If you’re a busy working parent then perhaps you’re a bit like me: More comfortable behind a computer than behind the cake stall at the school fete?
If that is the case, then Village Raised may be the perfect way to fundraise for your school or kindergarten. I spoke to founder Luci Temple to find out more about crowdfunding for kids.
“Village Raised is a global online fundraising platform and community website to help digitally connected parents to raise money for their kids’ schools, day care centres and sporting teams, by harnessing the power of social media and online communities.”
The quick facts:
Village Raised operates on an All or Nothing basis with projects required to meet their target to receive any funding. They charge a 5% success fee plus PayPal transaction costs of approximately 3%. Village Raised is globally accessible – you can create and support projects from anywhere that crowdfunding is legal.
Crowdfund it: Congratulations Luci on such a great idea. Can you tell us about your background and why you decided to create Village Raised?
Temple: I’ve often had to wear multiple hats in my career, side projects, and personal life, and the decision to create Village Raised kind of came through a collision of these different worlds.
I ran my first crowdfunding project in 2007 to raise $5,000 to make a short film – back then it just involved a PayPal “donate” button on the production company’s website. In the years since, I’ve paid close attention as filmmakers and other creative people experimented with raising money and engaging fans for their projects. For many years people argued that it would be impossible to raise large sums of money this way – and there were plenty of failed experiments – but then Kickstarter hit its stride and proved that it could be done many times over.
While I dabbled in filmmaking out of passion, my paid career has been in the field of communications and marketing, and I’ve applied my skills to several different industries, including the Education sector. The biggest change in the last ten years of marketing and communications has been the move away from one-way mediums (like newspapers, TV, advertisements) towards interactive mediums (social media, blogs, content) that invite people to participate in conversations and content co-creation. In many ways the creative fields have led the way in this change, and I see lots of correlation to the evolution of the crowdfunding movement.
As a typical working parent, I have to juggle these work responsibilities alongside the needs of my child. My daughter’s school, like many others, doesn’t receive enough funding to cover everything, so parents volunteer their time to organise and run fundraisers to raise money for the school. I have to admit I was not originally one of the diligent hard working parents who did this. I more often than not ignored the calls for volunteers, and instead dug a little deeper into my pocket to buy cakes or jam or sausage sizzles that I didn’t really want or need. The one time I did bother baking for the cake stall, the mental arithmetic of costing the ingredients and my time versus the sales price convinced me I would be better off in future to just donate money directly. But in the age we live in, it is hard to ignore the sense of mother-guilt we feel when we ‘cop out’ like this.
So my guilt of being a less-than-perfect-P&C-mum, combined with my knowledge of crowdfunding, led me to put up my hand to run a crowdfunding campaign for my daughter’s school. I could see it would yield a better financial return to the school while requiring fewer man hours from parents. The existing crowdfunding platforms weren’t geared towards schools, parents, or children so I set about creating a new website that would do the trick. Thus Village Raised was born.
CFI: Who do you see as the primary market for Village Raised?
Temple: At this point we’re focusing on schools, and the parents, teachers and principals who fundraise for them. More broadly, we would include day-care centres, children’s sporting clubs, and other organisations that provide activities to children.
CFI: Does it need to be the school or childcare centre (for instance) that sets up a campaign or can a project be launched by a parent? How do you ensure the school is part of the process?
Temple: We provide a platform that gives flexibility for a school or parent to set up the fundraiser. Parents are already involved in running fundraisers for their schools, and will already be following whatever protocols or processes are required within their school community – Village Raised simply offers a different style of fundraiser that is online, can maximise financial returns, and requires fewer man hours.
We will additionally release case studies and support documentation to help parents, teachers and schools run an effective crowdfunding campaign that aligns with their school needs.
CFI: What sort of projects would be a great fit for Village Raised?
Temple: Village Raised is specifically for fundraising for things that benefit a collective group of kids – so if you are trying to raise money for a school, this is the platform for you.
