CROWDFUNDING TRAINING TOOLBOX FOR SMALL AND MEDIUM SIZED ENTERPRISES Author: ikosom UG Partner from Interreg Central Europe Crowd-Fund- Port CE575 1 Content Crowdfunding Basics 3 The Definition of Crowdfunding 3 Crowdfunding and Alternative Financing 4 History of Crowdfunding 4 Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing 6 The different types of Crowdfunding 7 The Crowdfunding phases 8 The main parties in Crowdfunding 9 The elements of a Crowdfunding Campaign 10 The Added-Values 10 Pre-Campaigning 11 Campaigning 12 Post-Campaigning 13 Crowdfunding tools 14 Crowdfunding Best Practices from Europe 15 Crowdfunding in Croatia 15 Crowdfunding in Slovakia 15 Crowdfunding in Hungary 15 Crowdfunding in Poland 15 Crowdfunding in Slovenia 16 Crowdfunding in Germany 16 Crowdfunding in Austria 16 Crowdfunding in Italy 16 Crowdfunding in Czech Republik 16 Crowdfunding exercises 17 What happens after your Crowdfunding campaign? 18 Key challenges you have to face after the campaign 18 2 THE CROWDFUNDING TRAINING TOOLBOX The content below is part of a training material created for small and medium sized enterprises within the Crowd-Fund-Port-project, aiming to improve their access to capital through online platforms. The purpose is to explain “Crowdfunding” and “Crowdfunding campaigns”. You can access the full version of the training material in English here: https://www.crowdfundport.eu/training-material/ Crowdfunding Basics The Definition of Crowdfunding The most common definition used by the scientific community is the following: “Crowdfunding is an open call, essentially through the Internet, for the provision of financial resources either in form of donation or in exchange for some form of reward and/or voting rights in order to support initiatives for specific purposes.” (Lambert, Thomas, and Armin Schwienbacher. 2010. “An Empirical Analysis of Crowdfunding.” Available here: https://wenku.baidu.com/view/2de46229b4daa58da0114ac8.html) Image 1: Crowdfunding Definition by Karsten Wenzlaff, Wolfgang Gumpelmaier-Mach, Crowd-Fund-Port.eu is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 3 Crowdfunding and Alternative Financing Crowdfunding is part of the so called “Alternative Financing Tools”, meaning finance which is not intermediated by a bank. Image 2: Crowdfunding-Alternative-Finance by Karsten Wenzlaff, Wolfgang Gumpelmaier-Mach, Crowd-Fund- Port.eu is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. History of Crowdfunding Through the Internet this alternative form of finance became an open and transparent financing tool. Artistshare is known as the first Crowdfunding platform, starting in 2003 as a “fan- funding” website for musicians and artists in the USA. In 2006, Sellaband launched a similar platform in Europe, helping bands to communicate with their fans and getting financial support from them for recording new albums. Also in 2006, Wired-author Jeff Howe coined the word “Crowdsourcing”. In 2008 Indiegogo launched as an international platform for financing social and creative projects. Soon after that Kickstarter started its service. In many European countries, platforms opened which imitiated the user experience on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. In Germany, Startnext started with a similar concept in 2010, in Austria Respekt.net opened its platform for social projects from NGOs following a donation-based approach. In 2011 the first studies on Crowdfunding were published in Central Europe, e.g. by the Fraunhofer Institute as well as one about Crowdfunding in Germany by ikosom. A year later the first international “Crowdfunding Industry Report” was published by US-company 4 Massolution. The report analysed a few hundred platforms worldwide and gave a first picture of the industry. Also the differentiation between different types of Crowdfunding was published in this report. Since then, Crowdfunding exploded in Europe but also worldwide. To date there are more than 1,400 platforms online. Crowd-Fund-Port is an Interreg project aiming to improve skills and competences of all relevant stakeholder groups to prepare them for taking advantage of the Crowdfunding phenomena in CEE countries. www.crowdfundport.eu Image 3: Crowdfunding-Timeline by Karsten Wenzlaff, Wolfgang Gumpelmaier-Mach, Crowd-Fund-Port.eu is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 5 Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing Crowdfunding is used as a subset of the term “crowdsourcing”, originally coined by Jeff Howe, author of Wired magazine, in 2006. He described the concept of Crowdsourcing as follows: “Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer- production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.” Jeff Howe: The Rise of Crowdsourcing, 2006 in Wired – https://www.wired.com/2006/06/crowds Image 4: Crowdfunding-Crowdsourcing by Karsten Wenzlaff, Wolfgang Gumpelmaier-Mach, Crowd-Fund- Port.eu is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 6 The different types of Crowdfunding In 2012, an US-agency called Massolution conducted the first global Crowdfunding Industry Report. In the report they defined that there are at least 4 different types of Crowdfunding. These types are now widely used in research and descriptions. The different types of Crowdfunding are: Donation-based Crowdfunding: mostly used for charitable projects Reward-based Crowdfunding: mostly used for pre-selling Equity-based Crowdfunding: mostly used for high-risk investments, returns are based on profit- or exit-revenue-sharing calculations Lending-based Crowdfunding: mostly used for low-risk investments, returns are based on interest-based calculations. Image 5: Crowdfunding-Types by Karsten Wenzlaff, Wolfgang Gumpelmaier-Mach, Crowd-Fund-Port.eu is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 7 The Crowdfunding phases There are three phases: the pre-campaign phase, the campaign-phase itself and a post- campaigning-phase. Image 6: Crowdfunding-Phases by Karsten Wenzlaff, Wolfgang Gumpelmaier-Mach, Crowd-Fund-Port.eu is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 8 The main parties in Crowdfunding Most Crowdfunding Campaigns take place on platforms – the whole Crowdfunding process becomes a triangle of three parties: Platform, Project and Supporter.Each party has different responsibilities: The Project Owner is in charge of preparing and executing the campaign. The project delivers texts, images, pitch videos and other communication material to the platform. Often the project owner is also responsible for editing the campaign site. The platform acts as an intermediary between Project and Supporters. It facilitates the payments between Supporter and Project owner. The platform is also in charge in discovering payment fraud and disabling campaigns that commit fraud. To that end, the funds from the supporters are often kept in a special escrow account until the campaign has ended. The supporter enters an agreement with the project that it will transfer a certain amount of money via the platform to the project owner at the end of the campaign, given certain conditions (for instance in All-or-Nothing-Campaigns the reaching of the funding volume. Image 7: Crowdfunding-Triangle by Karsten Wenzlaff, Wolfgang Gumpelmaier-Mach, Crowd-Fund-Port.eu is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 9 The elements of a Crowdfunding Campaign The campaign combines all elements to reach the Crowdfunding Goal. Image 8: Crowdfunding-Campaigning by Karsten Wenzlaff, Wolfgang Gumpelmaier-Mach, Crowd-Fund-Port.eu is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The Added-Values Crowdfunding is not only a financing tool, but also helps SMEs in many other ways. Image 9: Crowdfunding-Added Values by Karsten Wenzlaff, Wolfgang Gumpelmaier-Mach, Crowd-Fund-Port.eu is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonComercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 10 Pre-Campaigning The Crowdfunding process consists of three phases: the pre-campaigning phase, the campaigning-phase itself and the post-campaigning-phase. But what exactly is meant when talking about pre-campaigning? Simply said: everything that can be done in advance BEFORE launching a Crowdfunding-project on a platform is part of the pre-campaigning phase. This includes conceptual and organisational tasks, like defining your goal, your budget and team, but also explore Crowdfunding in general and learn about how the tools and the platforms work and finally choose one platform that fits your purpose. The pre-campaign phase also includes preparing a communication plan and start building a crowd. Last but not least, it is about building your project page on the chosen platform, add a video, text and - if reward based - your rewards or - if equity based - your business plan. Our experience is that a successful Crowdfunding campaign needs more than just publishing your project on a Crowdfunding platform. A detailled