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On Thursday night we celebrated the launch of wedidthis.org.uk, a new crowdfunding platform supporting UK arts organisations, allowing them to reach out to their audiences and supporters for funding and bringing together large numbers of small donations.

We must build and strengthen the "culture of asking", which will be so vital for the sector's future.

at the heart of the new culture that we must create is a two-way conversation between arts organisations and individuals that is about much more than a donation of funds.

Chance Barnett says he founded Crowdfunder in order to give startups more options. Backers can choose to invest for more than just straight equity -- they could also buy a cut of revenue based on time or percentage return. So an investor could buy 5% of a company's revenue for three years, or 10% of revenue capped at a 200% return on their investment. "In equity-based financing, [investors] aren't guaranteed a return on their money unless the company is sold or offers dividends," Barnett says. "Revenue lets them get a return. It lets them really share in the incremental growth of a company as it happens." Crowdfunder is in private beta testing right now, which will serve as a holding pattern until the Act takes effect.

with little more than a month left before their deadline, several key questions remain unanswered.

“The law is better than it might have been … but there are lots of loose ends, a lot of inconsistencies.”

his will be brief as my head is still spinning from last night’s Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation (PSCDC) meeting held at the Quality Inn and Suites — my first "public meeting" as editor of the Pagosa Daily Post. First of all, many, many thanks to those who took the time to intentionally seek me out after the meeting for the purpose of encouraging me, offering me help (so needed) and suggestions (a bit over-whelming).  I even appreciated those who came up to me, shook my hand, offered me an encouraging smile and simply stated “You really are crazy...” This may not be “newsy” enough or “investigative” enough for some, but it’s all I got for now. Please bear with me as I feel like I am trying to catch a run-away train.

There were two main topics of discussion last night. First up was Udgar Parsons with a brief update on the “Imagine Downtown” project. Mr. Parsons is leading the charge to implement many of the preliminary initiatives that resulted from the two day meeting with Downtown Colorado, Inc. (DCI).  DCI visited Pagosa Springs on November 12-13, 2012 to take a look at our community and make recommendations about how to improve the Pagosa experience.  There were numerous opportunities and invitations to attend sections of these meetings. Attendees were then e-mailed to come to an inaugural launch meeting which took place last Thursday night.  As a downtown property owner, this is a group I intend to follow. They are energized to dig in, doing simple, inexpensive projects to make a difference.  First up is to identify all the vacant downtown property owners and offer to assist them in “dressing up” their windows and properties so as not to look so… well… “vacant”. There are a variety of suggestions including Christmas themed decorations, historical information, restaurant menus, high school art work and maps.  It’s really a very simple project that requires minimal funds and a few dedicated souls to carry it out. The best part is it requires no government approvals. Property owners will be contacted and the service will be offered — free of charge. Now that’s new and different.

Mr. Parsons launched the project with a $1,000 donation from Growing Spaces (the company he co-owns with his wife Puja). The CDC voted to match those funds — so with $2,000 & no government red tape to cut through, the first initiative of the “Imagine Downtown” project is off and running in less than 5 days.  If you want to get involved or have suggestions, you can contact Mr. Parsons at udgar@frontier.net or Muriel Buckley at madamebuck@gmail.com. Next up was Anthony Edwards, founder of “Crowdfunding Offerings, LTD”. Anthony’s presentation consumed a majority of the time last night, but quite frankly, it was so chopped up due to constant questions and off-tracking from the audience, it was hard to follow. A “great” reporter would have come home and dug in researching everything he/she took notes on — and could perhaps write an intelligent summary of Mr. Edward’s presentation. I came home, cooked dinner, cleaned the kitchen and helped my son with his spelling test.  In the scope of life — exactly what I should be doing. I will continue to update Daily Post readers as the viability and sustainability of such an endeavor really unfolds.  You can read more about what “Crowdfunding Offerings”  by clicking the link. It offers some basic education re: who, what, why and how. I was a little perplexed by the PSCDC’s willingness to jump in with Mr. Edward's company as it has no active platforms at this point. But I will assume for now the PSCDC has done their homework... and there is nothing wrong with joining on prior to the masses.  I am sure the original shareholders of Apple, Dell and eBay would agree, there’s nothing wrong with being first.  (Facebook??? Not so much.) 

