On 20 – 21 September 2024, we invited you to Stacja Kultury in Pyskowice for a unique training on developing your skills to raise funding for social or cultural projects through citizen crowdfunding.
During the training, participants were able to learn the basics of creating a successful campaign, covering issues such as an introduction to crowdfunding and civic crowdfunding, project focus, managing campaign dynamics, stakeholder mapping, community building and the ‘rewards’ system. An extremely important part of the training was the section on crowdfunding communication, including the creation of a campaign page and the development of its visual and textual elements, crowdbuilding or communication strategy.
Crowdfunding is seen as an innovative tool providing an alternative approach to accessing funding. However, the scope of the training shows that crowdfunding is more than just raising funding. Setting up and managing a good crowdfunding campaign is a difficult process that requires a range of skills and resources from both individual project developers and teams of entire organisations raising funding or finance for their activities in this way.
Interestingly, available research indicates that crowdfunding has a leverage effect. The added value of this form of raising funds is, among other things, the development of an audience, building a community around important ideas and projects, the development of an organisation’s internal strategy and the development of specific skills of individuals or organisations that are also useful in other activities, including competences related to communication and marketing, and finally, market research.
In the context of the necessary transformations resulting from climate change, it has another plus – through the fact that it uses digital tools, it reduces the costs of communication and outreach!
GrowthFundMe is an international project in which partners from 4 countries (Poland, Belgium, Bulgaria and the Netherlands) work to increase social inclusion, employability and develop the entrepreneurial skills of disadvantaged people and communities by promoting new forms of self-organisation, solidarity and citizenship. The tools, including communication and participation, used to develop social networks are ‘crowdbuilding’, ‘crowdfunding’ and ‘crowdsourcing’. GrowthFundMe combines crowdfunding and business training, with all the benefits of mobilising local resources and developing networking skills.
The training was led by Wenancjusz Ochmann and Ewa Grynicka.
