CrowdPatch.com: Global, free crowdfunding for social entrepreneurs, NGOs, charities and creatives

NEWS RELEASE

London, February 2021

CrowdPatch is a global, not-for-profit, GDPR-compliant, community-based crowdfunding platform that brings people together in shared locations or interest groups to fund and help projects in their ‘patch’. An online community is formed as a ‘CrowdPatch’ with a Patch Leader, who is responsible for managing which projects to list and for providing support and connectivity to the community. Established as a community interest company (CIC) with philanthropic investment, CrowdPatch is now sustained as a freelance marketplace for registered users.

The digital model of CrowdPatch mirrors local fundraising in the real world: Project Owners can offer rewards in exchange for financial contributions, announce campaigns that require only volunteers (no funds), or embark on crowdlending ventures with our partner platforms, LendLocal or Kiva. 

Features 

CrowdPatch has many unique features – such as integrating funding, volunteering and social media targeting – to utilise the full resources and energy of communities. Another feature unique to CrowdPatch is our ‘no fees structure’, which opens up patches on the website to include projects from other crowdfunding platforms: our focus is on driving impact in the patch, not to gain profit for CrowdPatch. Also, in-kind gifts received by projects are assigned equivalent financial values that are added to the cumulative funds raised by projects. New features at CrowdPatch.com include the facility to fund projects without needing to register, run events (via platforms like Eventbrite), earn passive income via affiliate marketing, establish membership schemes, build teams of paid/volunteer freelancers, and run white-label CrowdPatch campaigns from third-party websites via widgets and iframes. 

Scale 

CrowdPatch has in-built flexibility to serve organisations/projects of any structure at any scale: local, regional, national or international. We create projects in CrowdPatches, set up as necessary in a parent ‘CrowdPatchwork’. Within each patch, people can fund projects, volunteer their skills, share news of projects around their networks and join the group for news updates. Each patch can list current crowdfunding projects hosted by other platforms – such as Indiegogo – where Project Owners can integrate commercial crowdfunding campaigns at third-party sites with social enterprise campaigns aimed at CrowdPatch’s local community networks. In this scenario, the CrowdPatch project is more likely to be on a small scale: e.g. a Project Owner may ask for a few thousand pounds from the crowd in their local area to support events for disadvantaged or vulnerable groups in their communities. A Project Owner may be promoting a simultaneous campaign at, say, Indiegogo to raise larger amounts for a commercial campaign.

Examples 

We can create a dummy patch and project for your organisation: you would click on links in our cover email to visit a showcase landing page set up to display projects and patches. If you enter such a patch you would see that we loaded an external crowdfunding project related to the themes of your patch. You would also see we have connected the patch to its related social media accounts, which is important for digital marketing. Once such a patch appoints someone as Patch Leader, this person then manages the crowdfunding projects listed and provides frontline support. Our Director of Crowdfunding, Christopher Norris, can act as a mentor/troubleshooter for Patch Leaders.

Network effect 

The structure of CrowdPatch works uniquely to engage many relevant communities. Once a project reaches a 25% funding threshold (volunteer-only projects have a 0% threshold), its Project Owner can ask for the project to be listed for crowdfunding in other relevant patches on our platform with shared interests and/or with people local to the project geographically, where host patches can contribute funds and/or volunteers to the project’s financial target total.

We can list your crowdfunding projects across many different communities (that equate to CrowdPatches), including countrywide ones already supported by serving MPs (based on parliamentary constituency boundaries), as well as any fundraising projects currently running on other crowdfunding platforms. This whole process is free to set up and manage and the CrowdPatch platform is so flexible it can mirror the ways in which any organisation operates. 

Win/win/win outcomes 

What does CrowdPatch get? We exist to help to create jobs, fund small businesses, bring new money into the system and make a sustainable impact in local communities around the world. We create an environment where skills and experience (including CrowdPatch executives) can be volunteered and/or rewarded financially. Our proposed working relationship would aim to achieve these objectives within your organisation.

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About the Team

• Simon Krystman, Co-founder and CEO, CrowdPatch

‘Crowdfunding is a brilliant way of validating projects. Successful campaigns generate funds to make projects happen in local communities and shared-interest groups. CrowdPatch optimises opportunities for great not-for-profit projects of all types to be realised for free, to make beneficial impacts on diverse communities.’

• Christopher Norris, Director of Crowdfunding, CrowdPatch

‘Crowdfunding provides the social glue for community cohesion projects to happen. CrowdPatch makes creating a buzz, building a network and raising funds easy for project owners: our platform is free to use and it’s a great way of attracting fans – and volunteer and freelance talent – to compelling ideas that impact communities in positive ways.’

For further information and for interviews please contact:

Press team, CrowdPatch

• E: [email protected]
• Twitter: @CrowdPatch ? Hashtag: #FreeCrowdfunding
• Facebook: @CrowdPatch