 Good afternoon, everyone, and it's a pleasure to have you join us today for our webinar on crowdfunding for economic development. My name is Susan Lowe. I'm with the Design, Coordination, and Outreach branch of the Ministry of Jobs, Trade, and Technology. I'll be moderating and providing technical support for today's webinar and moderating our question and answer sessions as well. I'm located in Victoria, BC, in the traditional territories of the Likwungen people, mainly the Songhees and Esquimalt First Nations. So there's a couple of options for your audio today. Many of you are connected via your computers. Then some of you are connected with your phones. So if you're having problems with your bandwidth or your computer connection dropping, then you can click on the little radio button that says phone call, and it'll give you a dial-in number, an access code, and a unique pin which you can use so that it's attached to your registration so I can see your name and I can mute you or unmute you when we get to the discussion part of the presentation. A couple more things on the control panel here. You've got this lovely hide or unhide button, which lets you access your controls. It will, for some of you, disappear from your screen after the webinar has been going on for a while. You just click the orange arrow and we'll come back. The full screen, if you want to see us really big, and the raise hand button if you want to let me know that you'd like to ask a question. However, because there's many of you and there's only one of me, what I would suggest is that you type your question into this, enter a question for staff button, and it comes up on my screen and I can either hold onto it and ask one of our speakers at the right time, or I can type you back a really quick question if it's a technical issue. And one of the most popular questions is, will the presentation slides be made available at the presentation? Yes, the whole presentation is being recorded and the slides will be made available on the BC Economic Development website, which is scub.bc.ca slash economic development. And it takes me about a week usually to get those up there depending upon what's going on. I'm heading to some conferences next week so things might be a little delayed in sharing things, but I'll do my best to get that up there for you. Throughout the presentation there's going to be some pop quizzes and some other polls to let us know about you, and these are going to come up as a poll on your screen. It will not be asking how many pets you have. I'm going to actually run a poll right now so you can get some practice answering and we can find out a little bit more about you. I know from your registration and your email address is roughly where you're from so we've got people from north, south, east, west in the province and let's find out more about what kind of roles that you take. So the poll is opening up asking, when is your role in economic development? And if you wouldn't mind just we want to get really good voter turnout on this because that's important for civic engagement. We'll get some idea of who we have in here. I usually leave these up for about 30 to 45 seconds. So if you're listening but you're actually checking your email at the time when you hear me talking about a poll being open you want to hop back over put in your answer or answers so that we can get really good voter turnout. Our system actually keeps track of whether or not you have go-to webinar in focus on your screen or you're looking at something else. Now I'm not going to call out anybody but I do like to see my attentiveness does get up there so try to stay with us and we'll try to keep you really engaged. So we now have 88% voter turnout and I'll close the poll and I will share the results with you so you can see who's on the poll. So we've got about 36% are economic development officers in communities, 14% are with community futures or other local agencies, 21% are with the provincial government, hi colleagues and 21% with nonprofit or other business organizations and 7% are that magical other. So thanks very much for sharing that part and we will carry on. So today's presentation is about crowdfunding and at the end of this webinar you will be able to, if you've paid attention and learned well, describe what a crowdfunding campaign is and how it supports local economic development. You'll have a good idea of how to navigate the Invest Local BC crowdfunding site and you will be able to identify best practices for organizing an effective crowdfunding campaign. And managing all of that learning for you is our three presenters Graeme Stanley who's the general manager of community futures Stuart Nachako, Tom Bulmer is going to be giving us a tour of the site he's the CED coordinator for community futures Stuart Nachako and Robert Cuibel of Vortex Social Marketing is going to be talking about what makes a good crowdfunding campaign. Now these three gentlemen have a great fun to work with putting this together and they have an enormous depth of knowledge about crowdfunding so I know you're going to enjoy things. All right without further ado I'm going to turn things over to Graeme and he is going to talk about crowdfunding and how this all came about for community futures Stuart Nachako. There you go Graeme. Thank you Susan. Before we get started I should acknowledge and will acknowledge that we are broadcasting from the traditional territory of the Sykes First Nation in Vanderhoof BC and I wanted to get that in and I'm here to talk about crowdfunding and the idea and the history of why we did this and why we have this in place and I'm going to do that. I'll only spend about five minutes of your time and then I'm turning it over to our other panelists who have a lot more in-depth knowledge that we need to be discussing than what I do. Invest Local BC was an initiative that started in 2014. Initially the idea was to address fundraising activities required by nonprofits and arts and culture. The reason for this is we had a we have a lot of clients that come into our office community futures and they ask how do we get funded how do we get funded and the issue of course from from what we've dealt with with large senior government is that they're looking to have some indication of community support so we created the initially the crowdfunding platform to allow to create community support for nonprofits and arts and culture. That's what we started in 2015 the BC Securities Commission changed their rules to allow equity crowdfunding through a registered or an exempt portal. We are not a registered dealer of securities but we offer a transaction for those people that want to do a doing yourself campaign to try and support an idea or an innovation in their community and in the greater BC so that that is why we started the thing but what we've learned is that crowdfunding to us is part of a larger process and that process is true secondary economic diversification. Diversification from our perspective comes from innovations and ideas and bringing them forward and bringing those ideas to the market or to the public to find out if we have support because not all ideas are profit-moted other there can be all types that will that would find their way onto the site. We believe that as a community development tool and as a community development tool we believe