 Hi, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to the Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2016 webinar series on the topic of using crowdfunding to raise capital. My name is Paul Scott, and I'm the Director of Engineering for Global Development at ASME. I'll be the moderator of today's webinar. So just like to tell you, take a moment to tell you a little bit about today's webinar. Hardware innovators and social entrepreneurs are constantly seeking new funding pathways. Crowdfunding is an attractive option that enables both fundraising and market penetration through brand building, customer-based growth, feedback collection, and testing future features. To create powerful social innovation campaigns, innovators must invest in significant pre-launch planning and strategy. We've invited Alicia Cadacius, Indiegogo's Director of Social Innovation to share insights on how to launch with success. Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to thank the E4C webinar series team. If anyone out there has a question about the series or would like to make a recommendation for a future topic or speaker, we invite you to contact the team using the email address visible on the side, webinars at engineeringforchange.org. The webinar that you are participating in today is part of E4C's professional development offerings. Information on upcoming installments in the series, as well as archive videos of past presentations, can be found at the E4C webinars webpage. If you're following us on Twitter, I'd also like to invite you to join the conversation using our dedicated hashtag, E4C webinars. Before we move on, I'd like just to note today that today's webinar is done in partnership with the Innovation Showcase, which is a global competition for hardware-led social innovation. We've got other webinars that have been on there, and as you can see, we've got upcoming webinars on the Lean business model with BuildGrow innovations. So a few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's first see where everyone is from. In the chat window, which is located in the bottom right-hand side of your screen, please type your location. If the chat is not open on your screen, you can access it by clicking the chat icon on the top right-hand corner of the screen. Any technical questions or administrative problems should go in the chat window. Feel free to send private chat messages to Engineering to the Change admin if you have any issues. You can also use the chat window to type any remarks you might have. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window located in the chat to ask your questions to the presenter. Again, if you don't see this, you can access it by clicking the Q&A icon in the top right-hand corner. If you are listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any troubles, try hitting Stop then Stop. You might also want to try opening WebEx in a different browser. Following the webinar, to request the certificate of completion showing one-hour professional development hour for this session, please follow the instructions at the top of the U4C Professional Development page. It's now my pleasure to introduce today's speaker, Alicia Cardone, the Director of Social Innovation and Design at IndieDogo. She works to empower social entrepreneurs to bring their products to life through crowdfunding. She heads up outreach efforts in the social innovation vertical and is responsible for building strategic partnerships and consulting campaign strategy. Alicia has spoken at many events, most recently at South by Southwest Eco, Unite for Sight at Yale and a frequent presenter at UC Berkeley in Stanford. She graduated from UCLA and received a Master's in Public Administration and Management from NYU. But further ado, over to you. Thanks so much, Paul. It's wonderful to meet everyone. If anyone has trouble hearing me, let me know. I'm on my cell phone, but hopefully this works well. Looks like we have a great scope of folks across the country, a few outside of the country, so welcome. So today I'm going to kick it off and we're going to talk about crowdfunding and we're going to talk about innovation. If it's not the right spot for you, then stick around. It could get really exciting. You know, you should hopefully walk away with a few key tool sets on best practices of crowdfunding and a great basic history of Indiegogo and how we came to be. So surprise surprise, actually crowdfunding is really not new. Back in the day when the French gave us this beautiful statue, which we call the Statue of Liberty, we had nowhere to put it. We were like, huh, okay, interesting. This is great. Where are we going to place this? So people went door to door to pull some money. People also made different ads in newspapers so we could have this beautiful podium. The only difference from then versus now is we have the internet. So back in 2008, Diné, Eric and Slava came together. Eric and Diné were at UC Berkeley for business school. Slava was just finishing up work at McKinsey and they were both actually having issues with traditional financing. Diné was trying to help a producer fund his movie. Slava was trying to get research for cancer and grants were not really helping out and then Eric was trying to put on a play in a theater effort. The traditional financial way, because of these frustrations, they decided what can we do about this? How can we connect people that are really trying to make these ideas come to life in scale? So as I mentioned, the difference between then with the Statue of Liberty and going door to door to now is we have the internet. So Indiegogo really prides themselves off of being global. We're in 200 plus countries and territories around the world with four different currencies and five different languages. We're open so when somebody creates a campaign you can honestly launch right away if you choose to. I wouldn't do it without understanding some of these strategies that I will walk through but we didn't want to become another gatekeeper that Slava, Diné and Eric had already come up against back in the day. And of course finally