Crowdfunder aims to raise £1 million – through a crowdfunding campaign
Howard Lake | 11 November 2015 | News
Crowdfunding platform Crowdfunder has launched a £1 million campaign to help it expand to support over 150,000 social enterprise, charity and business projects across the UK.
Its equity fundraising campaign is running on Crowdcube.
Phil Geraghty, Managing Director of Crowdfunder said:
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“Since 2012 we have grown Crowdfunder by a factor of 10, and become the UK’s number crowdfunding platform – raising over £10 million for thousands of social enterprises, charities, businesses and individuals across the UK.
“We currently have 975 projects looking for £12.4million on the site. Of the thousands of projects that get added to the site every month, only about 30% are suitable for rewards crowdfunding. We want to offer the remaining 70% other funding and support opportunities to include community shares, equity, loans and other partner services. This investment would enable us to turn more of those ideas into reality.”
To date Crowdfunder has successfully raised over £657k for social enterprise projects. £66,000 was raised for Newquay Orchard, including match fund from The Ashenden Trust and Duchy of Cornwall. Manchester’s FC United raised over £50,000 for new kit and The Secret Pillow project raised over £30,000 to to help empower women through enterprise.
More recently it has launched community shares on the platform, successfully raising £662,000 for community shares projects, including £263,000 for Positive News.
“Crowdfunder’s move into Community Shares is a game changer” said Dave Boyle, Director of the Community Shares Company, Crowdfunder’s partner for community shares.
“There’s a steep rise in demand and support for bottom-up community enterprises, and Crowdfunder’s platform is by far and away the best in the country to help groups raise the money they need. But we can do more – and so if you want to make an investment that could deliver a social return, Crowdfunder’s raise could be attractive for you.”
“Having directly supported over 2,000 social entrepreneurs and innovators, we can see the value that crowdfunding brings to the social enterprise sector” said Alex Soskin, Managing Director of Impact Hub, Westminster.
“Many of these organisations have to work harder to find the funding model that works for them due to their focus on producing both social outcomes and financial returns. We are happy to hear about this announcement from Crowdfunder, which can complement our existing crowdfunding accelerator (Raise Impact), and other services in support of social enterprises across the UK.”
Crowdfunder’s unique and proven business model connects people and projects to partners who can offer them funding and support. Current Crowdfunder partners include Plymouth University, Angus Council and Virgin StartUp.
Rob Love Chairman said:
“With this investment, we want to grow the company by six times, and help over 150,000 projects across the next three years. By the third year, we’d like to be raising over £100million for projects across the UK.”
The crowdfunding campaign has been launched on Crowdcube.com, the world’s leading equity crowdfunding platform and you can find out more here: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/invest
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About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.