that it is the public that is going to drive this if they think it's a good idea it'll work if they don't think it's a good idea it's not going to work we can understand that. We have been going slow in the development process as we talked about as I mentioned 2014 is when we started people would argue and say how come you're not farther well one of the things was crowdfunding was at an infancy stage at that time and not a lot of awareness we wanted to make sure that the scamming and all of the hype that comes with these type of things had gone through and that we could come up with a platform that is going to be a trusted platform in our communities and that's what we're looking for is developing the trust piece that's why we've dragged your feet and have not been out running around the province with this program however that doesn't mean that time isn't coming to us to do it now it's a program that allows communities to embrace themselves and look after themselves and that's what it's meant to be. Thanks that's my speak I hope to talk answer some questions but that's all I have at the moment. Thanks Graham I I'll just take things over again here for a moment we're going to have a demo by Tom who's going to show us the invest local BC platform before we go there are there any questions from the audience you can either raise your hand or type the question into the question box and also if you forget your question now but you want to ask it later you can do that too so all right Tom I'm are you are you ready let me just unmute you here there we go you're unmuted for my invest local BC I have it in the background but I seem to only have the webinar up front and I can't seem to find it to get into the background and I'm trying to shrink the webinar screen so I can get to my invest local BC screen so I can take you all on a tour all right there we go I think I found it okay and I'm gonna make you the presenter so you can show us what's on your screen we're going to get a magical tour of invest local BC I don't know if any of the people on the webinar have checked out the website in advance but there's lots of pretty cool projects up there there's also I find the the combination of the equity financing and also the the non-profit donation financing having those two things on the same site is quite powerful and it's I think it sets this site apart from a site like GoFundMe where it's it's asking for a donation all the time how are you doing Tom oh hang on I got it you have yourself muted you have somehow muted yourself oh we have your screen now we your audio is still muted unfortunately I can't unmute you if you've muted yourself okay I think maybe I figured that one up there we go and I'm wondering how can you see the screen of invest local BC yes we do okay this is invest local BC and this is the screen that you would come to first when you come to our site which is investlocalbc.ca and when we first got this going basically non-profit and arts and culture were the two we were concentrating on as Graham had mentioned in 2015 the securities commission allowed businesses to take part and then we added that site as well just to give you a bit of an indication we were working we've worked with some successful ones one of them was our very own community futures we wanted to run put together a video that explained a little bit about invest local BC so what we did is we started our own campaign we were going to raise four thousand dollars to have the video made halfway through that we changed our website to offer the business one therefore what we had to do was close the campaign off on the original website and reopen it once again on the brand new one and that left us a thousand dollars or so left to go and we made that with a new one so we did about three quarters of it on the old website we did about a quarter of it on this new website this is the new website and I must caution you that this is what it looks like now but it is going to change once again we have our IT guy working on some new ideas for investlocalbc and that'll be coming shortly there's a quick review of the front page here you can start your campaign immediately by hitting this little button up top here it says start a campaign you can also ask questions and find out more about investlocalbc under the about and you can explore the various categories which of course are all down here as well non-profit and arts and culture are fairly self-explanatory if you are running say a historical society and maybe you need a new porch for one of your buildings or something like that you can go on the non-profit one and you can follow all the instructions the site is rather intuitive and basically all you have to do is answer the questions we'll get into that in just a moment the arts and culture one very much the same but a different category perhaps you want to put out a new video or you've done yourself a cd i know cds are on their way out and pretty soon we won't have cds anymore okay perhaps you want a book or an ebook or something like that and you need funding to get it off the ground the arts and culture area is where you would go basically it boils it down so that people who are looking for something that might want to get they might want to get involved with a book or with a music project or something like that they can go to arts and culture they want to get involved with a fair or historical society or some other community project they would go to non-profit now the business one is a little different the business one is the one where you can actually start up a business and you can crowdfund your equity in the in the business i'm going to click on that one now and of course you'll get the first part of it is in a very important warning from us and from the securities commission that we don't offer any advice on any of the projects that show up on invest local bc so you have to understand that and that you're willing to continue then you have to pick whether you're doing an equity campaign non-equity campaigns since the inception of this we have not had any equity campaigns here on invest local bc we are working with that and we do actually work with people where we direct them to other sources that can really help out with equity campaigns on that we have a couple here on the non-equity side that actually we have one that just started up recently here a little while ago and these two here actually worked out quite well for this one here especially worked out very well for a lady out west of us who is doing a pet to vet or a vet to pet mobile pet service so once you choose which way you want to go and perhaps you want to start an equity campaign and we should start now and now let's just get into that now so and it offers you once again you can either start an equity campaign or does not offer equity excuse me the one that does not offer equity is regular campaigning similar to the non-profit organizations and the arts and culture projects where you would offer perks and things like that to get involved the equity one of course is one where you would offer equity in your business so with people who actually get involved with it become a part of your business whereas in the non-equity ones they do not become part of your business so you choose the one you want there and let's just go into the equity one and I will show you quickly that it is very very intuitive you type in the title of your your equity campaign what it may be your goal that you would like to reach the length of days and the maximum is 90 days the rules on this are set out by the securities commission and that so you do you have a business plan available you should have your cash flow forecast if you talk to Graham you definitely should have a cash flow forecast if you want to pick a certain region of the province that you want to aim at this is available down here I believe on our new site we will remove this and just go with all of BC for all of our campaigns but at the moment you can choose if you would like to do it in the caribou you'd like to do it on the island or Victoria that sort of thing you can choose from there once you have all of that you move on I guess we could we we could start a campaign and and move along but that would take far too long for us to do this so that's basically the equity campaign ones if you're doing one that doesn't offer equity campaign once again you hit the create campaign button wants me to select one region let's go home here so I'll pick I'll pick then a jack of one because we're going home here we create a campaign here once again this will come up and it will give you a hand we have a very very helpful website that can give you basics it can get you quite in depth to help out with your campaign but Robert is going to be talking about that a lot more on our site you would have the basics of your campaign the story you want to tell tell your story make people want to get involved with whatever campaign it is this would go for whether you're doing an equity campaign or a perks based campaign then you get into the details of the campaign how long you want it to run the funding what type of funding are you going to offer with it and what type of perks are you going to offer with it as a review and then you'll be able to launch your website and basically without us actually building a campaign here today which would take a little bit of time they usually take between half an hour and 45 minutes to do that would take up too much of our time so basically I think that would be our website and that would be our website and that's basically how you maneuver through it and what you do to get to where you want to go I wanted to point out on our main campaign and I'm going to do that now on our main page here get out of the campaign one and just go back to invest local BC itself and point out one that I think Robert is quite familiar with as well and that was the one that was for the hub in Prince George they did a very good campaign and they happened to pick a very good time to do it and that was the vault here what they wanted to do was create a place where you could actually come on into their building go into a vault which actually was a vault because it used to be a royal bank building and they created a room in there where you could do internet content whether you're doing it for YouTube or Facebook or what have you you could actually go in there and do that and they picked a wonderful place to launch it they did it at the Comic Con type event in Prince George at the time so they had a lot of people going by the booth and a lot of people looking into that so that's just the basics of how our website works what I'd like to do now is turn it over to Robert to show you how the vault was successful quite successful it says here that they raised four thousand that was their goal they actually raised four thousand thirty dollars so they did go over it and Robert can now tell you how you take that and turn it in to a successful campaign thanks Tom um before we go I have a couple of questions for you about the invest local BC can you show me how if I had a campaign on the site how can I send people to my campaign where do I where do I find the link or something like that if I want to let someone know how to actually get there and send me okay let I most of these campaigns have expired I will try this one here and see if I can show you how to do that okay so right now he's the fellow has 300 dollars raised in there and down here you will see links to you can share it on the Facebook there's the Twitter feed and the others as well so you can go through social media that way there is also a link here where you can email links to people as well so there's actually with when you think about it almost any way that you can do to get people to come to your site you can do it through Facebook Twitter emailing a link the link here is to put into a website perhaps you have a website to go along with it which we do suggest you you have a website to go along with it you can take this link here embedded in your website have people click on it you can hit the email and send them that link and you can share it on Twitter and others as well so that's that's how you would do that great thank you and there was a couple of other questions that came in one of them was about social enterprises and whether they would go under nonprofits or business on the site I think if I was a social enterprise one I would go into the business site and go under the non-equity end of it okay and what's the average fundraising goal on the website um the average fundraising goal for us is rather small we do between five thousand and ten thousand dollars back in 2015 the Canadian government released a report called Hive Wire and I'm waiting for them to update it actually now that some more numbers have come in over the years and uh changed that but they found that um if your campaign was under eleven thousand dollars you had an eighty nine percent more chance of being successful than those over that now you will hear crowdfunding campaigns that have gone way out to lunch for example I would like to cite the case of Humble and how that crowdfunding campaign on ego fund me actually did so well for them there are ones that do go and get extraordinary amounts of money but those are the exceptions of the rule okay and does the website take an admin fee yes we do we we charge basically the same as any of the others and uh that that is about uh three percent or so five percent and then of course you have to also pay for a paypal or Stripe or one of those to have the uh finance handlers so I always tell people to look at about ten percent that's a little over what uh all of those fees together would be but I tell people to look at a ten percent uh increase in what they're asking for okay thanks um so I'm going to run a quick poll here to get people uh feeding back to us and uh before we get on to Robert's content so my question is have you ever run a crowdfunding or online fundraising campaign so let's collect up some responses here and see where we've got our people we've got 68 percent oh this is great voter turnout you guys I'm so excited I'm one of those people who go out there and try to get my friends to vote so I like to see good high voter turnout all right so we've got uh over 90 percent of our attendees have voted that it's fabulous makes me so happy and we have here's the uh the results of that uh about 22 percent said yes they have run a crowdfunding or online funding funding campaign uh know what I'd be willing to try so there we go a little background information so uh next up thank you for the questions everyone keep them coming next up we've got uh Robert Cubell