we're customer focused. So my entire role essentially is getting the word out there on best practices with crowdfunding and for social entrepreneurs and then helping consult on their strategies so they are successful. And as you can imagine from 2008 things have changed. The industry has rapidly grown. It's gone much more beyond the 30 to 60 day campaign. This middle pillar here saying crowdfunding that was the core of what Indiegogo stood for. And now we find our entrepreneurs are looking for even more. How do they build a community before they launch? So we've created sort of a pre-launch strategy. We have a coming soon page. We help you build that audience before the exciting announcement of a launch because at the end of the day crowdfunding is community building. And we've also learned that once you run a campaign for 30 to 60 days put your blood, sweat and tears in it. It's been successful in whatever objectives and metrics you've decided. And there's no need to shut it off, right? So we've actually implemented our in-demand program where people can continue to raise funds even after their campaign timeframe and enter our marketplace. This is great for our products that are coming into the market and you still wanna capitalize on pre-orders or even programs that continue past the year frame or so on. This is just a fun snapshot of what I like to showcase for our impact on Indiegogo. My favorite here is the number of community backers we have and how they've supported over 600,000 projects. Every day on the site there's more ideas coming whether they're film, whether they're technology, whether they're the next drone or the next water filter that's helping folks in Kenya. It's pretty amazing to see the vast variety across the board. And this is the realm that I work in. So products for good. If you see at the bottom here, it's kind of cut off but cuttle and kind is a great example of this. These are dolls that the intention was to go to newborns but the couple entrepreneurs that actually created the venture, they met a co-op of women in Peru and they wanted to be able to help with their livelihood. The women in Peru are wonderful knitters so they actually create the dolls. In addition to that, employment, 50% of the proceeds go to the World Food Program when you purchase a doll. So these are what we lovingly call products for good. This is kind of the social innovation realm of Indiegogo. I mentioned before we have different verticals such as technology gadgets, technology software, film entrepreneurs, creative entrepreneurs, everything under the sun. Which is exciting to see that variation of backers that come to this thing. So with all that said, what is crowdfunding really? So we know it's about the crowd and we know it's about funding but it's actually much more than that. It's actually helping mitigate market risk and execution risk. So what do I mean? These two entrepreneurs, Martin and Jim, they came from the UK. They had a beautiful idea of creating a light that did not need electricity in order to function. They wanted to ensure that people were gonna use this light and their target market was not you and me trying to go camping. Their target market was actually a slump in Kenya. So they used their Indiegogo campaign to validate a need. They wanted to ensure that they could bring on non-profit partners, that people were actually interested in utilizing this rather than just putting the product out in market with their name on it. They did raise a fair amount of funds and lo and behold they did bring on their partners to move the venture forward. You can also gauge demands with the campaign. So Denise is here in San Francisco. She had this wonderful idea as a social enterprise to retrofit an old school bus and provide free showers for the homeless in the tender line. And she had such success on her first campaign and such a ground solid support that she ended up launching her second campaign for her second bus, which now comes on the weekends to the mission. It was pretty amazing to see. She was trying to raise funds in order to do the retrofit, but in turn with the outcomes of the first campaign, she was excited to be able to move forward with the second campaign of the second bus, therefore giving more homeless people the chance to have human dignity and cleanliness. Lisa Curtis, she came back from the Peace Corps and she was extremely passionate to help create a supply chain to Meranga Farmers that were in her community neighborhood in Niger. And Meranga is all over the country. It's this awesome route that helps with malnutrition, helps with your health, helps with digestion. And so she came back to Oakland and she said, okay, I wanna create this bar. I don't understand what my brand will be at. I'm not exactly sure what price is pricing, but let me test it on an IndieGo low campaign. So she raised about 52K and she was able to test different pricing packages of her bars with different perk levels. She involved is a school attendance software based over in New York and they already had school affiliates and partners on board. They already had the software in data testing mode and they were excited to roll it out in a more scalable fashion. With that said, they also wanted to bring on more advisors. These gals were actually my friends in grad school. So it was exciting to see them actually launch an IndieGo go campaign and attract advisors and influencers in the Teach for America space and beyond. Supriya and Jana are two awesome, awesome individuals. They were at the University of Chicago and they wanted to create a doll that inspired young girls and boys that there are female role models in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And their first prototype was going to be Marie Curie. And they were pretty dead set on raising 60K in order to put in their first manufacturing batch of this first doll. Now they raised about 60K in three weeks or so and they wanted to still utilize the time that they had left in their campaign. So rather than just letting it kind of die off a bit, they used this as an opportunity to ask the crowd, who