This week we achieved a new first: we hosted our first webinar! Anna and myself teamed up to share some of our crowdlending insight – what it is, how it works, the inspiration we’ve gotten from overseas and at home, and how to take the first steps towards launching your crowdlending campaign.
powered by crowdcastHere were some of the big takeaways from the session:
- Anna can’t pronounce my surname. It’s Greh-hin.
- Webinar’s are quiet. You’re speaking into an echo chamber. You have to imagine the rapturous applause and the thunderous laughter after every delightful joke and quip!
- A crowdlending campaign works just the same way as a regular project crowdfunding campaign – you set your $ goal, you set your campaign deadline and you’re aiming to reach your goal by your deadline by collecting pledges from your crowd. The big difference is the reward that you’re offering – paying back your pledgers with interest
- You have a big say over what your loan looks like. You choose the interest rate you want to offer, the min and max loan that you want to raise, how long the loan will last, how often you’ll pay it back and whether or not you secure your loan with assets. It’s really about giving a voice to the people that matter – your organisation and your crowd
- Having a partner in crime is helpful. It takes away some of the lone-screen loneliness
- Our two successful campaigns so far, Eat My Lunch and Denheath Desserts, were both successful partly because they let their campaigns speak to their values. For Eat My Lunch it was replicating their Buy one, Give one impact model for their loan, by offering both a financial reward (interest) and a social reward (more hungry kids fed each month) to their lenders. For Denheath Desserts, it was sharing their story of local pride and seeing almost 40% of their lenders come from the local area.
- I, em, say “em” a lot. Something to practice, or un-practice.
- The stories from overseas that have caught our ears have been wide ranging. From a local surf school in rural Ireland raising €10,000 to refurbish their school, to Mexican grub chain, Chilango offering their crowd burritos as interest and raising £2million to open three new London stores.
- The first questions to answer before diving into preparing for a crowdlending campaign are: 1) is our organisation ready to borrow; and
2) is our crowd excited to support us?
Taking our CRED assessment will help you understand if you’re in a good financial position to borrow from your crowd. Drawing up your list of the first 50 people who you believe would support you by pledging, sharing or both and listening to their perspective is the best way to begin to build confidence in your crowd. - Try not to fall off the screen when you’re in the middle of answering a question
- Give enough time for participants to type their questions.. Fill the gaps between asking them to ask, and them asking. I was told to do this by a friend before going live…and then promptly forgot.
- When you are repaying your loan, we look after the flow of money from you to each of your lenders.
- For organisations who’ve informally borrowed from their crowd before, PledgeMe.Lend can be a good way to involve that closer crowd but also get you working to spread the story to a wider audience and empower your closer crowd to help with that story-spreading.
- Most of your pledgers will be either people you know and people who know you.
- Watching it back at 3x speed is well worth a watch
We’re going to be running more webinars over the coming weeks to help spread our knowledge and crowdfunding insight to any curious campaigner