If we are able to reach our fundraising goal, we will deliver a handbook that provides: An overview fo how crowdsourcing leads to breakthroughs in funding social movements; A framework of open collaboration to engage change agents in the funding and building of movements; Concrete first steps for financing and developing infrastructure to support these new models and high-impact projects.

If we reach our goal of $5000 we will pull together a team of experts on innovative financing models, collaboration platforms, and social movements to draft a crowdfunding handbook

Upon completion, the handbook will be made freely available to everyone under a Creative Commons license.  If the crowd pays for it, the crowd will own it.

The future of crowdfunding is allowing investors equity in an idea or business. If we can fund ideas from friends who want to see us become successful, imagine if those friends actually got to participate in the revenue stream. Wouldn’t you give a little extra if, instead of receiving a simple return, you had the opportunity not only to make a profit but also to own a percentage of the company itself?

In recent years, hundreds of crowdfunding sites have sprung up worldwide, covering everything from games and mobile apps to performing arts and businesses, including a number in the UK such as Crowdcube and Crowdfunder.

Rubin outlines four key reasons why people contribute to crowdfunding projects: "The first is because they care about the person, or the cause, or the campaign. The second is because they want the product or the experience. The third is because they want to be part of something bigger than themselves. And the fourth is because they want profit. The first three are serviced on Indiegogo in a dynamic way; the fourth is illegal right now [in the US, although not in the UK]."

"I have very little doubt that 10 years from now, crowdfunding will be embedded into the financial fabric of the world, just in the way credit cards are

these laws now make it almost impossible to invest in small businesses in our communities and pretty much compel us to invest in the New York Stock Exchange. In the name of protecting investors, securities laws now make it very difficult to raise money with crowdfunding.

Failure to comply with these requirements can, at a minimum, result in having to return all your investors’ money. At worst, there could be civil and even criminal penalties.

Ask for donations!

As crowdfunding has matured from a series of one-off efforts into something reproducible, the money has followed.

Venture capitalists have also shown an interest by investing in start-ups that facilitate crowdfunding.

Of those that are accepted, about half meet their funding goals: around 1,600 projects had been funded by July 2010.

What are you raising funds to do? Having a focused and well-defined project with a clear beginning and end is vital.

Rewards are what backers receive in exchange for pledging to a project. The importance of creative, tangible, and fairly priced rewards cannot be overstated.

Every project’s primary rewards should be things made by the project itself.

at the 3rd Annual Film Finance Forum West, where an inconspicuous crowd-funding panel presented IndieGoGo, Audience Productions and Sokap, three new crowd-based companies that can topple the remaining barriers-to-entry, and fully democratize filmmaking.

Audience Productions is the first film company to be authorized by the SEC and 20+ states to use both the internet and crowd-funding to sell shares in their films for the purpose of raising their financing.

As the local distributor of your selected territories, you can show the film in local theaters, sell it through local merchants, or directly to interested people or organizations in your territory. You just pay a small upfront license fee to the filmmaker which allows them to make the film and then you market the film until it's delivered, and collect a distribution fee from the revenues you generate. Like Audience Productions, this addresses filmmakers' critical need for alternative sources of financing while at the same time, also addresses the critical need for alternative forms of distribution in the U.S. and Canada

On November 3, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 2930 (the “Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act”), a crowdfunding bill that will allow startups to offer and sell securities via crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, as well as social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

this change could be huge for startups and lifts certain securities law prohibitions that have been on the books since the 1930s.

Until the crowdfunding bill becomes law, startups should avoid selling stock or other securities via crowdfunding sites or social networking sites.

In over four years of operation, leading crowdfunding site Indiegogo reports virtually no fraud. U.K. crowdfunding leader Crowdcube (which does allow equity finance) reports no fraud.  As is the case for U.S. based peer-to-peer lending site Prosper or AngelList, the popular site for angel investors searching for deal flow from entrepreneurs.  Never let the facts get in the way of a good FUD story.  If you commit fraud online, your life is over.

