Crowdfunding with Crowdbound

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Our new initiative, Crowdbound, offers a new opportunity for authors to raise funding to cover the costs of publishing their books. Previously, we were reliant upon grant funding and donations to support book production costs, and found we were only able to support a handful of books per year. Up to now, the only other ‘crowdpublishing’ option in the UK has been Unbound, which sets very high thresholds for authors to raise funding and has no dedicated support or focus for books that cover important social or environmental themes, by diverse and disadvantaged authors. Crowdbound changes the landscape of publishing, opening the doors to people from these backgrounds, widening accessibility and improving coverage of pressing social and environmental issues – from homelessness and discrimination, to climate change and ecosystem degradation.

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As well as supporting books, Crowdbound is open to projects from other organisations and individuals that cover these two bedrocks of our work: improving social inclusion and environmental sustainability. There do exist several other crowdfunding platforms where such projects can run campaigns, but Crowdbound is unique in a number of ways:-

  • It is run by a charity, exclusively as a non-profit initiative. The vast majority of crowdfunding platforms across the world are run by for-profit companies.
  • As a result, it is completely free to use – both to people creating campaigns and those supporting them. Only 1% of whatever raised at the end of a campaign is taken to support the platform’s cost. In contrast, other platforms charge from between 3-10%.
  • The focus on environmental sustainability and social inclusion is unique. Each campaign must include these elements and will not be approved unless it does.
  • There is also a focus on supporting projects and books by people with lived experience of the issues they are writing about or seeking to tackle. For example, if a project seeks to help young people in a deprived community gain employment, we would expect the person managing the project to have personal experience in this area and to be based in that community.
  • Crowdbound offers limited match funding opportunities. That means, each eligible campaign can receive funding that matches whatever was contributed. At present only one other UK crowdfunding website offers that option, with such match funding being highly restricted and hard to access.

Lastly, the platform seeks to provide dedicated 1-1 support to every single campaign that is approved. Unlike the vast majority of other crowdfunding websites, which simply let project starters ‘get on with it’ by themselves, we instead look to work with each creator to successfully promote their campaign through social media, organisational outreach, media and offline publicity. Our aim is to ensure every single one of the campaigns on Crowdbound reaches its target.

To find out more, please visit the Crowdbound website

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