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Take a deep breath. Your campaign is over. Hopefully you’ve had enough pledges to make your minimum goal, or even better have pushed onward to your maximum goal. The work isn’t over yet though. After the campaign has finished, we’ll collect the pledges and deliver the Loan Contract to you. You need to give it your signature and electronically sign a direct debit initiation form (which allows us to debit the scheduled loan payments from your account on the set dates) and then you can begin putting the money raised from your campaign to use. Your attention then turns to paying it back to your lenders.
Repaying your loan
You use the money raised from your loan to invest in delivering your organisation’s objectives — putting the cash towards your purpose. The organisation begins achieving bigger and better things and cash begins to flow back to you. You then use these proceeds to begin paying back your monthly principal and interest repayments on your loan.
It works a little something like this:
we remind you a week in advance of the scheduled payment that we’ll be debiting from your account
you arrange to have the required amount in your account on the payment date
we receive your payment, take off taxes and our fee, divvy it up between each of your lenders and transfer the amount due to each lender to repay their contribution… all on the same day.
it’s as simple as that.
If you encounter trouble repaying, we encourage you to be open and come talk to us. We’ll discuss the situation and find a solution to the problem together.
A handy thing to do is to keep a spare month’s repayment on hand throughout the length of the loan so that you have a buffer for temporary unexpected shocks that you can call on.
Communication
You’ve gratefully accepted their money, the loan is established. But that’s not where the relationship should end.
It’s good practise to keep your lenders informed about what you’re up to and the progress you’re making on your goals. We recommend a monthly update so they feel connected to the business. This is important: now they have an interest in you succeeding and you have an interest in them continuing to support you.
What we suggest is that you provide this bit of colour at each payment date and we can then pass the latest news on to your lenders.
Most importantly, communicating to your lenders allows them to support you further. They’re more than champions now, they’re a resource that want to see you succeed.
Further capital raising
You can raise up to $2 million through crowdlending or a combination of Lend and Equity campaigns over any given twelve month period. If your first offering raises $60,000 so you can hire a new staff member, and once you have them on board for six months you realise you need to buy some more equipment, you can do another Lend or run an Equity campaign.
Remember to keep your level of debt at a comfortable level so that your organisation avoids the trap of overleverage.
The Shareholders Page
What is it?
PledgeMe’s Shareholder Portal provides a space for you to have ongoing private communication with your shareholders.
You can use it for general discussions, monthly shareholder updates, requests for advice / support, and to vote on resolutions.
The portal is great because
it stores your communication and interaction with shareholders in one place
reduces email overload
makes your shareholder discussions many to many (instead of oldschool 1:1)
allows engagement and actual discussion with your crowd!
How does it work?
You can automagically add all the people who became investors through your PledgeMe campaign. If you’ve got other shareholders, no problemo,you can manually add them in (if you want to).
Once everyone is in, you can create discussions with your shareholders around anything. It could be to update them on your performance, you could be asking them for help, or it could just be a simple hello! You can share images, documents, or just have a good ol’ discussion. If the discussion includes a resolution you need to pass as a company, your shareholders can vote as well.
What does it cost?
You get the first two months free to see if you like it and after that there is a $25/month fee.
Shareholder's Page
You can:
Pull all of your shareholders into this page.
Hold discussions around certain topics, and share images/attachments.
Go out to your shareholders to vote on resolutions.
Publish the results of these votes.
Your shareholders can:
Support you with ideas, information, and (potentially) even be tapped for work and advice!
Get to know each other.
Manage their responses to resolutions simply.
Read the information you provide.
Think about your Cap table
Keep your capitalisation table handy. You can plug in future fundraising at different times and different valuations to see the dilution effect on each shareholder.
Remember: things generally take longer and cost more than you expect, so don’t cut it too fine. Plan for the time and cost of raising future money as well as where you expect it to come from. There are also other places you can go to raise capital. You may want to look up your local Angel Investors clubor look for some venture capital (and matching).
Postscript
Now you are ready to run your very own PledgeMe.Lend crowdfunding campaign. Huzzah! We’ve covered all the basics of what you need to do to run a campaign. We can provide more specific advice about the PledgeMe platform if you need it. Your next step is to make sure you’re ready to borrow and chat to us about using CrowdfundingU to prepare yourself to run a successful campaign.
The PledgeMe team is easy to contact.
You can fire through questions and emails to the team at contact@pledgeme.co.nz
Or call us on 027 Pledge 1
We’re super excited about helping you go out to your crowd. We think PledgeMe’s Lend and Equity crowdfunding options are the future for people raising investment from people to make things happen.
We look forward to working with you,
— The PledgeMe Team
