Crowdfunding: what it is and what are the best platforms

If you are looking for financing for your company for any particular business project or materialize a business idea and you do not want to ask for a loan, you should know that crowdfunding is a great and effective alternative to this conventional option.

Let's find outw what crowdfunding is!

Crowdfunding allows any project creator to raise a considerable sum of money among many people

Crowdfunding is a type of collective financing that allows any project creator to raise a considerable sum of money among many people with the main objective of supporting a certain initiative.In exchange for this contribution of money, employees receive non-monetary and (usually) original rewards, for example: personalized acknowledgments on the creator's website, the pre-purchase of products or services at a lower price than they would have when they were launched on the market or independent gifts as a thank you.

5 of the best crowdfunding platforms

These are some of the best and multiple crowdfunding platforms that exist and that you should know about if you want to start a fundraising campaign to finance a campaign or business project, there they go!:

# 1 ➟ Indiegogo

This North American crowdfunding platform deposits the money raised even if you have not been able to reach the total, but you must meet your rewards. In Indiegogo it is not necessary that your project is exclusively creative, but also they accept social and particular causes and have a special category for entrepreneurs.

#2 ➟ Kickstarter

This platform, also North American, is one of the most widely used and the one that has raised more money in our days in comparison with the rest. It is characterized by betting on new and creative projects in order to make them real and materialize them.If you want to launch a crowdfunding campaign through this platform, you should know that charity and personal projects are not allowed in it, and if you are looking for financing for a product, they will require a real prototype.

#3 ➟ Verkami

One of the most important Spanish funding platforms with a success rate of 70%, Verkami is mainly aimed at creators, artists, designers and collectives, although it is true that it is expanding its range of projects. This platform keeps 5% of the rewards plus the expenses of transfers of these and provides 40 days approximately for the promoters of the projects to reach the goal and cover all the money they ask for.

#4 ➟ Drip

Goteo is a crowdfunding platform with different nuances from the previous ones, and that is an initiative driven and managed by a non-profit entity that focuses on giving visibility to social, cultural, technological, and educational projects.Something that also makes it different from the rest of crowdfunding platforms is that the collaborators do not expect to receive a 'reward' in return, but rather a collective return: the organizations share their projects with the rest of society so that they can use their knowledge . That is, in exchange for funding, the promoters reveal their business plan so that it serves others, they facilitate the free download of a creative work, they make it available to other designs that can be used freely, etc.

#5 ➟ Lánzanos

Lánzanos is also a Spanish crowdfunding platform characterized by having to get more than 100 votes in the first phase of the project in order to start the crowdfunding campaign and thus achieving collaborative and monetary financing.On the other hand, it differs from the rest of the platforms because it allows the collection of financing in the offline world. How? Through vouchers generated by the creator of the project: each of them is assigned a reward from their list and has an authentication code. To exchange them, the creator could, for example, organize an event to present his project 'in situ' and, through Lánzanos, raise funds to sell tickets. In this case, the vouchers could be the access tickets to the so-called event.

You know, if there is a project or idea that goes around your head and you want to materialize it, deepen in these crowdfunding platforms and choose the one that best suits your needs and business expectations.

"No one owns the crowd even if they think they have it dominated"

Eugene Ionesco