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Join for freePosted: Tue 30th Jun 2026
Crowdfunding is a great way to raise finance for a business. But when done properly, it also acts as a vital marketing and awareness campaign that builds trust among your customers.
In this Lunch and Learn, Lucy Kebbell, impact funding consultant and founder of The WIP, will explain how you can take your first steps towards crowdfunding.
Using her first-hand experience as a founder who's crowdfunded successfully – and as someone who's taught other business owners to do it – Lucy covers the basics and shows you the difference between a successful crowdfunding campaign and one that merely wasted time.
Which businesses can crowdfund (legal structures and business models)
Which crowdfunding platform to choose
How much crowdfunding costs
The importance of community and storytelling in making crowdfunding successful
Following a 10-year career in luxury fashion media, and a stint freelancing as a digital marketing and social media manager, Lucy pivoted to work directly with small business in the impact space and founded The WIP.
She is a speaker, workshop facilitator and consultant who works with business organisations, local authorities and graduate services. She's also a certified business mentor with the Association of Business Mentors, and was recently certified by the Carbon Literacy Project.
Through its Friday Funding Chats Substack, Lucy's company The WIP offers free resources, an expert directory and a funding opportunities database alongside additional alternative funding resources.
Lucy also recently became a fundraising development manager for a London charity, supporting community organisations and the voluntary sector with raising funding for their activities.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Beth: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn. My name is Beth, and I'll be your host today.
For those of you attending a Lunch and Learn for the first time, Enterprise Nation is a vibrant community platform for start-ups and small businesses.
I'm pleased to introduce Lucy Kebbell, who is the founder of The WIP.
In this session, Lucy will explain how to take your first steps towards crowdfunding. If you have any questions throughout the webinar, please post them in the chat, and we'll do our best to answer them at the end of the session.
Today's webinar will be recorded, and we will send the recording with further resources later today. Over to you, Lucy.
Lucy: Thank you so much, and thank you so much for coming along today. I appreciate you spending your lunch break with me. I hope I can make this really valuable for you.
As Beth said, please pop your questions in the chat and, hopefully, we'll have some time for them at the end.
I'll quickly introduce myself. I'm Lucy, the founder of The WIP. I'm an impact and funding consultant, so I support small businesses to leverage social and environmental impact to fund their businesses.
I'm also a part-time fundraising development manager for a charity in Lewisham.
I have been a successful crowdfunder. I'm also a speaker, facilitator and mentor, and I mainly work with underrepresented founders and concentrate on bootstrapping, so anything that isn't equity-related.
That includes crowdfunding, grants, revenue diversification and strengthening, debt, and other things like that.
I'll give you more details at the end on how you can connect with me. But I will be sharing my own experiences today, as well as the experiences of other people I've spoken to and people I've worked with on their crowdfunding campaigns.
I'm really obsessed with crowdfunding because I think it's such an accessible and democratic way for small businesses to raise money for their activities.
I really hope that by the end of this, you're going to have a better idea of what crowdfunding is, whether it's right for you and what separates a campaign that works from one that is just going to eat into your time, because I have also seen those ones as well.
I wanted to share this quote with you first because I really love it. I feel like it encapsulates what crowdfunding should be.
This is Clay Herbert, who is the founder of Fund Your Dream, which is a crowdfunding consultancy. He says: "The best campaigns I've worked with tell a specific story to a specific group of people."
This is really key because you can't just put a crowdfunding page up and hope people are feeling generous. There needs to be more to it.
Knowing who you are raising money from, how they want to be rewarded and how they want to be communicated with is really the make or break for a successful crowdfunder.
There are some misconceptions I want to address first, because whenever I suggest crowdfunding to my clients or people I'm mentoring, these things always come up. So I feel like it's important to address them head on.
The first is that it's beggy. I really hate this one, and I'm hearing it more and more.
I think people are obviously feeling the cost of living crisis. Every time you go to the petrol pump, the price has gone up. A lot of people say to me: "People aren't going to give money right now. No one wants to do that."
This is a false assumption because you are not begging for money. Even if you're a charity, you shouldn't be begging for money. You are raising money to do a thing.
