crowdfunding – Visibility Marketing

Last week I wrote a blog entitled, “Need Money? Try Crowdfunding“. The Small Business Administration (SBA) offers many free online training courses to help business owners succeed. One of their latest training videos is called, “Introduction to Crowdfunding for Entrepreneurs.”

SBA’s Office of Entrepreneurship Education provides this self-paced training exercise as an overview of crowdfunding (also commonly referred to as ‘crowd financing’ or ‘crowd sourced capital’). The highlighted next steps at the conclusion of the program will help you apply what you have learned and engage you in the process of crowdfunding.

The course is free, online and takes 30 minutes. If you have time, you can click here to participate – http://www.sba.gov/sba-learning-center/training/491091. System Requirements: Acrobat Reader, Adobe Flash Player. Classes will not play in iOS devices due to Flash limitations.

On several occasions, I’ve read about people, even celebrities, using crowdfunding to raise money for entrepreneurial ventures and social causes.

Crowdfunding is the collective effort of people networking and donating their money to support efforts by other people and organizations. Crowdfunding is used to support many initiatives including disaster relief, company startups, nonprofit campaigns, political campaigns, artists, musicians and a host of other individuals looking to get their project off the ground.

Chance Barnett, a Forbes Contributor, wrote a blog back in May entitled, “Top 10 Crowdfunding Sites for Fundraising.” In this article, he lists his top 10 as:

Kickstarter
Indiegogo
Crowdfunder
RocketHub
Crowdrise
Somelend
Appbackr
AngelList
Invested.in
Quirky

Chance goes into detail about each of the programs here.

There are a number of other crowdfunding resources such as Causes.com, Pozible.com, Razoo.com, Giveforward.com, and a few others.

Before you get excited about crowdfunding, most of these offer free account set ups, but take a small percentage of the fundraising capital. Also, keep in mind that most of these programs do not award you the money unless you have met your stated goal. As always, do your homework and make sure you are getting the best deal possible.

So if you need money to fund a project, help a nonprofit or to get your business off the ground, consider crowdfunding. There might be program out there that’s just for you.