According to an analysis by Crowdfund Capital Advisors, among companies that complete a successful crowdfunding campaign, 87% go on to hire new staff. And sales go up. Find out how crowdfunding works in Italy, including the relevant platforms.
Crowdfunding, or collective financing, helps business and employment. Entrepreneurs win, but so do workers. The well-known American agency Crowdfund Capital Advisors, involved in numerous authoritative studies on crowdfunding — including the one carried out by the World Bank in October 2013 — has analysed several crowdfunding platforms across different countries and found two extremely important results.
The first concerns employment: among companies that complete a successful crowdfunding campaign, as many as 87 per cent go on to make new hires, with an average of 2.2 jobs created per company. At a time of considerable strain in overcoming the cyclical economic crisis, this is an extremely significant macroeconomic result, especially given the absence of public investment.
The second result concerns production growth: a crowdfunding campaign leads to a 24 per cent increase in a company's sales when it is a reward-based campaign. If, on the other hand, the web campaign is aimed at raising risk capital (equity), crowdfunding — or rather crowd-investment — drives sales growth to 351 per cent.
"There are 4 ways to turn to participatory financing", Oliver Gajda, director of the European European crowdfunding network (Ecn), explains to Euronews; there is a donation-based model in which you receive money without giving anything in return.
But it is also possible to receive money and give a small reward in exchange, by providing a service or promoting that participation.
It is also possible — and this is very interesting for small businesses — to participate in the project by becoming shareholders. Or you can obtain loans or credit-access facilities on an individual basis or as a small business.
What you actually need to do for a crowdfunding campaign is to have an idea or a product that has already been tested with other people.
You need to identify a crowdfunding platform (such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo), preferably at a local level — some also allow international transactions — a platform that best suits your needs because, for example, it has already hosted similar initiatives.
You will need to describe the product or initiative in detail and convince friends, family and the wider public to help you reach your goal through the platform.
On crowdfunding there are no rules common to all European countries from a legal standpoint. But a discussion is under way in Brussels, among national governments, to find a common approach".