Check Out These 10 Crowdfunding Platforms for Recession Funding You Should Know About

These 10 crowdfunding platforms for recession funding have been catching our eye lately.

Have you been thinking of crowdfunding your business? There are several recession crowdfunding platforms out there with differing requirements. These are the recession crowdfunding platforms you should know.

Getting working capital to grow your business doesn’t have to be hard. Many companies these days turn to recession crowdfunding platforms. A lot of these options will work for startup ventures. The last 5 of our top 10 crowdfunding platforms for recession funding are a bit more obscure. But first, here are a few tips to help you with your campaign.

Quick Tips About Crowdfunding: Your Campaign

Your campaign’s success is far from guaranteed. But you can capitalize on a few proven approaches. First off, consider these four emotions that you need to engender in donors. Use one or more of them as the focal point of your campaign as a starting point.

Scarcity

If you have thousands of something or other to supply as a perk, it will not be as desirable. If you only have a few copies of a specific perk, that will instill a feeling in some potential donors that they just have to have it. Do this with your larger donation levels only. Therefore, you might want to establish a perk/donation level system similar to this:

Donation Level	Number of Perks
Lowest	1,000
Second lowest	500 (reward also incorporates lowest level reward)
Second highest	50 (reward also includes two lower level rewards)
Highest	10 (reward also incorporates all other levels’ rewards)

Remember: a lot of variety in physical perks will make fulfillment a lot harder, so don’t work with greater than maybe five separate varieties of physical perks– and even that is pushing it.

Building scarcity into your perk tiers is a great way to add perceived value to the perks which attach to your higher level donations.

Urgency

The first two and last two days of a crowdfunding campaign are pretty much always the days with the biggest payoffs. Often, making the campaign longer doesn’t make you significantly more money. So why not open a campaign for only a week? Do not let donors feel they can contribute any old time they feel like it.

Novelty

If you are offering the same old thing as a thousand other places, no one will want to make a donation. Your widget has got to be hotter, cheaper, lighter, or more resilient. Your food should be reduced in calories or higher in nutrition or better-tasting. Or your professional services need to be delivered better or quicker, by friendlier and more skilled employees. And they should come with a money back guarantee your competition does not provide.

Not sure about your own personal creativity? Then talk to creative people you know, and listen to what they say. They might have amazing ideas and it certainly never hurts to ask.

Cool factor

Is your product a work of art? Is it a new, gadget-like innovation? Then it may have a coolness aspect which you can construct your campaign around. But do not be discouraged if it isn’t! These days, some of the most unforgettable advertising campaigns are based around a product the majority of people found uninspiring not ten years ago– insurance.

So house flipping could boast a cool factor if you show off flipping in a neighborhood where a celebrity lives or once lived. A nail shop can show off coolness with exciting new designs not found anywhere else. And a long haul trucking company can showcase a cool factor with some of the more unusual products you’ve hauled.

Quick Tips About Crowdfunding: Crowdfunding Strategy

A few words on strategy:

Your Pitch Video Must be Great

Use an expert to film it and develop the script. Can’t pay for experts? Then try schools, both pupils and educators. Your script doesn’t need to be verbatim but you should have points you wish to make and not babble. Write a script and stay with it. This is not the right time to ad-lib.

If You Have Tangible Evidence of Your Project, then Show it

Put it in your campaign video and on your campaign page. A number of people are naturally doubtful about crowdfunding. An image and a tangible thing will go a long way to assuring them that your project isn’t vaporware.

Manners Matter

Say please, thank you, and you’re welcome to everyone. Use these magic words in your pitch and in your communications with your donors, even in the cover letters you deliver with your perks (even internet perks can include a cover email). You don’t need to be servile, but you absolutely must be diplomatic.

Stretch Goals Should be a Combination of Readily Achievable and Pie in the Sky

If you are crowdfunding for $100,000, a reasonably easy to attain stretch goal is $125,000. Pie in the sky going to be more like $300,000.

Make it abundantly clear what you will do with any added money if you are fortunate enough to get it. Will you buy the property your startup is in? Employ five more people? Replace your old equipment? Launch a brand-new market on another continent? Let your donors know what you are pursuing, so they can dream with you.

Be Gracious if Your Campaign Fails

You may not receive enough to make an appreciable dent in your funding requirements. So give your donors a stake in and an inside look at your business. This will enable them to feel invested. Even if your crowdfunding campaign concludes does not mean a donor cannot send a check or buy extra goods or services. If that happens, then politeness is essential.

Line up the Most Significant and Most Dependable Donors You Can Before You Start

Tell these people to postpone handing over their $1,000 or $10,000 donation till you start your campaign.

And ask them (nicely!) to release their donation during either the first or last day of the campaign.

