Crowd Funding – 2016

Organisation Name: BitGiving
Contact Parson: Ishita Anand
Website: www.bitgiving.com
Country: India
Email Id: ishita@bitgiving.com
Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/BitGiving
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BitGiving

BitGiving is an online crowdfunding platform that gives wings to entrepreneurial ideas, creative minds and social issues. Crowdfunding as a concept leverages social media and online communication to raise small monetary contributions from a large pool of individuals.

Headquartered in New Delhi, BitGiving was founded in 2013 by Ishita Anand and Fahad Moti Khan. With an immense focus on social media integration and inherent vitality, BitGiving envisions bringing together individuals and organisations to make amazing stories and impossible dreams come true.

From raising funds for India Ice Hockey team to compete internationally; to preventing Friendicoes from shutting down; or to raising Rs. 40 lakh in four hours for rebuilding Chennai; BitGiving is gratified to be a part of others’ success stories. It saw more than 2,300 people come together to help save Friendicoes from shutting down. The campaign raised more than Rs. 30 lakh in the first three days, making it one of the fastest-funded campaigns in India. The campaign closed after raising Rs. 61 lakh in just 30 days.

Stop Acid Attacks — an organisation which was only a few months old when they started their campaign with Bitgiving — raised money from the crowd to become one of the biggest voices against acid attacks in India.

BitGiving focuses on curating all kinds of campaigns and educating the campaigners with the best crowdfunding practices for India. The strategy is simple: communicate the story effectively and help the campaigners reach out to the right audiences.

Organisation Name: Wishberry.in
Contact Parson: Rakesh Kumar
Website: www.wishberry.in
Country: India
Email Id: rakesh@wishberry.in
Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/wishberry.in
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Wishberry_in

Wishberry.in provides a platform to creative artistes to raise funds to bring their ideas to life in the form of film, music, theatre, publishing and apps, among others. It not only provides them with the platform but also guides then on how to ensure a successful crowdfunding campaign. Wishberry.in primarily uses Facebook and Twitter to spread information and amplify the reach of artistes seeking funds.

Wishberry.in is India’s first and only crowdfunding platform for creative artistes. Moreover, the platform fosters communication between creators and funder, thus ensuring transparency in the entire process.

The Wishberry blog helps impart knowledge to artistes; it teaches them how crowdfunding is helpful to them and why they should take it up. Once an artiste begins his/her crowdfunding campaign with Wishberry, the platform helps them with their marketing plan so that they can raise their target amount successfully. A team of consultants is involved in the process of guiding the fund seekers in the areas of public relations, social media marketing and email marketing, etc. This ensures that their campaign reaches out to maximum number of people, thus attracting funders to their projects.

So far, Wishberry has helped more than 250 artistes raise more than Rs. 6 crore from 12,000 funders. The Wishberry blog imparts knowledge to more than 4,000 artists every month while the same knowledge is also shared with our 23,000 strong Facebook community, 2,900 Twitter followers and over 12,000 email subscribers.

Organisation Name: Transparent Hands
Contact Prason: Rameeza Moin
Website: www.transparenthands.com
Country: Pakistan
Email Id: rameeza.moin@transparenthands.com
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/TransparentHands
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TransparentHand

Transparent Hands is a global crowdfunding platform that is involved in conducting surgeries on poor patients in Pakistan while ensuring complete transparency and one-to-one connection between patients, donors and hospitals.

Its customers are mainly its donors (both corporations and individuals) who contribute from all over the world after selecting the patient by reading their stories. Transparent Hands has some of the ?best (eight) hospitals on its panel to  provide all ?sorts of surgeries ?to the needy patients.

The process of raising funds for a particular patient starts after the hospital ?diagnoses the patient and prepares an assessed bill of the treatment. The crowdfunding platform then puts the assessed bill, patient’s case history and dates for surgery on its Web portal where donors ?from all over the world can view, register and contribute towards ?patient’s ?assessed bill.?? After a netizen has donated for a patient, the donor can easily access all subsequent documents through the dashboard that is created right after signing up.

Transparent Hands’ objective is based on helping the underprivileged and destitute people of Pakistan using advanced technology. The platform intends to facilitate maximum number of poor patients of Pakistan by providing them the best medical and surgical facilities.

So far, it has successfully financed the surgeries of more than 180 ?patients and ?many more are waiting to be operated upon. Transparent Hands hopes to expand its services across the entire country in order to facilitate maximum number of needy people.

Organisation Name: Puppetica Media
Contact Parson: Ravi Shankar V
Website: www.punyakoti.com
Country: India
Email Id: ravi@punyakoti.com
Facebook Page:  https://www.facebook.com/Punyakotiproject
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Puppetica

Punyakoti is a Sanskrit animated movie project initiated by Puppetica Media. Conceived by Sanskrit lovers at Infosys and directed by Ravi Shankar, the movie has many ