Crowdfunding strategies for social entrepreneurs
This is a great panel discussion about the use of crowdfunding to get a social-mission-driven company started (or a project developed). Jeff from Sustainablog hosted Tinia from Re-Nuble and Jen & Nick from TriplePundit, both of whom are doing crowdfunding campaigns at the moment, to talk about what’s going right, and what’s going wrong, with regard to crowdfunding the money for an innovative green campaign.
Tinia’s project involves commercial composters. It’s not your typical crowdfunding campaign, and despite getting coverage in a variety of high level sustainability news outlets like the Huffington Post, CleanTechnica, and Mother Nature Network, Re-Nuble’s crowdfunding campaign has not exactly taken off. In the video she talks about what she’s doing and why she thinks she’s had more trouble than she anticipated. Check out Re-Nuble’s crowdfunding campaign here.
Nick and Jen are doing a crowdfunding project to sponsor a series of articles on their website, TriplePundit.com, covering the sharing economy. They’ve raised over $17,000 by offering a series of rewards like carsharing credit (through Wheelz), parking space sharing credit (through Park at My House), house sharing credit (through Flat Club), and bike sharing credit. This collaborative pre-marketing campaign is as innovative as it is enticing, which explains a good amount about why 3P has been able to raise the money it has (and has a good chance of reaching its $25K goal). Check out TriplePundit’s crowdfunding campaign here.
Check out the panel discussion below and let us know what you think–why do some crowdfunding projects succeed where others don’t?
About the Author
Scott Cooney Scott Cooney (twitter: scottcooney) is an adjunct professor Sustainability in the MBA program at the University of Hawai'i, green business startup coach, author of Build a Green Small Business: Profitable Ways to Become an Ecopreneur (McGraw-Hill), and developer of the sustainability board game GBO Hawai'i. As a serial eco-entrepreneur who has started, grown and sold multiple green businesses, Scott believes that capitalism, true capitalism, can be a powerful force for change, but that our current version of capitalism is severely hampered by perverse subsidies and negative externalities that make unsustainable products less expensive than healthier alternatives. Scott is a vegetarian, an avid cyclist, and an organic gardener. Find Scott on Google Plus
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