Crowd Funding 101: Try It You Might Like It

What in the heck is crowd funding anyway?

A few weeks ago, a dear friend and colleague introduced me to her newest business venture – www.healthtechhatch.com.   As an empathetic entrepreneur, I jumped in with both feet to support the Beta testing of her site by adding my newest project to her portfolio – The Healthcare Quality Consortium, supporting the invisible workforce. 

 Health Tech Hatch (HTH) is a crowd funding website focused on helping start-ups, entrepreneurs, social activist, and other health technology enthusiast  acquire funding to jump start their projects or ideas.  If you have heard of crowd funding, then you have probably heard of kickstarter which has been featured on CNN, GMA, and other national news shows or a similar website aimed at marketing innovative ideas spawned by really passionate people.  If you are not familiar with crowd funding, this is a quick intro to the concept, as I think it is a pretty cool way to make small increments of support go really, really far.

1)      The website is a secure, legitimate way of donating funding to a project that peaks your interest.

2)      HTH is a secure website with projects that are screened and approved for inclusion on the site.

3)      The funding goes to the project with a very, very small percent being retained to maintain the site.

4)      In most cases, when you donate you are offered a funding level that can be as low as $5.00 and in exchange you get a gift.  The greater your contribution, the more attractive the gift.  We are raffling Orange Bowl tickets and contributing all proceeds from the site to the charity of a selected donor.

5)      Unfortunately, HTH requires you donate online with a credit card or paypal, but we are exploring a way to collect checks.  More to come!

6)      The more people who donate the better.  The point is to get a lot of folks to donate.  This increases your visibility on the web and the popularity of your project, so it is a quasi-marketing effort as well.  Kind of like Twitter or the number of hits a site gets on google.

7)      Bad news – if you don’t meet at least 60% of your goal, then all funds are returned to the donors, unless you decide to extend the date and continue to push for donations.

8)      The goal is to collect as much money as you can within the timeframe specified, because typically the project needs the money right away, which is why they have chosen this method of fundraising.

The BAE Company is seeking $5,724 to jump start The Healthcare Quality Consortium.  We are hosting a planning meeting to build a consortium of folks who are interested in creating a non-profit entity that will bridge the gap between the underserved who need jobs and open jobs in the health care arena, while focusing on building a quality healthcare workforce for our safety net clinics and hospitals.

So far, we have reached 20% of our goal.  Whoo hoo!  We have 4 more weeks to go!  Hoping this helps resolve some of the mystery around crowd funding for those who want to support the effort, but just weren’t sure how.  Not only are you helping us build a new social enterprise, but you are supporting innovation at its best by pilot testing www.healthtechhatch.com.