who's going to talk about uh how to actually make this work what do you have to do to prepare your campaign and uh and get it going Robert are you ready to go I'm turning over the controls to you oh I should unmute you that would be nice there we go I'm just trying to make sure that I get the right screen oh oh there we go I'll get this out of the way um so can you see the screen yes okay perfect um I called it the immutable rules or immutable laws of crowdfunding and the reason why I did was I've been reading the immutable laws of just about everything in marketing and branding and in I don't want to you know one of the things I want to tell everybody right up front is although we have not always reached the money the amount of money during the campaign that we had hoped for um every one of the campaigns that we've worked on has been funded in some way fully funded um usually by someone coming in later so I'm going to tell you a little bit more about that at the end but the first thing I want you to realize is these things are not easy they're hard um money doesn't fly in yes there's exceptions um I think there's exceptions and everything but it doesn't they don't it doesn't just fall in um you need to raise between 20 and 30 percent ahead of time there's a couple reasons for it one is to cover you're going to need to spend some money on advertising um and the more the media gets involved the better it is for you I suggest a lot of PR so where do you go for that the typical the is to reach out to friends and family and the one of the people that I often find that don't contribute unfortunately is the person who's putting it on um and they need to contribute because you need to show that you've got some skin in the game and even though you put all the time and all that work in there you need to know that they're part of it as well um the other one is uh as you're raising the money you're going to start perfecting that message because you're not going to have a you're not going to have a perfect message in the beginning it's just not nobody does um usually those perfect over the first couple weeks you start to get more more of the wording that you want to use it people start saying hey you know I hadn't thought about this or I thought about this or um different ways to look at your project and it really helps you perfect your message um and it gets more people involved because the more people you have involved walking around talking to people working with you the better it is for your campaign in the in the long run and this is the last thing I'll say if you can't get them involved there's two there's two challenges that you're having either you need to change the story or maybe the project's not viable and you may need to look at doing it a different way there's like when you go through a camp in and there and you get to that point where you feel that it's not gonna work it's it's awful because then you try to scramble so that pre-time that you do ahead of time it really makes a difference as to whether or not your campaign's gonna work um and you need everybody involved um if people aren't if you can't get everybody involved it's too hard um the because you need if you have a board they definitely need to be involved and they definitely need to put money in it doesn't have to be a whole bunch of money it's not about the amount of money it's about that the fact that they took part the average donation in a in a campaign most of them are between $25 and $100 um so it's not a great deal of money but it when even if someone puts in $10 it shows that they have faith in your project and you have to realize that those people are really standing by you and they're showing you that you've got something um which is even more exciting because it actually creates a whole bunch of goodwill in the community um this can't be a side project on the side of your desk doesn't work lots of people when we start working with them they go well you know just do it off the side of your desk you can't you have to be out there talking to people you have to be out there getting things going you have to be doing even some of the traditional types of fundraising should be done alongside this because that would get your campaign going even further and every platform will allow you to do what they call off-lining which is where they take you take the money that you've raised on say in a fundraiser or something and you you take it and you put it into the campaign but you don't have to pay fees on it but it shows the best way to do those is show everybody who put money in because the more people you have putting in money the more social proof you have for the project itself and if you hire a consultant they can't do it all even though we'll all try but we can't um there needs to be something for everybody needs to be something for the people who are helping you there needs to be something to for the people who are contributing um and and I think sometimes we forget that that part that those people who are contributing need to have some feeling that they're doing um some good or or helping you in some way because people like to help but if if you don't clearly show them how you're gonna they're gonna help you especially in a business race um we did one in the states um where they're looking they were working with realtors and it's been a very successful um campaign um we didn't raise the million dollars we we got a third of it but um it it was successful because he got out there and talked to people got people involved showed the realtors how they they were going to be able to help this project go um and since then there's been several people have come out outside of the crowd funding to come and help them actually their launch their website and I think they just launched it just recently I think in the last few weeks they launched it but we weren't part of the launch of the website um the thing about it is there's a pre-launch period and their pre-launch period can be anywhere from one month to three months um a lot of people think that if you go on to uh any of the of the funding sites and you just throw something up um money will flow and it's it's it's always really heartbreaking when you see those because they they have um it you you can see it they just they just crash because they haven't gone out and raised the money ahead of time so what are you gonna do with that 20 to 30 percent before you begin you're gonna use it to start putting it into your to start putting into your campaign and you're gonna list the people that are doing it because people like to help other people who um when they see other people helping them the other thing I strongly suggest um especially if you have a non-profit or business make sure that you've got um I believe uh uh Graham you use Stripe as well I wasn't sure whether you use WePay or PayPal but um make sure that that's all set up before you get in there because sometimes the accountant can take like weeks to get back to you or to set this up and it can be a real problem and it delayed one of our one of our campaigns by almost two weeks because they had to get all that paperwork done and anyone who's worked in this area knows that's the first thing you do when you walk in with a with a client who's trying to start a campaign you say we got to get the PayPal and all that stuff or do you