Some ideas:
- Specific items needed by the school. For example, my daughter’s school is raising money for new computers. Schools might need sports equipment, or a new playground, solar panels, vegetable garden, electronic whiteboards, art supplies, musical instruments, etc.
- Pre-sales of items or tickets. For when you need a minimum order to proceed, or must know numbers early on, for example, pre-ordering Class Jerseys, or tickets for the year 12 formal, or tickets for a fundraising dinner.
- Equitable experiences. For situations where a per-student fee would result in excluding disadvantaged students from being able to attend (e.g. school camp), crowdfunding enables a class or school to fundraise the total together so no child is left out.
- Special programs. Raise money for important programs that don’t quite fit within the school budget, such as breakfast programs, student clubs, arts programs, homework club, or ethics classes.
CFI: Are there any projects that you can’t launch on Village Raised?
Temple: You can’t use Village Raised for something that isn’t related to kids, and obviously you can’t do anything illegal. Our guidelines with more details are here.
CFI: While many parents are likely to know how to navigate their way online, crowdfunding is still a new concept to many. Will people be comfortable using this new form of fundraising?
Temple: Anything new has a learning curve, and some people will be more comfortable than others. But I’d say the same goes for any type of fundraising – I helped out at a Bunnings BBQ for our school one weekend and it was clear that some experienced volunteers had worked out time-saving tricks that made things go faster while others were slow, clumsy and got flustered easily. I watched what others did, learned their tricks, and in no time at all was teaching other newbies how they could improve as if I were an old hand!
Similarly, the first time someone organises a crowdfunding campaign they will have to learn how to do new things. But in time they will get better at it, and be able to teach others. Meanwhile, it’s easy for anyone to support a crowdfunding campaign by payment or by sharing a link, and I’d be surprised if any parents had trouble with that part of the equation!
Over time Village Raised will have more documentation, support materials, and member forums to help lessen the learning curve.
Equally, it’s important to note that many of the so called ‘digital natives’ are now at child-rearing age and becoming parents. They are the generation that has pioneered crowdfunding, is riding the wave, and when it comes time for them to help with school fundraising, something like Village Raised will make perfect sense to them.
CFI: With reward-based crowdfunding it can be used for pre-sales. What sort of rewards are suitable for funding on Village Raised?
Temple: The beauty of a platform like Village Raised is that there is a lot of flexibility to suit the school using it.
On one hand the primary reason people give to a school fundraiser is because they care about the school kids, so you can provide rewards that show your gratitude but that don’t eat away the profit margin. For example, student crafted thank you cards, student artwork, VIP seating to a school event, certificates of appreciation, engrave messages in a brick wall, naming of the school wi-fi for a year, videos of teachers Gangnam Style.
You can theme your rewards to suit your goal. For example, if you’re raising money for a vegetable garden or healthy eating program, why not have each student eat a vegetable for each corresponding pledge?
Or you can offer more tangible rewards, replicating what your school already does but in an online environment:
- Event tickets, such as for school formals, concerts, plays, or for fundraising events such as trivia nights, dinners.
- Year 12 Jerseys or House Shirts
- Home-made preserves, pickles, soap, baked goods, crafts.
- Third party fundraising products, such as school tea towels, calendars, drink bottles, clothing labels, coffee, chocolate, etc.
CFI: You’ve been surveying potential users about their needs, what have you learnt?
Temple: Modern parents often lack time to volunteer for traditional fundraisers, they can get annoyed at the hypocrisy of chocolate drives and cake stalls that contradict the school’s healthy eating policies, they can feel ripped off when fundraisers involve substandard products at inflated prices, and they get upset when their young children are pressured to sell fundraising products.
However parents also care deeply for both their own children as well as other kids at their school, and they do help out when they can. Even if it means buying the cake they don’t need, selling their school’s chocolates to work colleagues, or buying the whole book of raffle tickets rather than selling them. They can be very selfless, generous, and compassionate.
