The Los Alamos Chamber of Commerce has begun working with a brand new crowdfunding organization that puts the emphasis on local projects. The Chamber has formed a “Clowd,” a custom, local crowdfunding and crowdsourcing network now available on the new Main Street Crowd economic development platform. This platform allows non-profit business and community development organizations to host their own crowdfunding sites at no cost, and even provides revenue sharing with the organizations. There is no cost to join Main Street Crowd or the new Chamber Clowd® (the crowd in the cloud).
For those who are not familiar with crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indie-GoGo, crowdfunding sites work like this: Someone who wants to finance a project, such as an art installation, or a movie, will post a project on a site. They’ll choose a goal of how much money they want to raise and set a time limit to raise that money. They may offer small rewards, such as bumper stickers or simple public acknowledgment to their funders. At the end of the time period, if the project is fully funded, the project originator gets the money and the site takes a small percentage.
“Our platform is like LinkedIn for economic development,” said Co-Founder Marshall Neel, “It enables local social and professional networking around local business development and worthwhile quality of life projects.”
We believe it will be an important piece in the local economic development puzzle going forward. This will serve as a central place for the community to come to see and support new business and community projects. We encourage everyone in the community to sign up and work with our members in support of local business and community improvement. Chamber members have a free page in the site that lists the services they provide, an additional benefit of membership.
Crowdfunding involves the community “crowd” each giving a small contribution that will collectively
make a big difference in the growth and prosperity of the community. Neel said “People invest in who they knowand what they know and they will find exactly that in their local Clowdz on Main Street Crowd.”
We’ve been working with UNMLos Alamos Professor Nik Seet and his “Financing the Entrepreneurial Enterprise” class to create sample projects for the local Clowd. People who go to the Main Street Crowd site can see those projects and contribute right away to those that appeal to them.
Groups like the Posse Lodge, Pajarito Mountain or our service clubs could benefit from using this model, because it involves the whole community, rather than just asking the same people (their members) to finance everything.There are lots of great tips on the site for how to create your project, how to offer rewards, how long to run the crowdfunding campaign, how to market it and much more.
Your mission statements likely include something about promoting and enhancing commerce and development
within your community or region. Main Street Crowd can help you achieve that mission through crowdfunding.
Main Street Crowd’s focus is on small business, economic development, community development, and the Crowd. We offer rewards-based crowdfunding and we are poised to become the premier funding portal for equity crowdfunding when it becomes available in early 2014.
Main Street Crowd’s address on the web is www.mainstreetcrowd.com
The Los Alamos Chamber of Commerce Clowd is www.mainstreetcrowd.com/losalamos