Make the most of the novelty factor of the first day of the campaign, or the urgency factor of the very last. Just like a busker with a couple of her own bucks in her hat, to motivate people to toss in a few bucks for a song, you want your biggest donors to show other donors that they believe in you and in your project. And you also want them to suggest your other donors that they had best get in on investing in your startup before the opportunity ends.

Share Your Campaign on Social Media

And ask your family and friends to do so, too. Tweet the link. Incorporate it as a Facebook status. Make it a Tumblr post or a snap on Snapchat or create a blog post about it. Ask your network to publicize the link.

The most effective technique to get your network to help you out is by helping them in return. If your relative’s rock band is on Facebook, share their page, or tweet about it.

Be a collaborative member of your own personal network. Then your contacts will be more likely to help you out when you ask.

And rerun these social media postings. Considering time zones and our all-too hectic lives, people may not see your message the first time around. Mix it up and deliver it at odd hours. You can oftentimes use scheduling software such as Hootsuite for this. This includes what is the middle of the night where you live.

In Part 1, we covered 5 great crowdfunding sites you should have on your radar. Here are 5 more to round out 10 crowdfunding platforms for recession funding you should know about. But now we’re going a little more obscure.

More About Our Favorite 10 Crowdfunding Platforms for Recession Funding: 6. GoGetFunding

GoGetFunding has been around since 2011. It lets fundraisers keep the money they raise, whether they meet their target or not. Flexible funding can be a great option if your company is a somewhat unproven idea and you are unsure whether you will be able to meet your funding needs.

GoGetFunding charges a fee of 6.9%. This somewhat high fee includes both the platform fee and the payment processing fee. Hence this option is actually somewhat more cost-effective than many other crowdfunding options.

What frustrates you the most about funding your business? Tell us in the comments.

More About Our Favorite 10 Crowdfunding Platforms for Recession Funding: 7. Crowdfunder

Crowdfunder works as what’s called equity crowdfunding. This is where investors purchase equity in promising companies.

Crowdfunder treats its campaigns as deals, and its donors as ‘investors’. Pay a one-time fee to make your campaign discoverable.

Starter listings are $299/month. Premium listings are $499/month.  Premium Plus is $999/month.

Types of business which cannot use Crowdfunder include:

• Guns/Firearms
• Tobacco/Cigarettes/Cannabis
• Pyramid Marketing
• Adult Products & Entertainment
• Gambling
• Contests and Raffles
• Illegal Substances/Drugs

More About Our Favorite 10 Crowdfunding Platforms for Recession Funding: 8. Fundable

Fundable is a business crowdfunding platform which lets companies raise capital from investors, customers, and friends. Create an equity or a rewards-based campaign.

In their first year, they generated over $80 million in funding commitments.

Fundable allows equity campaigns.

They charge $179 per month to fundraise. Fees on rewards are: 3.5% + 30¢ per transaction. They do not charge success fees.

More About Our Favorite 10 Crowdfunding Platforms for Recession Funding: 9. AngelList

At AngelList, you can invest in a startup or even get a job at one.  So it can be, essentially, an index fund for startups. Hence if a larger, established company wanted to offer retirement investment opportunities geared to investing in startup companies, AngelList would be a place where they could go.

Hence AngelList is not exactly a business crowdfunding site. Rather, it is a way to connect investors to an array of startup investment opportunities. So investors can try for returns on FinTech or even cryptocurrencies. One of their better-known investments is a business administration site called HoneyBook.

What frustrates you the most about funding your business? Tell us in the comments.

More About Our Favorite 10 Crowdfunding Platforms for Recession Funding: 10. Fundly

Not quite one of our 10 crowdfunding platforms for recession funding, Fundly does allow for crowdfunding for creative ventures. Therefore, if your business has a creative bent, you might find a home there.

Fundly imposes no minimum amount to fundraise in order to keep any raised funds. You can generally withdraw payments within 24 – 48 hours of the donation. They also allow for automatic and scheduled transfers. It is free to create and share an online fundraising campaign.

However, Fundly will deduct a 4.9% fee from each donation you get. A credit card processing fee of 3% is also taken out from each donation. Plus there are nonspecific automatic discounts for larger campaigns.

What frustrates you the most about funding your business? Tell us in the comments.

Takeaways

So for small business owners who want to crowdfund, it pays (quite literally!) to read the fine print. Large and well-known sites such as Kickstarter may get more attention from donors. This is often because they are better known. However, smaller sites on our list of 10 crowdfunding platforms for recession funding – like Fundable – might offer better rates and more personal service.

In the end, though, it is all about the funding. This is true for all of the recession crowdfunding platforms you should know. If your company can meet its goal, then any platform is going to be terrific. If your business cannot, then you will probably do better looking for another form of funding. This includes building business credit. Discover this new way to get funding for your business.

 

 

 

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