AngelShares launches new arts crowdfunding site
Howard Lake | 17 November 2011 | News
AngelShares is a new philanthropic crowdfunding website for arts and cultural projects in the UK. Founded by Sarah Gee, a professional fundraiser and marketer for nearly 20 years, it aims to help the arts build stronger relationships with donors.
Gee claims that it is “the only arts and cultural crowdfunding site that collects Gift Aid on donations”.
Projects can be posted to the site by organisations or individual artists, and donors are then encouraged to invest to make the projects happen. In return donors receive exclusive benefits offered by the project owners. These are up to the project creator to choose: they could be opportunities for private visits to galleries or historic houses, meetings with creative artists, or other quirky gifts or acknowledgments of their support.
Projects on the site at launch include collaborations with Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing, an appeal to save an art house cinema, and support for a craft collective of refugee and immigrant women.
Projects can choose to set an income target by a timed deadline, or simply receive on-going donations.
Gee said: “As a fundraiser, I had become fascinatedby the range of opportunities for building relationships through online giving. I could see that most of the existing crowdfunding sites were not maximizing tax efficient giving, so set out to create a site that would provide as much money as possible to support arts and cultural projects, but also build deep and long-lasting relationships with donors.
“HM Government is encouraging philanthropy in the arts, and our aim is that AngelShares will help create a band of angels who are new philanthropists and help make art happen.”
Interview with Sarah Gee of AngelShares
UK Fundraising’s Howard Lake met Sarah Gee a month or so before launch to find out about the service.
www.angelshares.com
Advertisement
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.