Platform Feature - Crowdera

About the Platform:

Crowdera is a fee-free online fundraising and crowdfunding platform aimed at helping nonprofits and individuals driving social impact. Crowdera helps fundraisers to build meaningful engagement, spread their messages, and expand their donor base to increase their overall funding and impact.

Crowdera is designed to complement an organization’s existing fundraising and volunteering activities by offering a user-friendly platform to create visually-compelling and viral fundraising campaigns that raise awareness and funding activities for an organization’s charitable goals and missions. Our focus is to empower global nonprofits aligning with United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Whom do we cater to?

We are a platform that caters to organizations and individuals raising money for causes, emergencies and dreams that matter to them. So far we have helped over 2300 fundraising campaigns by nonprofits, individuals and filmmakers. As a business, our primary target customer is a typical nonprofit organization from India and United States, whom we help to set up their fundraising framework to manage multi channel fundraising including individual and team driven crowdfunding campaigns, events, outreach, donation compliance, and more. Besides Indian & American nonprofits, we have a small team is dedicated to support independent filmmakers. Our self-service side of platform is helping many medical emergency fundraisers.

What do we offer to our consumers/customer?

We help our customers to set up a fundraising framework to manage multi channel fundraising including individual and team driven crowdfunding campaigns, events, outreach, donation compliance, and more. Crowdera complements organization's existing fundraising and volunteering activities by offering a user-friendly platform to create visually compelling, viral fundraising campaigns that raise awareness and funding for an individual or organization's needs and dreams. Our feature rich platform allows our customers to start their fundraising in matter of minutes using our guided story builder, customize their donations pages, build & manage their fundraising team, use our inbuilt CRM & social integrations for donor outreach, manage tax exemption receipt disbursement, socially shareable widgets & buttons, and can even have access to our pre-negotiated marketing and PR partners.

Along with this we personally provide few hacks and tips for better results on raising funds.

We do not charge any fee or commissions and neither do we ask for tip from donors. So far we have helped over 2300 fundraising campaigns from 5 different countries to get support of donors from 35+ countries. We have SaaS based freemium business model that allows almost every fundraiser to raise money and upgrade as their fundraising need increases. We have officially launched in two countries, however supporting campaigns from over 200 countries, fundraising in 4 currencies.

What motivated us to start up?

During his first stint building a social enterprise supporting education of underprivileged, Chet Jain noticed how numerous nonprofits were refraining from online fundraising because of donor dipping (commissions charged by existing platforms) and many nonprofits using such platforms were struggling to raise money online for lack of customer support from the platforms. In order to plug these unnecessary leaks, Crowdera was started as a free crowdfunding and online fundraising platform. After a successful year of beta in the USA, the Crowdera’s beta platform was offered to Indian fundraisers starting November 2015. In just over a year of beta existence, the platform was used by several Indian nonprofits.

In early 2017, Crowdera combined it’s both tech platforms to launch a single platform to support global fundraisers. With its latest release Crowdera is now India’s (and world’s) first truly free fundraising platform. Currently, nonprofits and needy individuals from over 200 countries can raise free funds on it.

What's in a name?

We were looking for some simplicity in branding and a casual chat chat this name accidentally came up. No one was sure if it’s the right name, but somehow my heart shouted out loud, that Crowdera will soon change this ERA for good by empowering the CROWD.

How do we see Social Media?

Online fundraising would not be possible if social media didn’t exist. Social media and email marketing strategies forms the core of every fundraising strategy, whether it’s a crowdfunding campaign or leveraging any online fundraising framework.

Currently we are....

This company started with a fundamental principle of offering a commission free fundraising platform for the world atleasts for next 30 years. This indeed was a difficult task as we would have to bootstrap it. However, a silicon valley touch was required to build a global company, so Chet retained a few set of his colleagues for initial couple months to help him shape the product and the company before moving the entire operations to India to curtail the cost and keep the lights on. Until recently Crowdera was entirely funded by the founder, Chet Jain.

Crowdera always believed that a product either has to innovate or has to simplify something. Over a period of last three and half years Crowdera team ensures that they are always listening to their customers and their product would always address their customer’s need. The journey that started with a very few friends from silicon valley supporting Chet has now become one of the most liked fundraising platforms in India and the only one that does not charge any commissions or fee at all.

Crowdera currently operates from Nagpur and Mumbai with 16 crew members helping over 2300 fundraisers from 5 countries supported by donors from over 35 countries.  And we are raising capital to propel our growth supporting 10K fundraisers from India, USA and SEA region.

Our biggest challenge was.

Our commitment to the world has been providing a truly fee free fundraising platform that would never charge commissions or dip into donor dollars.  The biggest challenge has been to keep up with that promise without diluting quality of our product. So despite several challenges and pivots in our working strategy, we ensure the vision and our commitment never changes. We have always retained a 3 year run rate for our product. As promised our platform is and will always remain free to fundraise. Thanks to our customers offered us our revenue model, where we provide value added paid services. Our goal as a business is to build a scalable services platform for our fundraisers to increase their fundraising efficiency and amplify their impact.

Also Read: Platform Feature – ATKT

We want to dominate the world by...

We refer Crowdera as the future of funding for the things that matter. Whether it is an emergency, or a cause that moves you or the dreams that you want to come true, we intend to be that one stop solution for fundraising needs of all that matter to you. With our 24x7 fundraising helpline to support our Indian and American fundraisers, we are building a giving economy where the world believes that abundance starts with giving.

We’re making moolah by...

We do not dip into donor dollars and offer our crowdfunding platform absolutely commission free. However, over a period of time we have built our tech with multiple proprietary features, for which our institutional clients pay us nominal annual or triennial subscription fee. We also offer many value added services for an extremely affordable cost to our customers.

Our What The **** Moment

We have more of the Aaha... moments than what the **** moments. The aaha.. moment for us comes multiple times in a year for us like, when we help a medical emergency fundraiser to raise over 21 lacs in 48 hours.

Fundraising Industry as we foresee

With the recent surge in number of mobile and internet users because of increasing affordability of high speed internet and mobile devices, online crowdfunding is set to become the first choice for fundraisers. It's a matter of time when business schools will start teaching crowdfunding strategies. Donors have proven time and again that location, currency, religion, nothing stops them when want to do good and hence fundraising industry is growing very fast.

Americans alone give away nearly $400 billion to charity each year, the industry currently does over $2.1 trillion in revenue each year globally. I also foresee many industry alliances happening to propel fundraising growth in healthcare, product & startup innovation and many others. In a nutshell, crowdfunding is going to be the most liked alternative funding channel for almost everything.

Social Media Industry as we foresee

Users are more aware now, they are also accepting the fact that social media can not survive without their participation and they equally need it as part of their lifestyle now. With this awareness users are now refrain from sharing too private information, as we all know nothing is private when it hits internet. This being said, all major social platforms are now being more proactive for user safety and data security, so I believe, Social Media industry is certainly going to be a much safer place than it is now.

Lastly, are you hiring?

Yes, we are hiring. Crowdera hiring process is a bit different as every employee here is connected to some or other cause that defines their existence. We are starting our fellowship program for volunteers and interns to build a #giving economy where abundance will start with giving. We are accepting applications from students, and individuals of all ages and from any part of the world to be part of our revolutionary fellowship program.