Announcing an Opportunity for Wyoming Communities!
Get a free crowdfunding platform and supporting services—a $25,000 value! Apply today!
Get a free crowdfunding platform and supporting services—a $25,000 value! Apply today!
Get a free crowdfunding platform and supporting services—a $25,000 value! Apply today!
The Wyoming Community Navigator Opportunity
The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) recently awarded the Wyoming Small Business Development Center (SBDC) a $2.5 million grant to implement the SBA’s Community Navigator Pilot Program in Wyoming. This American Rescue Plan initiative includes funding for The Local Crowd (TLC) to establish a rewards-based crowdfunding platform in four Wyoming communities/regions.
The four communities will be selected through a competitive application process. The successful applicants will receive membership in the TLC platform for two years, along with services, funding and programs described below. The total package is valued at $25,000 for each participating community.
Eligible applicants are Wyoming economic and community development organizations that want to serve as hosts for the TLC crowdfunding platform. These organizations can include a wide variety of structures and missions such as economic development organizations, Main Street programs, Chamber of Commerce groups, community foundations, educational institutions, and city governments.
We want to work with economic development leaders that are passionate about supporting their local businesses and nonprofits and who can envision a localized crowdfunding platform successfully operating in their communities.
Want More Information? You can view our previous informational webinars here:
What is a Localized Crowdfunding Platform?
The illustration shows what localized, branded crowdfunding looks like. Each community gets its own page within The Local Crowd website, customized with their community’s name, logo, and photo. Local campaigns show up on this page. They also show up on main TLC page along with the campaigns of other communities from across the country. Visitors to the TLC site can browse among communities, discovering great local stories from other rural areas near and far.
Insert your community logo here
Insert your community name here
Insert your community photo here
Crowdfunding campaigns of local businesses
The TLC Package
The four selected communities will receive the following benefits—a total of $25,000 per community.
In addition to the $25,000 package described above, each community will receive a share in the revenues generated by the platform. Platform fees are collected from crowdfunders at a rate of 5% of funds raised online. Those fees will be split between the host and TLC—with the host receiving 75% (3.75%) and TLC receiving 25% (1.25%) of the platform fees. Your businesses will be able to do off-line fundraising as part of their fundraising activities, and platform fees are not assessed to those contributions.
Why Localized Crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding provides a powerful, non-dilutive way for entrepreneurs to raise capital – while also increasing a business’s capacity for customer engagement and reach. People often wonder what makes localized crowdfunding work because it seems like “going local” makes the crowd of funders smaller, rather than larger. But the local strategy does make sense when you understand the science behind it. We know that 80%-90% of the funds raised in a crowdfunding campaign come from the efforts of the crowdfunders who reach out to their networks. Then, in turn, people in Tier 1 reach out to their own networks, Tier 2 reaches out to their networks, and so on, moving the support from tier to tier to tier.
When an economic development community gets behind the launch and promotion of a local platform, each campaign is spring loaded with advocates and champions to push it out to their networks. In that way, the crowd grows quickly and exponentially from tier to tier to tier.
The TLC platform comes with education and coaching for the host and the campaign creators, enabling the crowdfunders to use proven best practices when running their campaigns. The worldwide success rate of campaigns that meet their funding goals is about 24%. The TLC success rate is more than double that—about 60%.
In addition, the TLC crowdfunding platform has been developed with local needs in mind and includes locally focused features unavailable elsewhere such as matching grants, offline fundraising, and third-party rewards.
Application Format and What We Are Looking For
The application is online. It includes eight questions designed to provide information to help us evaluate how well each applicant fits the needs of the program.
The application questions are listed below, along with our rationale for asking. Please have your answers ready before you begin the application process because your responses cannot be saved. Once you hit the SUBMIT button, you will not be able to return to your application to make any changes.
Project Milestones and Goals
The Community Navigator Pilot Grant includes an obligation to accomplish specific milestones. Below are the milestones that have been set for each TLC community. We used our past experience with community outcomes to negotiate these milestones and we believe them to be conservative and achievable.
Timeline