would you want to see next? What would you like this second doll to look like? What would our future product look like for you? And they actually crowdsourced an idea of who the next role model should be. And with the 25K extra that they raised, that was going towards the second manufacturing batch and Jane Goodall ended up being the winner. So really cool to understand and interact with your crowd, your clientele and know that moving forward, those are the ones that are gonna be extra excited to see that second product come up. Flow Hive is also a very interesting case. So this father son entrepreneurial duo, they are from Australia. They planned very heavily for their campaign. They had an avid avid beekeeper niche audience that were waiting patiently for this product to come out. This is a beehive that humanely extract honey without disturbing the bees. Now if you are an avid beekeeper, this is a huge deal. Unfortunately I was not, but at the same time, it ended up becoming more of a grassroots environmental climate change movement. So people that even weren't trying to get the product were so excited about learning how bees are related to our ecology system and the global makeup overall that they ended up raising over $12 million, which was pretty phenomenal outlier story here. But I'm happy that it was a product that was really going out there to have social impact in addition to being beautifully designed. And then Girl Scouts is a great example of building a movement. So this story, they came to us, the chapter in Seattle and they had a donor that gave 100K to their programming annually. And so every year they would install that in their budget and this particular year they actually had that 100K retracted because the individual donor learned that they allowed transgender girls to join their programming. So needless to say, it was a bit of a devastating story and they came to us to say we need to be able to make up that 100K for our programming. Lo and behold, it ended up becoming a viral movement and the hashtag for every girl was all over social media. It happened to align with when we legalized gay marriage nationally and the extra 238K ended up going towards scholarships for transgender girls to join the troops later on. So this really became more of a movement and donations were going towards the larger vision than just to the troops, so very beautiful story to see. So as you can see here, crowdfunding is much more than just funding in the crowd. Sorry, the slide got a little messed up but you get the picture. You're able to actually identify influencers, capture data on your potential customers, build a brand and awareness. Of course raise money and get the crowd involved and help with your market validation. These are a lot of different objectives and metrics and you can do it all but it's much better to walk into the planning process, understanding which are your top priorities and really executing on them. So all in all the way I see crowdfunding in general and especially at Indiegogo is we're really revolutionizing the way programs and projects are built by increasing transparency, encouraging collaboration, enhancing these channels of engagement and most importantly broadening your community. And that relationship between traditional financiers, the one that Danae, Eric, and Flava were so frustrated with in the beginning, what one would think would become more of a repelling relationship has actually become more of a ying-yang-yang complementary relationship. And Indiegogo has become this incubation platform where ideas are coming here, they're launching campaigns, ideas that are resonating with the crowd are bubbling to the top and then foundations and governments and banks and DCs and research and development initiatives are actually coming to Indiegogo to see what those ideas are and therefore moving forward with them and investment. So I know all of you have great ideas. I would normally if this was us in person wanna ask and get involved and interact but for the sake of time and for the sake of giving you guys some more info I'm just gonna continue on. I'll give my email at the end if you're interested in chatting more but I'm sure the burning question at this time is Alisa, how the heck did we make this a successful campaign? And there's four main things. These are pretty much the key fundamentals. There's plenty more strategies and examples and details and advanced techniques but these are the four that you have to get down in order to even make it out of the gate. So first is really thinking about an attainable goal. On Indiegogo we have two options. We have a sixth funding model where you can set a monetary goal and you spend your 30 to 60 days trying to raise that funding goal. If you do not hit your goal then all of the funds are refunded to your backers and it's pretty much a no harm no foul. The issue with that that we heard back in the day from our campaign owners and from our backers was what if we just fall a bit short and this is a program to expand this first phase of what we're doing on the ground or perhaps half of that goal could help with manufacturing this prototype and we just spent about two months trying to get there. So we did offer a new funding model called flexible funding. If you're able to keep what you raise people find that you still can have a very strong sense of urgency behind flexible funding because it's all about the messaging. It's not really based off of whether someone reads whether it's fixed or flexed funding on their campaign. So I always tell folks that flexible funding is your best option. With that said, you still wanna be cognizant of what goal you're setting. So for example, if you look at these two campaigns let's just hypothetically pretend you have no idea what they're about. You see them fly across your computer screen at one point whether it was through social media or popped into your email and so on. If you had to make a split second decision to read on and understand the details of this campaign I would venture to bet that you would probably read more detail into a campaign on the left. So