It might be your thing, but ultimately you're doing something that is going to benefit other people as well.
You should also remember that you're probably the only entrepreneur your friends and family know. I know that I am. A lot of people probably think what you're doing is really cool, and I'm sure they would be happy to back you.
So if you feel like, "It's a bit beggy. I don't really like asking people for money", we need to start reframing it as raising money to do something.
Another misconception is that you need a huge following. I don't think you do.
I had a modest following when I did my own crowdfunder, and the act of marketing the crowdfunder pushed the awareness of my business even further.
You also likely have a bigger following than you realise. Whenever I work with clients, we do something called a stakeholder mapping exercise, where we look at all the people you know and the people they might know.
Seeing it like that always makes people feel: "Oh, OK. Actually, I do know a lot of people."
The exercise also helps us with our marketing, communications and designing the rewards. It really does demonstrate that you know more people than you realise. You don't need to have a huge following.
Another misconception is that it's free money. It's really not. There are some costs associated with crowdfunding, and we'll go over those shortly.
The last misconception is that only product businesses use it. There are some product businesses that use it, but there are also some really weird and wonderful things being crowdfunded.
My own crowdfunder was for a business mentors membership, to build a community platform for founders of small businesses. I successfully raised my total.
As long as you create a compelling narrative around what you're doing, remember that quote: we're giving people what they want and speaking to them how they want to be spoken to.
So I hope I've challenged some of your misconceptions, and that you're feeling open to this as a way to fund your business.
Which businesses can crowdfund?
There are lots of different types of crowdfunding, and I'm going to briefly explain them now. We'll dive into two of them specifically because I think those are likely to be the most relevant for the businesses here.
But if you do want to know more about any of them, please reach out or pop a question in the chat.
The main ones to know are reward-based crowdfunding. This is probably the most well-known one. It's where people pledge money for rewards.
They can get anything from an Instagram shout-out for £5, to "I'll come and cook you dinner" for £100, to preordering your product for £60, or getting a VIP ticket to your event for £25.
There are lots of different types of rewards. Again, we're not begging for money. People are pledging to be rewarded by us.
Donation-based crowdfunding is more what a charity, CIC or not-for-profit would do. You can open up a crowdfunding page, offer rewards, but also ask people to donate money.
Equity crowdfunding is where you sell shares. In this case, you're selling them to the crowd. Generally, you would sell to hundreds of people instead of a small group of investors.
They would be expected to invest between hundreds and thousands of pounds in your business to help you reach a large goal in the hundreds of thousands of pounds, if not millions.
Debt crowdfunding is when investors lend money to a company, which then repays the debt on a regular basis. The company has to pay its debts before taking any profits.
It is a lower-risk form of investment than equity, and it can work out better for the borrower as well, because the repayment terms can be more patient and sometimes lower.
Finally, there are community shares. Community shares is essentially a user-friendly name for withdrawable, non-transferable share capital. That's not very sexy, so we call them community shares.
It is a form of equity uniquely available to co-operative and community benefit societies. They are a flexible, effective and very sustainable way to raise finance, because around 92% of businesses that have used community shares are still trading. So it's a pretty good one.
I'll give you some examples now of how different legal structures might use different types of crowdfunding.
Whether you're a limited business, sole trader, CIC, social enterprise or something else, if you're launching a new product or service, reward-based crowdfunding is probably the best fit for you.
If your business has a strong social or community-orientated mission, donation-based crowdfunding is probably a good choice for you, but you could also do reward-based crowdfunding as well.
If you're scaling a business that already has some traction, and you're willing to give up equity, then equity-based crowdfunding is a good option.
Your traction might be pre-revenue. It might be a waitlist, letters of intent or something like that.
In recent years, I've quite often seen equity crowdfunding used by small businesses looking to raise a large amount of money. They might have a few angel investors on board and then top up that round with a crowdfund.
It's very clever how those platforms work because it doesn't crowd your data room with hundreds of different people who have bought equity in your business. You're still selling a small amount of equity, but you're selling it to a lot of people. So that's quite a good option.
If you're in a position where you're confident in your ability to repay a loan and you want to maintain full ownership of your company, then debt-based crowdfunding might be a better path for you.
