Thu, Jul 31, 2014

( follows on from part 2 )

There is a new form of crowd funding in town

Following on from my last post about building a new charity platform the concept has evolved into something more concrete and exciting.

Having pushed the idea around a little more it made sense to look further at the power of the market place concept.

Although a massive objective is still to increase donations and awareness for charities it was never a part of the plan to be a charity. The platform has always required a valid business model and was and still is most definitely a for profit business.

This platform will require revenue to operate and I am going to grow it as a profitable company.

Why not just charities?

In the background I have always looked at different financial models to generate the revenue. This is something that I am guilt of over-complicating in the past. In fact the whole idea for this platform came to me whilst working on a previous platform idea with @kevbaldwyn called StickerDeck.

But now it feels right (although we'll see what actual sales say). The platform will be commission based like most crowd funding sites with a special tier for charities.

So I have introduced some breakthrough changes to the plan:

1. The platform will be designed around completing tasks. Any task that is quantifiable and trackable.
2. Anybody will be able to raise money be they a charity, company, individual or robot.
3. A campaign can have one or more recipients rather than just a single entity.
4. A campaign can have one or more donors.

These critical new changes are going to form the basis of the new taskfunding platform.

I'm proud to announce the platform is officially called "Taskfundr"

Yep. That's right. Welcome to ’taskfunding’. A form of crowd funding where instead of giving your hard earned cash you help others raise money with effort & time (Wow - almost seems like the basis of a proper market without the speculators!).

Next steps

So before I can launch fully I am building an MVP to test the validity of the concept. My brain is going into overdrive with future plans but I need some validation before going to far.

The most encouraging part so far is that I have found people understand the concept pretty instinctively when I have done user testing on the crudest wireframes. I have always found this to be a really important indicator that you are doing something right.

Initially I am going to run my own campaign to raise money and awareness for Children's Hospice Southwest. My company Wiseguy Digital will be the donor.

Whilst this campaign runs I will use it to educate new users about Taskfundr & the concept of taskfunding as well as benchmarking how well it does, testing, getting feedback, iterating etc.

This form of "eating my own dog food" has already enabled me to identify problems pretty early on and better understand the issues/concerns from all parties involved in a campaign.

So my next post will cover some of the issues discovered & how I am going about assembling my own campaign.

Until next time.

Part 4.

…

If you are interested in any of the ideas that I have talked about or want to get in touch about helping, launching a campaign etc then send me a tweet @jimhilluk.