both of these campaigns have raised $20,000 which is a nice sum of money but a $20,000 in a $50,000 goal versus $20,000 in a $150,000 goal it seems as if it's doing much better, 40% versus the 13%. It both have 23 days left but this perception of the funding bar is really crucial. This is not to say that you need to undercut what your goals are for your campaign but it is to say let's treat this campaign as a tool towards your larger vision. You might have a product that does have a manufacturing budget of $500,000 but you can use the first campaign as a fees of that. Perhaps you're trying to raise $150,000. Perhaps your programming is $300,000 or $30,000 and you wanna use this campaign to raise the first $10,000. That's completely fine because quite frankly a higher goal doesn't necessarily need more money and 87% of our campaigns that hit their goal continue to exceed it. There is a bandwagon effect that you should be cognizant of but you need to be still as transparent as possible to the crowd. So here's a tangible example that might make more sense. This amazing organization is out of Massachusetts represent.us, represent us if you will. They came to me and said, Elisa, we're gonna hire a actor from New York and this actor is going to play a satirical politician. We're going to name him Bill Fulbright and he's going to go down to the Kentucky Senate race and debate Mitch McConnell. And this idea is changing the discourse of super PACs being about money to super PACs being about actual politics. They wanted it to be a big media blast. And I said, okay, guys, that sounds great. It's very interesting. I know where you're trying to go with it but what does the big media blast mean? So they said, we want to raise 75K for a big media blast. And still I pushed back on them and said, okay, let's think through, what are the milestones for this? And they came up with these goals. 20K was going to get them a tour bus. 30K was going to get the billboards. 40K was going to get them media push online. 50K was going to get TV ads and so on and so forth. And because they broke down their campaign into these goals, it was much more digestible. The crowd understood the milestones as they were introduced. And as you can see, they raised well over 75K because showcasing that momentum and that progress was phenomenal. And even if they only hit that 20K for the tour bus, that was the minimum viable milestone that they would be happy with. So that's what I mean in thinking through your goal and making it attainable and then rolling with that momentum. Okay, compelling pitch. So this is crucial in terms of the storytelling of your campaign. You want to be able to showcase in your pitch video the who, the what, the where, the when, and the how and do it in a concise two and a half minutes. It seems impossible, but honestly, this is kind of just the hook of your campaign. You want to have testimonials from people that are involved in the project and you want to be able to include a strong call to action at the end. Now, with the same weight, your pitch text is equally important. This is really the real estate of your entire campaign. The more you tell here, the more you quote unquote sell. I like people to consider this sort of a blog, if you will. So you want to break it up with visuals. You want to be able to have your own voice. You want to be able to showcase any sort of financial breakdown, any sort of infographics that make the content more digestible. This is just a very important piece because you'll have 50% of people that want to watch the video and their visual learners and then you'll have 50% of people that really want to get into the details. So make sure that you balance them out equally. Okay, unique perks. This is one of my favorite parts to consult campaign owners on. So Indiegogo is not an equity-based in crowdfunding platform. We are a perks reward-based platform. So that means that people that are contributing, your backers, they are backing your project and in return you are fulfilling a perk. The equity crowdfunding platforms, people are backing a project and they are getting a piece of investment into your business or into your venture. That is not what we do at this time but it is very exciting to see all of the changes with the SEC and we're definitely at the forefront of that conversation. We just want to make sure that there's a balance between protecting the backers and the campaign owners with fair regulations while not stifling innovation. So we'll see what happens in the coming years but as of now, perks are the way we rock and roll. So why do people contribute on Indiegogo? This is really exciting for me personally because other platforms are really only focused on physical perks but what we find on Indiegogo is folks are interested in contributing because one, perhaps they know you, they're trying to support you, they feel that bond. Two, they're passionate about what you're doing so they want to see this change in the world or they're passionate that you're moving the needle in some technology. So they're just going to give, based off of impact. Third reason is they want to participate in some way. So perhaps they're invited to some user testing party or a launch event or they get to actually go to Nicaragua and meet the co-op of women that are creating needs off. And finally, the last reason is a physical tangible perk. If you are creative with both of these selfish and selfless reasons and you have a variation of perks, that means that you will have a broader subset of potential backers. I show this photo here of the sheep because I think it's an amazing example of a perk that encapsulates all four of these reasons. This is at a restaurant here in San Francisco called Mission Cheese. They had a campaign to raise funds for buying a few more goats that actually baked cheese. This is a little bit of a wine top of bar and all their backers at, I believe it was $150 level, they were going to get their names in a mural and this ended up being the mural. So if you look closely at the sheep, these are people's names. Now these people go to Mission Cheese constantly because they're excited to show off their names. And I just think it's pretty fun that it showcases all four of these reasons. So think creatively, think outside the box and create unique perks. We always find that $25 is a constant sweet spot for people across the world. So make sure that's a nice one to be fulfilled and you can create quantities with limited demand. We also have a cool feature with secret perks where you could offer a specific subset of folks an exclusive perk. Oh, and most importantly, as I mentioned before, keep fulfillment in mind. So one time I had a very, very smart entrepreneurial campaign owner and she was writing a book but she had no idea that she was going to have such a groundswell of support from Australia and she was based in California and her book was a hardback book and I thought 300 pages. And by the time she fulfilled all of her perks and because of shipping costs, she ended up dipping into a lot of the funds that she actually raised. So be sure that you know how to balance this budget and you think about that beforehand. Good news is that now we've implemented shipping costs within to our own platform and product. So hopefully that will never happen again. Okay, finally, this is personally in the most important part. You could have a great goal. You could think through your pitch. You could have really engaging folks but if nobody knows about your campaign, if you're not proactively getting it out there in the world, then it's just gonna fall completely flat. So think about your campaign promotion strategy as an onion. Your campaign team is your core. These are the folks that are gonna be in the trenches with you. We normally find campaigns with at least three people on the team, tend to balance out the workload a lot better than one person, of course. And five people is an even better number. So think through who this core team is going to be. Beyond that is sort of your action team or your ambassador team. So these are family, friends, people that are also passionate about the project. Perhaps they're not doing the actual content building and the actual promotion strategy but they are willing to kind of be your shining light and wanting to share the campaign with their networks. If you get them involved early on, they're gonna be more likely to wanna share the campaign because they were able to give feedback and they were excited to be in the process with you. Once you've identified those people, I highly suggest creating some sort of simple landing page online. The reason for this is really to cultivate emails. We find that emails are the highest conversion channel for campaigns and for their success. So if you just had some sort of visual of what your program or your product was, even if it's in the early stages and you had a call to action and a field at the bottom asking for people's emails if they're interested in learning more, then you'll be able to cultivate those and build them while you're also building the content of your campaign simultaneously and you know that these are targeted because they've actively decided to sign up. As you're building that with your launch page, you can test your offering. So you get your campaign all ready to go, it has that goal, it has both perks, it has that pitch and you share it with that action team of yours and you say, hey everyone, what do you think about this? Are these prices for these perks too high? Are you understanding what the actual pitch is? Does this make sense? And because you're asking their input, like I said before, they're more likely to want to be involved with this longer initiative with you. Now you're ready to go. You're ready to launch. Before you launch, I highly suggest sending a pre-launch email to that list of folks that have signed up through your landing page and you let them know, hey everyone, I'm about to go live in two days and I'm so excited to have your support early on. Then you go live again, you go live for the first time and you send an email again and you let them know now's the time. Here we go. And that early momentum, that launch is so crucial to the success of the entirety of the campaign because of the bandwagon effect that I alluded to earlier. So a strong launch normally leads to a stronger performance throughout those 30 to 60 days and these are the key people that you want to get involved from the beginning. A few fun life hacks that you could do is put up a vacation responder with the campaign, add the campaign to your signature so you're actually promoting it through email while you're going through the motions of everyday life. Once you've locked in around 30% of your funding goal, I suggest going and starting to promote the campaign on social media and perhaps even some digital marketing if you wanted to put some spend behind there. So we find 22% of a campaign's funds are raised through social media. But again, this is kind of thinking through once you have that first third of funding there because folks are gonna be more likely to look into your campaign once they see that first credibility step. And then the next layer of the onion, perhaps you want to host an event as in person, you can also get press involved, you can make relationships with bloggers beforehand. If you are more of a niche product or a niche program, be sure that you're connecting with bloggers and networks and communities that are also caring about the same topic area. And then finally, something to be cognizant of is within the campaign itself, there's an updates tab. The updates go to your past backers. The reason that you want to keep your past backers engaged is because in turn, they want to showcase the progress of your campaign with their networks. This is the whole theory of six degrees of separation and nowadays in 2016, it tends to be three degrees of separation. So again, think of your campaign as a living breathing blog. They don't want to know, hey, I raised a thousand more dollars today. They want to know relative progress. They want to know articles that are also in the same vein as your campaign objectives. They want to see photos of you. They want to see interactive material. Cool thing that I showcased is this great gal. She was creating a social enterprise. I think she was in Tanzania and she wanted to hire youth to sell green products in the Dukas, in the smaller Halas. And so she created this hashtag called Beyond Band-Aids. She was trying to raise 15K. She put 15 Band-Aids on her face from the start of her campaign and every time she raised a thousand dollars, she took a Band-Aid off. So as you can imagine, there's photos of her at the gym. There's photos of her at meetings and her backer audience, because they've already supported her, we're so excited to see the progress of when she could finally take that last Band-Aid off. She ended up raising around $17,000, sorry, but this is just an example of how creative you can get in thinking outside of the box. So those are the key fundamentals. I think that was a lot. I know that I've been talking, but what I want to show you is how Indiegogo can help. You've got those tool sets down. You've got the background on crowdfunding. We've really built out our customer service and our offerings, so it's in your benefit for the campaign owners, so you can really hit that stride and get to the end goal of your campaign. We've had folks respond to manufacturing. We've had folks attract different investment. Everybody has the metrics on their backers, so names, addresses, emails, demographics of where they're coming from. That data is yours. That's for you to be able to build your venture forward, and it's not just isolated within Indiegogo. So we really want to help you. And in turn, we've created in-demand. Like I said, this is a great example of being able to hit your goal and then keeping the campaign open for folks that learn about it later on. You don't necessarily have to have that hard promotion strategy behind you. That's for the 30 to 60 days, but at least this allows you to continue raising funds that people find out about it a few months later. Vocal ID is an amazing campaign. They create customized voices for children and individuals that have suffered from throat cancer and the like. So their voices don't sound like robots, but these voices are quite expensive. They're about $10,000. They ran a very successful campaign and now moving forward, people are still hearing about the voices and they continue to actually do pre-orders even though the campaign ended about three plus months ago. We've also helped international campaigns really enter the US market. So Ghost Drone was out of Canada, or sorry, Germany, I believe, and they already had a great customer base in Germany, but they wanted to be able to get their product over into the US. So they launched a successful campaign, raising funds and helped double down to get in the eyes of folks here in America. Local used Indiegogo to test marketing and branding and if any of you are in the Bay Area, they actually just opened their shop in Oakland. This is a social enterprise that creates healthy fast food at a fast food price, if that makes sense. So it's a $2 burger that's actually extremely nutritious and they hire local youth to apprentice under the chef. And if any of you have seen the movie chef, Roy Troy actually is the mastermind behind this amazing restaurant. We also have our referral tool. So you're able to do really interesting referral programs on social media and our tool tracks that. So Water for Life was able to do that and ended up connecting with an agency partner. So we've worked with a lot of agencies in the past. These are consultants on crowdfunding strategy and we have a great database and we're able to make those introductions for your own success. And of course we have our API. So if any of you are a developer buff, you can use our API to keep the look and feel of your business or your product on your website and have the power of Indiegogo's transaction process and crowd behind you. So this watch, one face watch, use that. As you can see, there's the funding bar on the left and the donate button underneath, which then took you to the Indiegogo payment transaction process. So pretty cool feature to have. And finally, again, we help advise on digital marketing. We know that that is a nuance to crowdfunding. You really do need to think of it as an online marketing campaign and we have the resources to really help you get that going. And then shipping now. So if you are a product that is actually ready to rock and roll and you can fulfill within the next 30 days, you can enter our shipping now program, which is a whole different experience for our backers to just cruise around different cool, interesting products that they know will be in their hands within 30 days as opposed to three months or six months. And then finally, we have really great retail partnerships. One with Brookstone, another that was announced with New Egg, another with Arrow, and these are sort of for hardware buffs. Again, they are helping with feasibility studies, helping understand what your design and your development and your manufacturing plan is, and that's an exclusive with Indiegogo campaigners. So pretty cool to see that. Like I mentioned in the beginning, we're going far beyond the crowdfunding campaign because we know that's just one piece of the pie for you guys to really get your ideas out there in the world. And at the end of the day, crowdfunding is community building, right? So whether you're a nonprofit program, whether you are a product, you really need to engage with people. And that's the coolest part about crowdfunding, in my opinion. It's not a static website where people just go to and they sign up. They're actually interacting with you as an entrepreneur and they're getting updates from you in real time and they're seeing videos and they're seeing the progress and they're picking a chance on you. And that's very vulnerable and exciting. And again, at the end of the day, that's the human connection and the community building part that I hope more and more people take seriously and can actually really benefit from at the end of the day. So if there's anything you can take away from this presentation, it's planning is crucial. The good news is that we're here to help you and I'm excited to hear what all of you are up to, any questions you have, but together we can do anything. So with that, I will open it up to questions. Thanks for taking the time, guys. Excellent. Thank you so much. What a wonderful presentation and overview of the Crown Funded Landscape. So if you have any questions, please, if you could put them in the question and answer box and then we'll go through those questions as they come in. Either a couple of very practical ones just to start you off. Definitely. Is it possible to run a campaign internationally or it's only in the US? And secondly, is there a good book that you would recommend or a good website that kind of gives us an overview or toolkits for running a campaign? Yeah, great question, Paul. So yes, you can run a campaign internationally. On Indiegogo, we are in 200-plus countries and territories around the world, so anyone within those 200-plus countries and territories can run a campaign, which is great. Second, in terms of a book, we actually have a ton of great resources that I would recommend looking at. I also know that Tim Ferriss has done a great podcast on crowdfunding as well, and it's more from a bigger ecosystem landscape, but there's a lot of great new writings nowadays on crowdfunding. So first, I would take a look at these resources we have. Second, I would check out Tim Ferriss, and then third, I'll get back to you on some other ones. All right, it looks like we have a couple questions. Oh, sorry. Yeah, I have one last kind of practical question, then we'll go out to the questions from the people on the webinar, and just a reminder, if you could put them in the question and answer chat, that would be fantastic if you have any questions. Is there a minimum amount that makes it worthwhile to launch a campaign on Indiegogo from your experience? Yeah, great question. So the actual minimum amount on Indiegogo you can raise is $500. With that said, I mean, I think that this is a very time-investing initiative, and it's at times an emotional initiative, so I would try to raise a minimum at least a couple thousand dollars. But again, it has to depend on what your objectives are for your own enterprise, for your own product, and also what makes sense just with your bandwidth. So that would be my suggestion. That's at the very minimum. Now we have folks that start planning their crowdfunding campaigns years in advance even, and budget out an allotment of dollars or bringing an agency consultant on board or actually having budget for digital marketing, and these are campaigns that are trying to raise the million dollars. So it definitely depends on what your objectives are. Awesome, thank you so much for that. Really interesting question that's come in. You mentioned the shipping expenses that was kind of unexpected through the campaign with books. Are there any other things that you come across as kind of unexpected expenses that people come across that they should think about right from the start with the crowdfunding process? Yeah, so if you're thinking about getting your video done professionally, then that can be an expense. I only recommend doing that. Again, it's very dependent on the case-by-case circumstance. The good news is if you invest in your video, then you can't repurpose it for marketing, collateral later on, but don't go completely overboard with that cost. Another interesting one that organically comes up for some folks is if they want to pay for Facebook ads and sort of get some retargeting there on social media to get their campaign in front of the right people. Those are actually pretty affordable, all things considering, and you can see their return on your investment pretty quickly in real-time, so you can keep feeding dollars to Facebook ads and seeing the return. If it's not having a return, then you can just stop. So those are a few other kind of costs. And then I think those are some of the major ones that I would mention right now. Yeah, I know, that's excellent. Thank you. Questions are now flowing. Once one comes in, they all come in. You focused on a number of products, and that's because we were looking at hardware, so we asked you to focus on products. There's been a question come in about people, have you got any good examples or experiences of people that have been trying to raise funds for a particular event rather than a specific product? Yeah, great question. Definitely have had examples of people raise funds for a specific event. I actually have a great campaign launching pretty soon with Good Magazine. They'll be launching a campaign for a summit they're gonna put on in fall, so keep an eye out for that. But yes, as long as you're very clear and transparent of what the budgetary cost bar for the event, and you can actually utilize perc levels as perhaps tickets, right? So if you wanted to say $50 is for one ticket to this event, then you could send them a digital download of that ticket afterwards. So it is a cool way to kind of double down on selling and getting people in the room while also raising funds for the production of the event. Awesome, thank you. We're back to a very practical question. I'm being very tough with this, we're going from a high level to a low level and backing, but it comes back to the international element, I think. There's a question regarding kind of access to payments where maybe PayPal or credit cards are prevalent. Is there any advice or suggestions you would give in relation to that? Yeah, so for our payment systems, we are reliant... Oh, sorry, can you hear me? Yeah, go on, go ahead. For our payment systems, the canteen setup is reliant on PayPal and we also use Stripe and people can utilize credit cards with that said, you're right, it is tricky if a country does not offer PayPal and I think that's one of the ones that we unfortunately don't function in, but let me double check that for everyone because I know they constantly kind of update their policies a bit, but that'll be a follow-up bit for me. Great question. Yeah, thanks for that and once we get that information, we'll send it out to the email list that we have. I know sometimes people have PayPal accounts even if it's not possible to have it in that country through servers and things, so that's an also another option. Just, this is relating today to a campaign really. Have you got any suggestions of how to kind of extend your reach of your campaign beyond your friends and family? So kind of tools or techniques for building the network if you maybe have a small one to begin with? Yeah, definitely, so this is a question we get constantly because it's true, you do need to start your campaign with sort of the snowball effect of your friends and family, but it shouldn't be only reliant to that and that's why that planning prior to launch is so crucial. The landing page is a great idea. Now a way you can convert people to get to your landing page is take all your Facebook friends and share that landing page on your site and get them all to sign up. Go on your LinkedIn and share that landing page and get them all to sign up. Get on Twitter, it's a difference between having a following versus having email addresses. Of course having a following is great and that's helpful in the second stage of that promotion strategy, but if you can capture them in emails first, that's gold. Another cool way to go about it is I'm sure some of you are just networking by going to events and going to webinars and going to conferences and collaborating with different organizations and different other networks in person. Again, push that landing page on those people because it's a nice way just to capture that interaction and hopefully that list by the time you're ready to launch is far beyond your friends and family. That's where I would throw all my energy from the get-go. When the campaign is live, there are other strategies where you can, as I mentioned, launch a referral contest. So perhaps it's something to the extent of share this campaign with five of your friends and then be in the running for this awesome perk, something along those lines. There's different ways for us to help you frame it, but there are other ways to kind of have that quick sense of urgency for people that have already back to share with their networks. I've got one more question from my side and then I'll open it up for one last question from the audience. So if there's any questions, please ask them now. We'll have the opportunity for one more question from the audience. I'm really new to crowdfunding and the overview that you gave me was super interesting. I'm a little confused about the difference between all the different crowdfunding sites and I was just wondering if you could share a little bit of guidance or background or experience on how are the different sites, what's right for me and how do they differ from each other in terms of the other options that are available as crowdfunding platforms? Yeah, great question Paul. So in terms of other sites out there, you have some folks that are very closely connected to nonprofits, so a great example of that is CrowdRise. They work with charities and 501C3s and specifically for programs and those perk levels are not necessarily rewards, it's just pure donation. One thing about that, it means that sort of the backer community is only focused on nonprofits, so you're not gonna really get that cross-sector of different types of folks around the world, but they do amazing work. Another site, if you're thinking about a personal fundraiser or a personal cause, GoFundMeet is definitely a key player in the crowdfunding space. Those are for campaigns that are trying to make ends meet with perhaps tuition or surgeries or initiatives to raise funds for disasters like what happened in Orlando, that would be one site. Another player in the industry is Kickstarter and Kickstarter works very closely with creative campaigns, so these are more of your musicians and your writers and your film per site, so they're very, very focused on creator. They have just a fixed-funding model, so they have a similar kind of structure as in DeGogo in terms of rewards and perks, but they only offer fixed-funding. And then there's, again, some equity sites out there that, of course, all four of us that I just mentioned, we are not a part of at this time, but it's definitely starting to move the needle that way. And then for IndieGoGo, we really pride ourselves off of having that cross-poll nation of different types of entrepreneurs, trying to have advanced sort of product offerings, so you can really bring these ideas to life beyond the campaign, and we look to be kind of a partner with you in that entire process. So yeah, those are kind of some of the key ones that I would mention. Yeah, awesome, thank you so much for that. It's just good to have an overview of the landscape and from my understanding of what you guys are doing really well, I spend a lot of time dealing with entrepreneurs and I noticed there's a lot of entrepreneurs on your site and I also deal a lot of my time working with hardware innovators, so physical products and I also noticed that that's quite prominent on your site as well, so obviously that community is there, which is really interesting for us from our perspective with the ASME I show and then also for engineering for change. So unfortunately, we've run out of time, but I just wanted to offer my thanks again to say thank you so much for such a comprehensive presentation, and I would recommend to everyone to check out some of those resources and links if you're really thinking seriously about running a kind of funding campaign. I think that those background materials will really give you the opportunity to do it successfully. So thanks again for attending everyone, thanks so much for the presentation, Alita, and you'll see that on the screen now you've got your professional development code hour. If you have any questions, please email us at webinars at engineeringforchange.org and as we said, you can follow us on Twitter as well. So thanks everybody, good evening, good morning, good night, wherever you are. Take care.