have it um the so the square I totally recommend that you get a square account for your pre-launch money um because people don't carry cash anymore um and it's a way that you can raise money you can later on you can put it on to the crowdfunding site you have to get you have to go through the crowdfunding companies or if the consultant has the ability to do that they can put it on for you but you you need a way that you can collect cash quickly because you really need this is I I literally now will not help somebody or code somebody if they haven't if they don't commit to doing 20 percent or 30 percent ahead because it's too hard and if you have a choice between 100 people giving you $25 or even five um get the hundred people um as opposed to getting one donation for $2,500 because you show a one donation of $2,500 everybody goes oh well that's just the big guy and or however they read it I don't know how they read it um it just works better if you have more people Robert before you go on can you explain what a square account is for us a square account is um it's a type of payment plan that you can use a you get a little a little cube square that goes on top of your phone and you can you can take payments from people when you're on your phone um and it I'm suggesting this before you start your campaign because especially in the beginning because it's the sooner you get start people starting believing in you or it's like even when you're doing a rate regular type of um fundraising when you get those first few people putting money in you and you actually get the confidence there it's great but not everybody carries cash so sometimes you can get a check or whichever um that all works but if you have square um it's just a way that they can get money much quicker so it's a little uh device it's literally an inch by inch plastic white device square and you plug it into the it goes into the headphone jack of your phone I believe and it is a credit card reader so from anywhere you are you can take people's credit cards or their debit cards I believe and get their money in your account just like that so there's no more Uncle Bob says I'm going to give you $35 great I'll take it right now oh I haven't got cash don't worry Uncle Bob I've got this square machine you can get it right there at dinner time it's perfect it's um it's surprising how quickly they'll say yes too when you have them so the other part of the the prelaunch is um depending on how you're doing it in type of campaign it can take up to a third of the money that you raised to raise the money that you raised so if you want to raise $60,000 $60,000 you have to raise as much as $90,000 to cover the costs of the campaign so that you have get your $60,000 and you need to be aware of that um just there's like there's uh the platform fee there's if you have to run ads um the best we've ever experienced was we did a political campaign back in Saskatchewan and for every dollar that we we spent we got 11 back and the the amount of money that we spent in the campaign actually was one third of the contribution or one third of the ads they ran in social media were through our crowdfunding which actually helped the person get into the position they got in um videos are important but your story is more important um a lot more important get media involved PR like seriously get as much PR as you can and as much people in that room when you're launching as you can because the more people there um the more more credibility you're going to have and the more people are going to say oh this is something that you know not just me sees it as a good idea all these other people see it as a good idea too because it is kind of a social media in its own way it's just a way of raising money that way it's always like that I'll tell two friends and you tell two friends and they'll tell two friends and that really works and the other thing is make sure you donate um it's it's sort of a frustration of mine if the person says that they're not willing to donate into their project um I'm not I don't feel that the commitments there and I don't care how much they just need to donate something um on day one you need lots of donations and in a perfect world you get 100 of them now I know that's that's hard and it's probably not going to happen but I'm going to tell you to aim for 100 and if you get 20 or 30 then that's a good start um and there's lots of strategies to make that happen um and there's tons of stuff online that will will tell you um how to how how to approach that um and your donors can be your biggest fans if you can get a donor who's given you money to start helping you with your campaign and talking to people it is like the very best they're like the best like literally you can some of the people when they when they get really excited about your project rather than saying oh well thank you very much for the donation and they're talking about how great it is you say well do you want to help don't forget to ask because they they're they can literally turn a campaign around um in one of our campaigns we had uh one of the directors get really really excited and a third of the donations came from um herself or her friends it was incredible um and remember you can keep the offline donations which means that when you get a check you can phone Graham I think that's how it works Graham you might have to clarify you can phone Graham and say I got this check for this amount can you offline it for me so he'll put the donation and put the person's name in and also when people do donate say something don't just ignore them awful when people do that um and and it should be someone from your organization we've often done it as consultants but it's much better when it comes from someone who's in the organization um and you can do sub campaigns I'm not sure if you can do sub campaigns on and that's local I think you can but I'm not sure and they're just like little mini campaigns so here's my two biggest takeaways um from all of this and I saw that several people were interested in giving in a try and here's why I think you should um regardless of how much money you raise they're always successful and they're always successful for two reasons one is two very large projects that are uh one of them that's about but was just announced a few days down in downtown Prince George um the beginning talks of that started through a crowdfunding that's actually on invest local um and now they've gone into a bigger um they're actually going to have a big site downtown um and what they were looking to do was to actually fix up their old location and now they've actually found them in another location which you know what you could say maybe it didn't come from that but I know the talks started shortly or actually they actually started during the campaign and then the last one we we did one to help one of the one of the local um community groups that wanted to help children and that campaign uh we finished the campaign and the provincial government stepped in later to help because they saw the need was there because they saw how much effort they put into it um and then the other thing was a political campaign where one third of the ads that they had run um or the the money that they had spent in social media was spent by us raising the money the raising the raising the money for the for for the