Who Can Use Crowdfunding to Get the Money They Need?

vanessa — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 18:16:38 +0000

What is crowdfunding? you may wonder, so let me explain. If someone or an organization of some type (it can be a loosly defined group or a corporation) has an idea, but not the money to see it come to fruition, they can go to the global masses to finance their plan. For example, charities are all crowd funded, as are churches. Political campaigns are crowd funded. And crowdfunding has financed independent films, music albums, and many other projects via the different crowdfunding sites online. In this short article, let’s look at some of them and what they do.

Indiegogo.com

Launched in 2008, Indiegogo is a very popular crowdfunding site that was founded by three partners: Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin, and Eric Schell. Each of them bring different skills to the table in terms of finance, marketing, and IT. It has seen 3,500 projects uploaded from 100 different countries around the world. So, as long as you have a bank account, you will be able to participate.

Like the majority of crowdfunding sites online, Indiegogo is free to add your proejct to, and also like a majority of the sites online, Indiegogo takes a commission from the successful site. At the time of this writing, it’s a 4% fee, so when you’re deciding on how much money you need to complete your project, add that amount into your request.

Kickstarter.com

Another very popular crowdfunding site is Kickstarter. Unlike Indiegogo, your project on Kickstarter will have a particular deadline. You have only that amount of time to collect all of the donations you’re requesting, or the project fails and you get no money at all. The upside for contributors is that their credit cards won’t be charged. The upside for the project owner is that deadlines usually help people to take action faster.

And that’s a differentiation that Kickstarter makes plain. People who donate to your crowdfunding project are not investors. They have no say in how the project goes from the time you get the funding until it is complete. They don’t get their money back for any reason, and it’s up to the person who put the crowdfunding project up to fulfill on the promises made in return for donations.

On the other hand, your project will run on Kickstarter until the dealine you set for it to be fully funded. If your project is funded early, people can still donate and you’ll end up with more than you asked for. For example, a recent project for social marketing software asked for a mere $10,000 and came away with $181,535!

International members are permitted on Kickstarter as long as they have an Amazon Payments account. The fee for a successfully funded crowdfuning project on Kickstarted is 5%.

There are also specific crowdfunding sites for people who want to do specific things. SellaBand,com is for musicians, Quirky.com is for inventors, and CreateaFund.com is for people who want to create their own crowdfunding site.

You can participate in crowdfunding on many different levels and you can get funding for just about any project you want to get funded. To learn more about any of the issues involved with crowdfunding and how it works, visit us at http://90MinuteCashAdvance.com.

WHAT IF WE ARE GOD – Threat To Democracy In The 21st Century

Writer — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:37:19 +0000

The current political climate is showing a political will that is struggling to effectively come to terms with global warming, let alone deal with it. Whilst a serious threat of this nature is a first for civilisation, politicians struggle with it because it can directly conflict with the agendas of those who helped them into power – and it is those same agenda’s which seem to be contributing to global warming in the first place.

The finance required to fund an election attempt in the 21st century is now of a size that can only be raised in the corporate sector. (It also raises the issue of whether these financial implications inhibit the true application of the democratic process for anyone seeking office, because of onerous financial considerations.)

As far as the leadership of any political party is concerned, raising financial support produces the problem of divided loyalties between sponsors and electors. A solution seems to have been found in the introduction of the “Party Line”, which effectively fudges the issues of local democracy by confining activity to the Party Agenda.

Political parties can demonstrate control over their members through adherence to the Party Line. This in turn provides corporate sponsors with the confidence to invest and support an organisation that can manage its direction and any changes to that direction. In so doing it can deliver on policies which are capable of supporting corporate views and desires.

For business to invest in anything, be it new equipment, staff or sponsorship, it needs to be sure that there is an acceptable level of return on that investment, whatever that might be. That is the nature of business and we should have no problem with that discipline.

However the actual democratic process seems to be under increasing threat from the powerful influences the corporate sector can now wield, further exacerbated by the acceleration of the doctrines of Capitalism across the globe.

The challenge lies in the shift in people power that this process seems to be implementing. We now have a reduction in voters at the ballot boxes because of apathy we are told, but a greater assertion of control over the corporate sector through consumerism.

Companies react to the will of there customers and this in turn causes movement by political reaction to meet corporate need. Somehow the corporate sector has managed to inject itself between the politician and the voter, enabling it to increasingly introduce corporate values and the dictates of profit into our everyday life.

Whilst consumerism operates in a similar fashion to democracy, our ability to influence and change could become restricted to our needs as consumers, rather than our needs as members of society. This new democracy is unhealthy because of the serious imbalance it creates within society, at a time when we need to be able to function as flexibly as possible in coming to terms and dealing with climate change.

Born in 1946 in South London and with a Secondary education, for 35 years John Coombes had a successful career in the City where he built several companies and a £100 million group. In the late 80′s he became disillusioned with “just making money” and in his early 40′s suffered several traumas including ME, Breakdown and Bankruptcy. In the space of 18 months Coombes went from a City boardroom to the paint shop in a small art metal works factory. At the time the Stock market and housing market also collapsed and he lost everything, including his family.

Over the last 20 years he has embarked upon a sabbatical which has resulted in him now coming to view life and its workings from a new, totally different and more meaningful perspective. In his manuscript “What if WE are God”, of which this article is an extract, there are amusing as well as very poignant stories that provide the backdrop to a deeply penetrating observation on the human condition, and how we seem to continually hold ourselves back from realizing our true potential as a species in this thing called life.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=John_Coombes

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