If you want to start a business, what’s the first thing you’ll start worrying about? Raising capital of course. You have to begin with a pillar-to-post run to ensure you get the right kind of bank loans and convince enough investors to reach into their pockets.

You must be ready with the whole arsenal: business proposals and future projections, powerpoint presentations loaded with data and statistics. But most importantly, you have to be ready to face rejection at any point, and to have the project of dreams turn into a hopeless nightmare.

Well, that’s how they did things back in the day. But now, if you have a business idea, you head straight to a crowdfunding platform and have the public at large, and their largesse, take care of your project. In the last few years, a raft of successful enterprises has been launched through crowdfunding campaigns. And these days, even big businesses are open to experimenting with crowdfunding platforms. To succeed, all you need is a winning idea, and access to any of one of these crowdfunding portals.

Krowdcircle

Krowdcircle is the first online crowdfunding organization in eastern India. It helps individuals with different concerns showcase their need to a larger audience and raise funds and do not charge any fee for creating a campaign on the website. The campaign is supported by content, visuals and narrative, to set a strong impact in order to help people understand the reason for raising funds. On completion of the campaign the entire amount is transferred to the campaigner’s account from the company account.

Krowdcircle deducts about a fee of 5% as transaction charges along with 3% payment gateway charges. The website creates campaigns of two genres- reward and donation based. In reward based, anyone, be it a startup or an NGO, can raise funds in return for goods or services. Whereas, donation based refers to selfless contribution.

GoRaiseFunds

GoRaiseFunds is a crowdfunding app that helps an individual and businesses to create fund for their creative project, execution of ideas, medical bills and personal needs. The user can create their campaign by themselves and upload the campaign photo on the app or onto their website www.goraisefunds.com. The main aim of the app/website is to find financial help through the specific need of an individual through crowdfunding. GoRaiseFunds is available on Google play.

GoFundMe

GoFundMe is the personal fundraising platform which helps to manage a fundraising campaign from start to finish. The user can start their campaign on the GoFundMe app by sharing the photo of the campaign and app will notify users about new donations. User once gets sufficient fund, can transfer the funds to their account.

Through the app, the user can also share their campaign on other social media platforms. User can also themselves keep an eye on their progress and get notification as soon as the donation comes in. To find or donate to a campaign, a user can directly go to the www.gofundme.com. The GoFundMe app is available on Google play store.

CrowdRise

CrowdRise is the fundraising platform that is exclusively for charitable causes. Users can open the account and start a charity campaign to get donation for particular causes. Users can also use online fundraisers to raise money for over 1.5 million charities.

The website also adds custom branding to the user’s campaign to raise donations. A user can also share their personal stories through their own CrowdRise Account to raise funds for their own cause.

The website also facilities the user to start their own activity like marathon run or give up birthday or wedding to raise fund for the social cause. The more of the donations go for the cause rather than going to fundraiser websites. The more points a user earn, the points become a charitable life of the user depicting the ability of user to raise funds.

A user can also get their own homepage for the entire fundraisers and donations user made.

33Needs

33Needs enables an individual to invest in social enterprises. Once the investment is made, investor gets a percentage return based on the company’s revenue. On this website, donars are treated as invested and make a portfolio on the website. Investors also solve global business challenges through their ideas and strategies through the website.

Each profile page has a tool to share or rather pitch their advice on the social enterprise. Every user is also able to track their investment through their own portfolio and is allowed to join the investment communities to invest collectively into the enterprise.

Source: Sunday Guardian Live