Remember, when you sell equity in your company, you're selling control of your company.
So there are options for for-profits, not-for-profits, big teams and small teams.
When I did my crowdfunder, it was just me. I had some freelance support from a graphic designer and a business strategist, and I didn't have a very big budget. We'll talk more about how much it might cost in a little bit.
What I want you to take from this is that crowdfunding is an incredibly flexible way of raising money. There is no such thing as too small a team or too small a budget.
Let's look at different types of platforms.
You've probably heard of Kickstarter. It's quite a famous, well-known reward-based crowdfunding platform.
Just an FYI on these costs: they were correct when I researched them. Please don't take them as fixed, though. You might want to go away and make sure they're up to date because, with things going on in the world, none of these rates tend to stay the same for very long.
Kickstarter has a 5% platform fee. That is their fee for using the platform to do your crowdfunder. Then there is also a 3% to 5% payment processing fee.
We'll talk a little bit more about that later, but it's important to remember that those are the two fees you should expect to pay at the very least when you're doing a crowdfunder.
Kickstarter's audience is very large and global. It's well known and often has creative, product-focused backers. But as I said, there's some weird and wild stuff on there as well.
The funding model is worth noting. It's an all-or-nothing model.
Kickstarter explains its position as follows: if you have budgeted to raise £10,000 to deliver a specific project, product or service, that's what you need to deliver it successfully.
If you don't raise all the money you need, then you can't do that effectively. So in their view, you should raise it all or give it back.
Essentially, people pledge money for the rewards. The money gets held. If you hit your goal, it gets released to you. If you don't hit your goal, it gets released back to the pledgers.
Indiegogo is another popular one. Again, it's reward-based and has a global, project and gadget-focused audience. But Indiegogo gives you a choice of flexible or all-or-nothing funding models.
It's worth looking at the different funding models available and deciding what you feel comfortable with.
Crowdfunder is another very well-known one. It is rewards and donation-based. Interestingly, it has a 5% platform fee for other projects, but 0% platform fees for registered charities.
It also has a partnership at the moment with Creative UK, and is offering creative crowdfunders 0% platform fees as well.
Crowdfunder has a strong UK community and social project focus. It's a really good one.
Again, it gives you a choice. You can do all-or-nothing, flexible funding or switch mid-campaign. It also has match funding options.
If you apply for one of its match funders, such as Aviva or Sport England, then if you raise £5,000 and Aviva agrees to match fund you, for example, you could top that up by another £5,000.
Finally, GoFundMe is mostly donation-based, with some reward use. It has 0% platform fees. It's a very mainstream, trusted brand. Lots of people use it, particularly individuals, but businesses use it as well. You keep what you raise.
I should also mention that with Crowdfunder, you can do stretch funding as well. If you reach your goal, you can keep it open for a certain amount of time and people can keep donating.
That can be useful if someone missed your campaign, or if they later learn more about what you do and still want to take part. It can be a good option for not-for-profit businesses.
I don't generally like to say, "This is the best crowdfunding platform", because it depends on you, your business, your goals and the product or service you're looking to fund.
Crowdfunder is a really good one if you aren't sure where to start. It's a nice one to use for charities and standard businesses.
JustGiving, which I haven't mentioned there, is a good one for individual or simple charity giving.
Crowdfunder is slightly more structured, story-led and suited to campaigns with clear goals, which is really what we want.
And as I said, double-check those costs before you commit.
I wanted to share a little bit about my own story as well, in the hope that it can help you.
I used Kickstarter because I felt it was a really good fit for a for-profit organisation, because I am a limited business.
I did a lot of research, and I spoke to people who had already raised, which threw up really interesting information.
This was true five or nearly six years ago when I crowdfunded, but around 80% of Kickstarter's organic traffic was male. My community is mostly underrepresented and female founders.
So knowing that, I planned an extensive marketing campaign. That included teasers, asking for sign-ups ahead of time and educating people on what crowdfunding actually was.
When I was speaking to some people, they said: "It sounds nice. I don't really understand what that is and how it works."
You don't want to leave that education piece until the campaign. You want to do it ahead of time. You want to limit as much friction as possible when people go to pledge money.
