Our Crowdfunder

When we decided that we wanted to get serious with Chameleon Crafters, we had to work out how we could pay for the initial setup cost. Hannah's local wool shop had recently run something called a Crowdfunder, to help them raise the money they needed for a newly rebranded shop sign and advertising. They had already raised quite a bit of their target and looked likely to succeed in reaching it. After some research we decided to set one up for ourselves, here's how it went.

So who are Crowdfunder? We went onto their website and found out how it works,"Crowdfunder helps you raise funds to make your idea a reality" exactly what we needed! Thousands of people had used Crowdfunder and have raised money and awareness from the supportive community around them. So basically it meant that people made pledges of money towards your project in return for rewards. There are three types of Crowdfunding and they are 1. Rewards-based Crowdfunding 2. Community shares and 3. Equity funding. After reading about each, we decided that the rewards-based Crowdfunding was the right choice for us.

After inputting some initial details about our project we created our very own Crowdfunding page, it was a very easy and quick process. Their site is very user friendly and there are lots of tips and help along the way, so when I did get stuck on something I knew where to find support. We worked out that £500 would be enough for our initial set up costs, so we set our target at £500. This would pay for materials, equipment and a basic ecommerce website. Crowdfunder automatically gives you 42 days in which to reach your target which sounds like a lot but believe me it isn't!

Next we had to come up with reward ideas and assign them to a pledged amount, making sure the prices suited every budget. We decided that we wanted to make our own rewards and base them around the crochet kits that we were currently making, so we came up with the following;

• £5 pledge. A big sparkly thank you (in the form of a card) and an entry into a draw to win one of our crochet kits.
• £10 pledge. An exclusively designed tote bag or a voucher for tea/coffee and a slice of homemade cake, in 2QuayStreet vintage haberdashery and tea rooms. (We were so lucky that the lovely QuayStreet ladies donated these.)
• £20 pledge. An exclusively designed tote bag and a crocheted chameleon keyring.
• £30 pledge. A set of hand drawn stitch markers, a crocheted chameleon keyring and an exclusively designed tote bag.
• £40 pledge. A large crocheted 'Pablo' Chameleon or 'Viola' Narwhal.
• £50 pledge. One of our crocheted 'Pablo' Chameleon kits, an exclusively designed tote bag, a set of hand drawn stitch markers and a crocheted chameleon keyring.

The next stage was getting funded.........and this meant lots and lots of social networking. If you are thinking about starting your own Crowdfunder then you'd better prepare yourself for how much time you will spend on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. 

If we were going to do this again I would definitely use a scheduling app, such as 'Hootsuite', right from the start and make sure I had scheduled posts for each day that held some relevance to our crowdfunder.
 I made sure there were at least 2 posts each week that contained our Crowdfunder updates and reminders. One thing we did learn though, was that publishing too many posts too often, about the Crowdfunder, resulted in our followers losing interest and our number of followers went down. We had to keep our content original, fresh and keep referring back to our products and business values.We wanted our followers to feel part of our journey and to get to know a little bit about us as individuals. Everyone on our social media pages were super supportive and regularly shared our posts with others or on their own pages. I also sent direct messages on Twitter to larger companies and local businesses many of whom retweeted our posts and asked for others to help us. 

We are lucky enough to have a lot of friends and family who wanted to pledge but some didn't feel comfortable pledging money online, so we came up with some paper pledge slips for them.

 We updated our crowdfunder page about halfway through, I admit that we worried at this point as we did not seem to be anywhere near our target but we didn't give up!

We started a blog and scheduled a few posts, scheduling the links to be posted on all our social media pages. This attracted more followers, so we decided that for every 100 followers we would run a competition to win one of our creations. These competitions really helped to spread the word about our Crowdfunder and our products.

 As we got closer to the end of 42 days, it got really exciting. I would wake up to new pledges or whilst I was working an email would pop up with new pledge notifications. We started making our rewards just after the halfway mark, as we knew how much work was involved to make them all, and gosh it was!! We had a small colony of tiny chameleons living in glass jars on coffee tables waiting to be made into keyrings and I won't begin to bore you with the ins and outs of the exact way to successfully transfer designs onto material!

Anyway......day 42 finally arrived and all of our hard work had paid off, we received £515 in pledges!! We are so very thankful to everyone who helped us to achieve our target, we would not be in the fortunate position we are now without your support. 

Since receiving the money we have been researching and buying materials and supplies. We have purchased an ecommerce website, currently being designed and also some much needed equipment.

We still have a long way to go with Chameleon Crafters but if we hadn't run our Crowdfunder we wouldn't have been able to get this far.

A great big sparkly "Thank you" to you all.

Big love,

Cara