Parents respond strongly to the concept of Village Raised, and say they’d love their school or parents’ association to run a crowdfunding campaign – however in practice many parents and teachers don’t feel like they have the authority or autonomy to start a crowdfunding campaign for their child’s school. This is probably the key challenge Village Raised has: finding people who not only have the need and desire to use the platform, but who also feel they can just get in and do it.
CFI: How is Village Raised different from other sites that exist out there, for instance Donors Choose?
Temple: Donors Choose is a doing a great job, but it is only for US schools and runs a bit differently – with a focus on high-poverty schools and teachers who just need a few hundred dollars for classroom supplies. On Donors Choose a teacher would itemise what their class needs, and explain why they need it in text; people visiting the website might choose to donate to them or to another class; and if enough money is raised Donors Choose would purchase and deliver the items to the teacher. Fundraising is therefore somewhat limited to “items” that can be bought and delivered by Donors Choose, as money never goes directly to the teacher or school. Village Raised on the other hand gives more flexibility, as sometimes a school might already know a local supplier of goods or services that better meet their needs. Because Donors Choose is centred around classroom teachers raising money for just their own class campaigns tend to be limited in scope and the average amount raised is $500.
There is also more focus on high-poverty schools, which means it’s not necessarily a good platform for other schools that also need to do fundraising. Most of Donors Choose donors come via their website rather than from a school or parents promoting the fundraiser to their community – the downside to this is that a teacher needs to make their plea stand out from the thousands of other classes on the website. Donors Choose asks donors to give a 15% donation to their platform (most of which do) while Village Raised has a set 5% fee.
Village Raised models itself more off Kickstarter. This approach allows fundraisers more flexibility, creativity, and autonomy in how much money they want to raise, what for, how they communicate it, and what rewards they will deliver. The ability to offer ‘rewards’ provides added incentive for people to support the fundraiser. We put the school community at the centre of the fundraiser. The big plus in this is that schools aren’t really competing against other schools on the website because they are tapping into their own community as a starting point. It is a highly social and potentially viral approach, enabling the whole school community to be involved and to spread the fundraiser to their connections. In time we expect to additionally have a community on our website interested in supporting multiple schools, just as Kickstarter has cultivated a creative community on their website who support multiple creative projects.
There are many other crowdfunding websites out there, but they either specialise in an area not relevant to schools (such as how Kickstarter is just for “creative projects”), or they are geographically limited (such as how Donors Choose is just for US schools), or they are very broad in trying to cater for anything and everything – which means they lack the ability to build a community around a common interest.
CFI: What do you see as the future of crowdfunding in Australia?
Temple: The benefit of the online world is that it breaks down geographical barriers, so launching a crowdfunding campaign in Australia is not much different from launching it anywhere else in the world – anyone can tap into a global supporter base. On the flipside, it also means there is global competition!
In the future we will see more niche crowdfunding sites that build communities around specific interest areas. Crowdfunding will become a common way for people to raise money – as common as school bake sales and other existing fundraising techniques. People may get sick of being asked for money by yet another crowdfunding campaign, but they will also always make exceptions for the ones that touch them.
Key factors that influence whether people will support a crowdfunding campaign: proximity to the people raising money, entertainment or novelty value of the campaign communication, intrinsic value of rewards, and alignment of the crowdfunder’s purpose for raising money with the supporters own values and interests.
The industry will grow in sophistication over time, as will the social media tools that help power them. As targeting tools improve, crowdfunders will get better at communicating to the right people in the right way rather than cluttering up everyone’s feeds.
Schools will particularly benefit because they already have a large existing ‘crowd’ willing and able to help out because of their connection to the school – parents will more often than not support their own child’s school fundraiser both financially and by volunteering some of their time.
Thank you Luci Temple from VillageRaised!
For a five minute demonstration of how to use Village Raised, watch their video below:
Visit Village Raised on their website here, follow them on Twitter or Like their Facebook page.
Do you think that Village Raised is an exciting new chapter for fundraising for kids? Would you use it? Let us know in the comments!
For more information on crowdfunding platforms, inspiring case studies and loads of how-to, buy your copy of Crowdfund it! today!
Anna Maguire, October 2013