campaign um helped that person literally get into office so we could we could actually track it and we at that point we were getting for every dollar we spent we were getting 11 back which was really cool I thought that was amazing and I think I want to stop there because I I'm sure people have lots of questions I know I didn't go into tactics but there's tons of tactical stuff but if you follow those rules there you'll find that that your your project will be way more successful cool thank you very much Robert um yeah we had a couple of questions and I'm actually going to open up I'm going to unmute all of our speakers here and go to a couple of questions and feel free to keep them coming in on the question thing I'm reading them and translating them one of the questions we had and I think this is probably for Graham or Tom is would this uh would a crowdfunding campaign or would invest local BC be a good opportunity for communities that got turned down uh for planning grants from the rural dividend fund which are for feasibility studies or drawings for downtime revitalization other um the the the planning grants are for communities with limited capacity to undertake the preliminary work to develop strong applications for future funding intakes is this the sort of platform or would would you guys recommend that communities look at this for that kind of funding it depends on who you're who you're trying to reach in in the case of what you're you're asking the question is will the community members the local community members support a feasibility study into one of these projects because if you haven't got the public uh feeling that they want to support this then it's going to go nowhere um so but will it it to me it comes down to how you articulate the ask and and also again back to what Robert was talking about running an effective campaign those are the two things the uh the events local would be uh a a site to do that sure it would but you still have to direct your people to that site and and involve the whole community so it sounds like if you've got a vision if your community shares a vision and you've had a lot of engagement prior to putting together your uh your funding application uh then you may already have the steps in place for a good campaign but if it's just something that you and a small team put together a grant application didn't get the grant you still have a lot more work to do before you can have a successful campaign right giving an example of one that i've amused around myself and this is uh just a top of mind one we haven't done it yet but the idea is what about a feasibility study for a refinery providing a gasoline to uh dc maybe a crowdfunding thing where local community support people will get a copy of the the feasibility study once it's done for investing in the process okay so it's really when they say crowd they really do mean crowd they mean a broad population of people having interest in supporting their projects uh yeah so a couple of that went with sorry i was just gonna say when tom mentioned our community futures asked that we put on an invest local bc because it was a video what we did is that crowd was very specific we only went and solicited funds from other community futures offices so sometimes you have to identify your crowd and identify what you're actually asking for okay um a couple of other questions why is invest local better than other platforms i i would like to answer that one if you don't mind um the invest local bc is good for people who are trying to engage local people to invest in local people so uh this one here has a very local feel to it and robert i think can attest to this that if you have a crowd uh that is very local and you're going out to your local crew right around your town your region um you're going to find a lot more success than taking it out to berlin or dallas texas or where have you and invest local bc pinpoints and aims right at your local town your local region your local area and so if you're doing something quite local like that and and perhaps um you're you're not maybe you're doing a brand new type of bicycle that everybody in the world will want then uh for sure go after uh the kickstarter the indiegogo something like that but if you're trying to do a small video say to promote your uh jack of alley rodeo uh then you want to go to the local people in your town to invest in that local project and that is why it is turned invest local bc okay um i think i i think that um you're really right because everyone thinks that the that donation comes from like california new york or whatever and they don't they come from people locally and then that's why even in the beginning why i'd say like start out there because people once you start getting people talking about it and and in that audience if you know who they are so if it's if it's a local project it's something that's going to happen people help people locally then you're going to get a lot of support if that's where if that's where your your your platform is bigger a very interesting story i can add to that robert um and that came from alex kormick she is a securities lawyer and she told us the story of the boston boat uh the boston boat was when the boston marathon tragedy happened and they found uh the bad guy in a fellow's boat in his backyard they basically shot up his boat pretty badly uh there were two campaigns that started for that guy to uh get him his boat back one was um and i can't remember if it was indiegogo or kickstarter one of those ones was one of the bigger ones and there was a local regional small boston uh platform as well the big one raised about three thousand dollars the small local one because it was local and aimed at being a local thing around the boston area raised over fifty thousand for his boat so that was just one story that alex told on how local will help you out if that's what you're after okay um is this an all or nothing funding idea so if you don't reach your target uh the money isn't correct because i know there's some platforms that do that you have to get it all if you get if you want the money invest local bc is both oh you can yeah invest local bc you can choose whether you want an all or nothing campaign or you can choose a keep what you get campaign they're both valuable for various reasons um most people in the uh and the um hide wire report that i mentioned earlier uh will give you the stats that the all or nothing campaigns will seem to draw more money more quick because people seem to have uh the idea that you're more invested in it and that you have to get it done and you have to get it done soon and so it becomes an urgency issue um in any advertising campaign urgency is always uh the issue and so the all or nothing campaigns seem to lend that way however if you do a keep what you make campaign uh what graham was saying about getting your word out there and just basically using it as a promotion and as a an awareness campaign that can be used in that way what do you do if uh you've taken money offline or through other ways and uh you don't end up moving the project forward how do you return the money or do you don't oh yes the money would be the money would definitely be returned if it's an all or nothing campaign okay if it's a keep what you make campaign of course you keep what you make and um if it's if it's been