I chose a 30-day crowdfunding campaign. You can usually do anything between around 28 and 90 days.
I generally advise people to go for the shorter period because, in the vast majority of crowdfunders, and I've heard experts speak about this as well, your crowdfunding campaign will follow a very distinct pattern of pledging.
The first two to three days go up quite steeply in terms of pledges. The majority of the campaign will be quite flat, and you'll be panicking because no one is donating. Then, in the last two to three days, it will suddenly go up again.
That's very common, even in huge crowdfunding campaigns that raise a lot of money. You don't want to be doing that for 90 days, so do yourself a favour and make it a shorter campaign.
I aimed to get 30% to 50% pledged in the first two days because Kickstarter says it will consider you for its featured projects page if you achieve that.
Realistically, I found out later from other people that using an agency is generally the way to get your campaign onto the featured projects page.
Having said that, securing a large sum of money early on in the crowdfunder meant my campaign looked crowded and more likely to be successful.
If you think about going out to eat and you're faced with an empty restaurant and a busy restaurant, which one would you want to eat in?
You'd probably want to eat in the busy restaurant because it's got a buzz. It looks like it would be better than the empty one. It's the same principle here.
I raised £18,000 in 30 days. It was an all-or-nothing campaign. It was probably the most stressful thing I've ever done in my life.
I have my mother-in-law to thank for getting me over the line because I was literally about £200 away, and she couldn't bear to watch.
My main takeaway is that it was an incredible experience because it took me out of my comfort zone. I'd never sold anything before. I'd never really asked people for money before, and it forced me to push my brand out to a new audience.
Before I'd even launched the platform I was looking to build, I had a much larger audience of engaged people who were ready to be members.
Let's look at the real cost of crowdfunding, because, as I said, it's not free money.
We've already looked at platform fees and card processing fees. You need to factor those into your budget because you don't want to get to a point where you've raised what you needed, and then suddenly a few hundred pounds' worth of card processing fees comes out of your budget.
So you need to have an idea of what that might be.
Rewards and fulfilment are also important. Make sure you budget this and build it into the total.
For example, if you sell 100 of something, you need to make sure you can deliver that and that you're not going to be out of pocket because that pledge did so well.
Then there is marketing and PR.
You need to create a page at the very least. I always advise people to create a video because you can tell your story more authentically that way.
You also need marketing assets, copy for your page and overall marketing. You might want to pay someone to do a little bit of PR for you. I did that.
Time is another cost. It really is an investment in your time.
I generally advise at least a six-week marketing campaign ahead of the launch, with two to three weeks of planning and research before that.
Then you've got the actual crowdfunder and the fulfilment process after. So this is going to eat into two to four months of your time. You need to factor that in.
You might also want to pay an agency to do it for you. I've heard mixed results about that, so that's really up to you.
I can spot an underprepared crowdfunder a mile off because you can tell that the person just created a page and thought people would start sending money. It really doesn't work like that.
You have to prepare a marketing campaign. You need to know who you're raising money from, how they want to be spoken to and how they want those rewards delivered to them.
It's a lot about preparation and marketing, but it is also about community and storytelling.
This is a real differentiator between a crowdfunder that doesn't succeed and one that does.
Crowdfunding is community activation. It's not advertising. You're mobilising people who hopefully already believe in you and finding others who do, and you're asking them to share what you're doing.
Quite often, what is very valuable is not necessarily the money that people give, but the sharing. It's the people-powered marketing.
Storytelling is fundamental. You need to tell the story and be authentic. Remember, people buy from people. Tell us about your moment and the problem you're solving.
But make sure you convey the value to the customer. This is where stakeholder mapping becomes really important because you can tweak your messaging to appeal to different people and what they value.
Remember, we aren't asking for charity. Even if you are a charity, we're delivering value for the money people have pledged us.
Staying with storytelling, you need good image assets that tell a story. When I say good image assets, I don't mean really polished, professionally done images.
I mean pictures of prototypes, pilots, you and your team. That might even just be you and your friends and family.
I know a woman who had some cute pictures of her and her little boy helping her stuff envelopes. People love that.
