Choosing the Right Crowdfunding Site
Are you planning to start a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for your cause, upcoming project or convert your concept into a real product? It can be a difficult and sometimes very frustrating to chose the right crowdfunding website because not all crowdfunding websites are created equally. Some of these websites are categorized as “general” where you can raise money for any type of project including asking for donations like you can do on MyEFunder, Indiegog, RocketHub and StartsSomeGood etc. Where there are many websites which are limited to specific types of projects like Appbackr which is designed to raise money for software application design projects etc. So how do you decide which crowdfunding website would be best for you and help you raise the maximum funds.
The following are different ways to choose the right crowdfunding website. This will not just increase your chances to make your campaign successful it will also give the most effective results, for example fan following, product promotion and less fee, to name a few.
Know your project or cause:
The first thing before you start searching a crowdfunding website, you need to know about your project or cause. Is it a local based project or you want to raise money from all part of the world? What type of people would get benefits from it? What is your target market? This will help you to decide the type of crowdfunding website would be best for you.
Know crowdfunding websites
Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will list of many crowdfunding websites. Visiting all of these sites and learning their terms and condition, their process to pay out funds and how to start campaign can take lot of time but this step is necessary and important. If not, you may end up choosing the wrong crowdfunding platform for your project or cause, which might be the most popular site but not the best place for your crowdfunding campaign. It is a very time consuming process to evaluate each and every crowdfunding website but well worth it. To make it easy for you, we have listed the following basic information about some of the top crowdfunding websites:
- MyEFunder.com: Personal causes and any project including both creative and non-creative, equity crowdfunding, micro peer-to-peer lending, and real estate crowdsourcing. Both US and International Crowdfunding. MyEFunder is free to sign up, free to start a campaign and does not charge a fee for it’s services. In addition to being very user friendly and easy to promote and maintain.
- Kickstarter: Only for creative projects and you must be based in Unites States.
- Indiegogo: You can start any type of project here including charity and donation.
- RocketHub: Open to all projects but new ideas are most appreciated.
- StartSomeGood: Website for international users which is opened for any kind of project.
- Lucky Ant: Open to all hyper-local projects; must be locally based.
- Appbackr: Only software and application related projects accepted.
- Wefunder: If you are looking for equity funds, then Wefunder is ideal for you.
- NewJelly: A special crowdfunding website to promote artists around the world
- Cofolio: Looking funds for small business? Cofolio help to raise money for small business.
- Peerbackers: A crowdfunding site for entrepreneurs “and their dreams”.
Explore crowdfunding website:
Once you know about the different websites, the next step is to rank them on the bases of their features, options, fee and business model structure etc. Explore similar projects and what types of projects got the most funding on these websites. You may have your own criteria to rank each of these website. You will also find blogs and commentary about the sites out there that can provide you with some guidance and insight.