done offline um you would go to whoever it was that you were giving your money to and they will have a way of doing it we have a way through invest local bc to do that okay then yeah can i just add something there the platform itself is not responsible for returning funds the arrangement for the campaign is between the campaigner and the donor okay so the it's the campaigner that decides whether to send the funds back and are arranges for that to happen that's up to them okay great um a couple of other questions um one person would love to hear some of the tactical steps for an equity campaign maybe Robert because we don't have a huge amount of time maybe you can suggest some uh great resources for that or one or two off the top of your head that are are good tactical moves i i haven't actually worked in uh in the um in the the equity part so it's not really an area i'm more familiar with either reward um well mostly reward um so i'm not as familiar with the with the equity side okay susan may i ask may i ask how much equity uh it makes a big difference because there's a cost of developing a security for the public even if it's crowdfunded there's a cost to doing that so there's a threshold that um that you have to reach before it makes any sense to do equity crowdfunding to be honest with okay now the only the thing that i will mention is that if you're looking to do proof of concept development where we're talking about pre-commercial projects then crowdfunding part of it to develop awareness and backers might be in a a worthwhile thing but here's the thing you can start off by a proof of concept through invest local successfully raise money for your next stage of fund fundraising and then transfer over to front funder which is one of our affiliate organizations that we work with who are an exempt market dealer the reason why we would move you towards an exempt market dealer if we're looking for a big ask an equity crowdfunding is because they can market the investment they are structured in that way that they can actually market an investment so we give the client in the small town the opportunity to be and in in front of those venture capitalists and other types of investors okay it sounds like there's a connection here that i'm going to make after the webinar which i love by the way when that happens as a result of the webinar so i'm going to connect you in this question asker offline because it sounds like it was a specific project at mind another question at what point in your project should you start the funding campaign i would suggest that i mean you have to know you have to know exactly what you're doing i actually think you start or you're you're fundraising ahead it's just you're not using the platform yet so it's almost to look at like your your your campaign is actually going to be four months long but the last month's going to be online and so the beginning part you have to really clear what you want to do and what's what everybody's going to get from it so if someone donates what are what are they going to get out of it whether it's just feeling like they've helped in a tragic situation which is very very powerful it's one of the most powerful ones are they going to get something that they find that it's very valuable as far as a reward is it going to help your move a cause that they feel very closely forward and the more focused you are the easier it is actually to raise money and lots of people say well let's go as broad as we can but that's doesn't work it's just like advertising if you don't know your audience then you and i think you kind of have to look at it that way i think for economic development projects i think this is great because i was just thinking about those two projects and one was definitely it's going to be a long-term economic project i will impact print short but it's the project was very much driven i mean i think it was in the back of people's minds but sort of when it's the back of their mind nothing ever happens and it's not until people move it to the front of their minds that you actually start seeing some of these projects go forward more so it sounds to me like if you're doing a project you want to have a strategy for the project and then when you identify that there's a combined element of funding need and like public buy-in or or hearts and minds you want to do friend raising as well as fundraising when you have those two things combined then you start thinking about okay at some point in this project we're going to use crowdfunding because not only is it going to raise some of the some of the money that we need it is also going to raise a public awareness of the project and that in itself is its own objective yeah well we're actually there's one that we've we've done and that i'm working on right now that we'll use the very last end of it we need another but another three thousand dollars but we've already raised the previous twenty five thousand ahead of time um but we'll use we'll go to invest local to finish the funding off because there's definitely interest there but um it's just a to to get the rest of the money to finish the project off we'll we'll go to front um to invest local for help okay great and and part of that back to uh that question about why invest local bc over the others is that um invest local bc was started by graham um and community future student in chaco in 2014 to further um uh projects in our smaller towns and we are not a for-profit organization we are not here to uh collect the money simply to build up a bank account we are here to try and move those projects forward in the towns and so uh that has to do with both the equity campaigns and non equity campaigns we will try and help you move it forward whichever way you want to go great and can i ask all the participants one thing sure go ahead share our link yeah we've got a couple of pop quizzes here i'm going to launch one of our one of our quizzes uh as a poll just for you people who have decided you're going to grab a snack here which is the following are important ingredients of a crowdfunding campaign you can choose more than one option as many as you like there's some trick answers in there i'm gonna give you a warning although there there are tricks but there are tricks in disguise because i think that celebrating your uh celebrating the people who've who've supported your project uh is an important part of a crowdfunding campaign wouldn't you say robert oh yeah absolutely yeah you don't want to be party-free you just want to be perhaps not a massive gala and uh maybe actually i'd love to hear about perks how do you know what types of perks to put into a crowdfunding campaign again that would depend i think on on exactly what you're uh doing um if you don't mind i'll just grab something here off my desk um we have an air show coming up in vanderhoof and this here would be uh one of the perks we might think about on our um on our crowdfunding campaign it's um done by a local fellow who does laser engraving on what and um we were thinking of offering this uh he did a very good job on the logo but he stuck the year on it and so that would make it a very unique thing um you can't walk into a store and pick that up it's not like a keychain or something of that nature that you can just drop into a store and pick up on that would be only something that you would get