Which Crowdfunding Site Is Right for You?
April 14th, 2011What is crowdfunding? you may wonder, so let me explain. If someone or an organization of some type (it can be a loosly defined group or a corporation) has an idea, but not the money to see it come to fruition, they can go to the global masses to finance their plan. For example, charities are all crowd funded, as are churches. Political campaigns are crowd funded. And crowdfunding has financed independent films, music albums, and many other projects via the different crowdfunding sites online. In this short article, let’s look at some of them and what they do.
Indiegogo (http://Indiegogo.com)
Launched in 2008, Indiegogo is a very popular crowdfunding site that was founded by three partners: Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin, and Eric Schell. Each of them bring different skills to the table in terms of finance, marketing, and IT. It has seen 3,500 projects uploaded from 100 different countries around the world. So, as long as you have a bank account, you will be able to participate.
Like the bulk of crowdfunding sites online, Indiegogo is free to add your proejct to, and also like a majority of the sites online, Indiegogo takes a commission from the successful site. At the time of this writing, it’s a 4% fee, so when you’re deciding on how much money you need to complete your project, add that amount into your request.
Kickstarter (http://Kickstarter.com)
Kickstarter is a bit different from Indiegogo in one respect: If you put up a project, it must have a deadline, and if you don’t bring in your goal, you won’t get the money that has already been pledeged. For example, if you offer a project with a goal of $5,000, and get only $2,983.45 in donations, the project will have failed and you’ll get none of the funding promised. The potential backers won’t be charged for their pledge, either. So, it’s safer for backers, in a way.
But people who make donations have to understand that they’re not investors. They don’t get a say in whether or not the project is completed or when. In fact, they can’t be sure that the project ever will be completed, but here’s the thing: When people searching for crowdfuning money put a project up and never complete it, there goes their chance for getting any money from the crowd again. People do pay attention, and if you have major donations, you’re going to have some very angry people. Kickstarter makes the donator/donee relationship very clear.
Kickstarter also has deadlines. If you set a deadline of two weeks out, and haven’t collected all the funds you need by that time, you get none of them. But the cool part is that if people like your project, they can continue to contribute and you may get more funds than you requested. One crowdfunding project that was recently funded at Kickstarter asked for $10K and got $181,535. That’s all but unbelievable!
International members are permitted on Kickstarter as long as they have an Amazon Payments account. The fee for a successfully funded crowdfuning project on Kickstarted is 5%.
There are also specific crowdfunding sites for people who want to do specific things. SellaBand,com is for musicians, Quirky.com is for inventors, and CreateaFund.com is for people who want to create their own crowdfunding site.
Whether you have some money you’d like to give away or whether you have a crowdfunding idea of your own, you can participate on many levels. To learm more about putting up a crowdfunding project that succeeds, visit us at http://90MinuteCashAdvance.com
Tags: crowd funding, crowd sourcing, crowdfunding, making money online