How are you mobilising in those early days? Get people on board.
Please be careful with AI or stock images as much as possible because they don't look authentic and relatable. We want to know you. We want to know the person we're giving money to.
I want to leave you with four pillars.
Remember that the business fit and the platform are very important.
Remember the real costs associated with crowdfunding. This is an investment in your business as well, so don't look at it as a cost you're not getting back. Look at it as an investment in your business.
Remember the importance of story, communication and building community around what you're doing.
My partner was the first person to introduce me to Kickstarter because he felt like he was part of something. He said: "This guy has created these incredible VR goggles, and I can buy them for £150."
He was so into the idea of getting in on the ground floor of something. Harness that. Really make that something.
Hopefully, I've left enough time for questions, but that is me. If you want to find out more about me, you can visit my website, thewip.work, or scan that QR code and subscribe to my monthly newsletter.
Also, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to chat.
Beth: Thank you so much. I've certainly learned a lot. If we go to some questions, if that's OK.
Natasha would like to ask about your own crowdfunding experience. What were your biggest challenges, or did anything unexpected happen?
Lucy: Yes. My childminder told me that she was going on holiday for two weeks. So that was fun. I had a two-year-old and was running a campaign.
I also didn't anticipate that flat bit in the middle, and that really freaked me out.
But afterwards, as I said, I heard from big experts who do this, and they said that's very normal. It's how you speak to people in that in-between bit that will dictate how sharp that uptick is at the end.
I did get the uptick, and it was amazing. It was a really great feeling.
Beth: Absolutely. Stuart would like to ask: can you limit the number of rewards available in case something becomes unexpectedly oversubscribed?
Lucy: Yes, absolutely. They ask you to do that. If you go to any Kickstarter page, you'll have the rewards in order of amount, starting with the lowest.
For example, if you do the whole "pledge £5 and I'll give you a shout-out on Instagram", you can do as many of those as you want.
But sometimes we want to almost build in scarcity or excitement that there are only a few of these available.
Maybe you only say: "I'm only going to thank 25 people." But then you might have 50 of the actual product you're wanting to build. And maybe you also want to do a launch event, but there are only 75 tickets available for that, so they're £50 each.
There is a trick with the rewards. It's not just how much they cost or how you describe them. It's how many there are and whether there is an early-bird opportunity.
For example, you might offer people 10% to 15% off if they pledge in the first three days.
There are quite a few fun little tricks we can use to encourage people to part with their money in that early stage, to make your optics look better.
Beth: That's great. Mark has asked in the chat about looking to crowdfund for a new family board game.
I know you mentioned you wouldn't recommend one platform for everyone, but would Kickstarter potentially be a good one for a family board game?
Lucy: Yes, I would say so. I would look at Indiegogo as well.
Unless there is some kind of social impact behind the family board game that you've not told us about, in which case Crowdfunder might be a good one.
But yes, I would look at Kickstarter and Indiegogo. They're probably your best bet.
Beth: Brilliant. Looking at the Q&A now, is there a minimum audience size or community you should have before launching?
Lucy: That's a difficult one because, as I said, we all know more people than we realise.
Obviously, if you really feel like you only know five people, you can start building an audience.
Do you want to start a Substack, TikTok or YouTube page? This can be quite a good idea. You can start talking about the product problem you're solving and build a community around that problem.
Then, five or six months in, you might say: "Hey, I know we've been talking extensively about this issue, how it affects your life and how you can't find the product or service that really solves it in the way you want. I'm going to design it for us. I'm doing a Kickstarter. Get behind me."
That's quite a nice way to do it. There are ways you can start to build a community before you do it.
But I would always urge people not to wait until they have 10,000 followers on Instagram, because that kind of thing is so hard to do now.
So much can happen during the marketing of the crowdfunder as well.
Beth: That's great, Lucy. Thank you.
That's all we have time for today, so apologies if we didn't get around to your question. As Lucy said, make sure you follow up with her on LinkedIn. I'll pop her details into the chat so you have them.
Thank you so much, Lucy, and thank you everyone for joining today's webinar. The recording will be going out later today, along with some further resources.
Lucy: Good luck with your crowdfunding. Bye.
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