through a crowdfunding campaign those are the kind of perks you want to look for i think hey robert the things that are unusual different unique and inexpensive like you don't want to go really i think i i think that was one of the biggest lessons i learned is don't don't go high value um rewards there you might get someone or you may have one big one but don't have a whole bunch of big ones because it's it people will actually even if you have a reward campaign people will just send you money it does happen um and sometimes if you're people usually donate our donations are between 25 and 100 dollars so you've got to keep it something where you're going to make something out of that between 25 and 100 dollars so yeah if you're free it'll cost you half of the yeah 18 minutes yeah not worth it yeah so on that last poll you did the very last uh choice there do you go for lavish prizes and perks i i would vote no yeah no i would call one of my favorite crowdfunding campaigns that i saw was to raise money for a movie that was going to be made uh out of an australian tv show called miss fisher's murder mysteries and one of the perks was actually you would get a copy of a costume sketch from uh from the movie and the costumes on the on the tv show were one of the highlights for a lot of viewers it was it was on 1920s fashion so that sort of thing is you know they can just run off these sketches you know they just print them out of their their computer but i would you know if i donated i think a hundred dollars i get this sketch mailed to me so things like that that are going to make the the donator feel like they're a piece of the project or behind the scenes on the project that sort of thing it's it's really helpful um i have really appreciate this i would like to pass along one more if you don't mind all right encourage anyone to google zack danger brown's potato salad google that and have a look at that campaign he only asked for ten dollars i think he made 55 000 or it might be still going it's been a couple of years now and i think he's still trying to catch up with that one but google zack danger brown and the potato salad and the potato salad all right well uh folks we have one more poll here and that this is me asking what are you going to do with this information next what's your next step to use this information i know some of you guys are packing up from lunch and going to your next meetings but i'd love to hear how you're going to use uh what you learned today on the webinar there's five choices you can answer honestly some of the questions are you know what we sometimes do with with what we've learned from webinars don't forget you will be able to come back and watch this webinar again in the future and it'll be recorded we post the recordings to youtube not long after the actual session so um and i think any one of our panelists here if you want to ask us questions directly by all means you can hold up gray and myself or robert yeah uh gray and tom are at community future steward nacheco and uh robert well if people want to reach robert they can they can email us uh email me and i'll put you in touch so i'm going to close the poll now and uh we have the very honest responses uh 21% are supporting a crowdfunding campaign in their community 93% are consider using crowdfunding for a mid or long term project idea fortunately we have nobody needing to rescue a crowdfunding campaign that's not going too well 64% are helping people they serve at getting better at crowdfunding and 21% are going to write it all down and hope you remember it in the future thank you for your honesty that's very good of you so um we have a few more i'm just gonna check here that people are seeing my screen yes you are that's beautiful so upcoming webinars yay i've been having a great time like i did with these gentlemen i'm planning this the next session is may 31st economic development with business improvement areas uh with gay cooler from downtown camo's business improvement area and terry james from uh langley and we're going to be looking at how to build them uh what kind of leadership is required and how they interact with economic development in your areas um i will not doing one in the middle of me because i'm going to be going on the road so i'll be in fort nelson next week at the north coast vocal government association meeting at the trade show booth so come and say hi if you're going to be at that event and in the following week i'll be at the local government management association in victoria once again come and say hi at the at the trade show if you're going to be at those events uh the uh a couple things going on in the meantime i want to talk about these things coming up may 8th and may 15th the link is here you have to write it down because unfortunately you can't click my links but small business bc has put together this series on disaster proofing your small business uh so this might be something that you want to recommend to people in your communities um the the research that's been done the schedule but i've heard is that uh there are far too many small businesses who know they should have a continuity plan and they don't so this is really getting down to it uh if you got this webinar invitation from somewhere random in the ether and you want to make sure that you don't miss any future webinar invitations write down this link c m dot p n slash three i n j so people friendly uh and sign up and that will make sure that you get those invitations i usually send them out about three weeks before the session i've talked about this before but we have them ongoing this year is the tech dev 101 workshops and this is an opportunity to gather people in your community and talk about what your sort of technology and innovation ecosystem is and how to build capacity in your community it it gets down to a really hyper local level of discussion about technology and innovation um so we bring the facilitators and the show to you and you help us by finding a venue and also making sure that the right people are in the room so email us economic development at gov.bc.ca if you want to request a workshop in your community if there has been one very very close to you recently we may not be able to come back we are not unfortunately able to do endless shows but uh we'll do it back oh someone asked can i bring back the invitation link please there it is c m dot p n slash three i n j i'll leave that up for one more minute we're almost done here here we go uh after this webinar please complete the feedback survey that will pop up uh metrics metrics metrics i love metrics and uh then we will record maybe have been recording this webinar and it'll be posted in about a week to the gov dot bc dot ca slash economic development website where you can also go and find out about our upcoming webinars and there is a link also on that page directly to that invitation sign up so that you can get on our list in many ways um thank you very much for joining us everybody um if you have other questions you can definitely email the economic development at gov dot bc dot ca email address and i will pass them on to our speakers thank you very much robert and tom and graham for being our guests say it's been a slice thank you all thank you thank you all all right i'm gonna turn it all i'm gonna turn it all off here it goes bye everybody right