Fraud feeds on opacity and on small groups, because those factors increase the probably of not being "found out".  Ironically, that would well describe the environment of the traditional investment paradigm.  But in the social networking sphere, the more viral any story gets, the more the chances that fraud will be exposed by the people who would know.

If we make it hard for Americans to invest in crowdfunding, then entrepreneurs will tend to get funded with larger percentages of foreign money.

Kickstarter, which just recently celebrated the 10,000th successfully funded project in its 2.5-year history, is under siege by that most ubiquitous of foes, presently at least: patent litigation.

Kickstarter has asked that the patent be invalidated, and failing that, that they be found not infringing.

Until now, U.S. regulations permitted these sites only to facilitate donations—not purchases of equity stakes. The Securities and Exchange Commission now is reviewing those rules, and many crowd-funding sites are pushing to axe the stake ban.

Launched in December, ProFounder has about 500 start-ups signed up and making pitches on the site. The average pledge is about $1,300; the average fund-raising, $30,000. ProFounder charges business owners $1,000 in service fees, on top of $100 to publish a fund-raising pitch. Ms. Jackley says she is already working with a legal team to lay the groundwork for online equity sales, an option she says will dramatically raise the amount of cash pledged by supporters.

The people who really need to hear, read, and see these messages are those who would never sign up for a newsletter about economic inequality or watch a YouTube video about climate change. That's what makes Loudsauce such a unique player in the crowdfunding market. Unlike Kickstarter, which focuses on funding individual creative projects, and IndieGoGo, which caters to "anyone with an idea," Loudsauce was designed specifically to transform the medium of advertising from one that primarily drives consumption to one of civic participation.

In this way, Loudsauce can almost be considered a second-stage crowdfunding service: it gets people to help not just in the early stages of a socially responsible project, but then to help amplify these projects and get them out into the mainstream consciousness.

Other Loudsauce successes include running a commercial about the Story of Stuff during an episode of Hoarders (potentially reaching 2 million people and resulting in 40,000 visitors to the Story of Stuff website)

One of the most impressive qualities of crowdfunding is its versatility. Feature films, music releases, web startups, gadgets, art projects, urban farms, journalism, open-source platforms, and social activism comprise only a short list of the types of projects that have been funded by crowdfunding. And as we’ve explored during this week’s Crowdfunding Nation series, it's only expanding.

Ten thousand successful projects is a big milestone.

How much money did those 10,000 projects raise? The most common projects on Kickstarter are not blockbusters like Diaspora or the Jay DeMerit doc, but smaller projects that raise $5,000 or less.

Project Statistics (current as of 7/17/2011)Launched Projects: 26,620Successful Projects: 10,388Unsuccessful Projects: 13,113Live Projects: 3,119Success Rate: 44%

Other sites like Profounder, which is currently in private Beta, aims to make crowdfunding easy for ordinary business owners. They'll assist in creating legal documents that will make the investments official and the terms easy to understand by all. Profounder will also enable users to hold both private and public rounds of investments, collect those investments, keep track of filings, deadlines and bookkeeping, and distribute repayments to investors automatically.

The role of nonprofits as a middleman is changing. The donors can more often support a specific project rather than the organization as a whole. Nowadays the donors can also easily have a direct contact with the beneficiaries.

The crowd can organize themselves around goals, campaigns and projects even without the structures that nonprofits have traditionally provided. People don't need a middleman, a nonprofit, to create the impact they want to see.

Every year the World Economic Forum picks a number of up-and-coming technology startups from around the world and dubs them Technology Pioneers.

This year’s group includes CloudFlare, DoubleVerify, Dropbox, Kickstarter, Lending Club, and Palantir Technologies.

Crowd-funding website Kickstarter allows anyone with an idea for a film, album, art project, or product to make their pitch, say how much they need to get started, and ask for pledges. Once the minimum amount needed is pledged, the project gets started. To date, Kickstarter has helped fund more than 25,000 projects, with $75 million pledged.