I’ve never started a crowdfunder before so I’m interested to know if anyone has experience in using these sites, and which you’d recommend. Indigogo, Kickstarter etc. Any suggestions?
I see that Coopers raised £10,000+ in a month on crowdfunder.co.uk, so in the absence of better suggestions, that may be our preferred option for now.
It may also be possible to get matched funding from Lewisham council for a crowdfunder on crowdfunder.co.uk . But this is for “For community, voluntary, and faith organisations with innovative, fresh ideas that benefit local communities within Lewisham.”
I almost set one up earlier this week, but found that it wasn’t needed.
Perhaps you need to set up a NfP company as part of se23.life, alternatively set up your own faith 
. More seriously, if this is a project to benefit the community it is possible that partnering with an existing community group might be useful to maximise funding. (If you want to discuss this further with me, we need to take the discussion off-line).
Thanks for the information @Michael.
We’re anticipating several months of lead time on the painting (due to the time of year), so the crowdfunder will run for a while. Perhaps we can see how the first month of crowdfunding pans out and if it’s looking sketchy, set up a partnership, approach the council and do the necessary form-filling to get matched funding?
Setting up an NFP probably involves quite a bit of bureaucracy, so I’m keen to avoid this if possible.
Let me know if you think it’s a gook idea to involve FHTA in this too & I’ll run it past the exec, though sure it will be cool.
There are two good choices - Spacehive or Crowdfunder.
You are unlikely to get funding from any of the organisations, even the council, unless you are set up as a community group, and even then it is not something that is likely to happen, nice if it does, but rare so don’t bank on it.
Spacehive will want detail, they will want a discussion and they’ll want to know cost breakdowns, contingency, liability, written permissions and any other hoop they can find before they will go live, but they will also help - they’ll push it, and they’ll do what they can to approach funding organisations and they have a very high success rate.
Crowdfunder will ask far fewer questions and you send it live when you want to. They don’t do much for their cut, but in this instance I doubt you’ll need much help.
If you can think of a good reason to get more funding, then crowdfunder allows for a stretch target and for over-funding opportunities. They also allow you to choose (before you go live and then you stick to it) if you want to do an ‘all or nothing’ or ‘keep what you raise’ plan, whereas with Spacehive you can only apply for what you need, and if you fail to hit the target you get nothing.
Whatever you do, make sure you account for a loss of up to 12% on what you raise. The platform takes a cut, the card processing takes a cut, neither are as small as they look on the detail. On this front, an advantage with Spacehive is, and I’m a little sketchy on the detail, but I think this is right; that they build in their fees as the total rises so what you see is what you get, whereas with crowdfunder, they don’t count any fees as they go along, it all comes off at the end.
There are always stragglers too - you get 75-80% of your money about 5-10 days after it finishes, then a week later some more, then a week later some more. It depends how many of your donors have the required funds in their accounts at the time the thing ends, and if it ends unexpectedly early, then they may not have the money in that account at the time.
Thanks so much, @Simon - that’s really helpful information. I think Crowdfunder sounds like our best bet at this stage.
@Pauline, did you have written permission from Network Rail? If not, it might be worth you (or me) obtaining it.
Is there any scope to have gift items to encourage donations?
So £5 gets your name on a webpage hosted somewhere as a ‘thank you’
£10 might get your name plus a postcard print of the final design
£20 might be a canvas bag with the design printed on
£100 might be getting to help paint.
Obviously depends on the cost of incentive not being more than extra donation.
Yes, again that is something Crowdfunder allows for, Spacehive doesn’t.
My advice on that one is to just offer a handful of rewards and don’t make them time consuming to administer. I have a feeling that they might not be needed on this occasion though, the overall target is relatively small, and good will is high, there are already examples of what people will get, it ticks all the boxes for success.
Definitely a good idea and something I can do on SE23.life.
I think I’d make it £20 though otherwise there’d be too many names on a single page?
As for the other reward suggestions, I have a feeling we’re going to smash this crowdfunder in days, and because it’s a project where everyone’s a winner (the Mural is a public asset, as such) I don’t think we’ll need to give bigger rewards.
I may be wrong of course!
Tomorrow is my only day off, and I’ve got lots to do. I’ll sort out contacting and obtaining this soon, though I only have to email dates for the go ahead from Network Rail.
And as @Simon says, I don’t think rewards are needed for a small target such as this, I think the community will see it through!
If it looks like the traders can help push it last minute by offering rewards I’m sure a couple of us at least will step in, I will