Crowdfunding for beginners

Hallo me again…. doing a bit of multi-tasking. For my day job I run a small-scale touring theatre company which takes big-scale thinking to pull off let me tell you. Today I’ve attended an online webinar hosted by Spacehive and put the washing on whilst thinking in the back part of my brain about the next bit of budgeting/fundraising I’m planning for work.

This webinar was great and free and all of us WEP people who are planning to campaign or run in next year’s council elections (yes whatever happens on 4th May and 8th June, there will be some more elections next year)… will be needing to find support  from a range sources.

I particularly like crowdfunding because it provides a real connection between the backers and the campaign. A well-run and well-researched crowdfunding campaign enhances and informs the project as it grows. A successful crowdfunding exercise achieves much more than filling the piggy bank (as delightful as that always is.)

It can help formulate the ideas even further by eliciting feedback, it can reveal further networks and connections, it can challenge and kick the tyres of your thinking, it gives you people to have a dialogue with and it helps you build a crowd of people that you can visualise, and helps build confidence and trust in the community around you. That notional crowd cheering you on is often the fuel you need to make a project (in this case your campaign) happen.

So I really recommend you spend an hour watching/listening to this webinar and share it with your branch…. it might not be an election campaign crowd fund you set up. It might give you an inspiration for a local campaign or stunt you can create to improve your area through a women’s equality lens and get the crowd to support it and raise the profile of WEP and women’s equality thinking/action.