstarter.com for creative projects – music, flim, art) but for the first time 33needs brings this new way of raising funds to the social space, giving social enterprises a powerful platform to raise capital and for the investors a simple, direct way to do good by investing in social businesses. The 33needs model is simple: social enterprises list their projects along with a short video to pitch their idea, set a fundraising goal and an offer of sharing financial rewards for a limited period with the investors. They get a 30 or 60 days window on the platform to raise funds. If the goal is reached by the deadline, then everyone’s charged. If the goal’s …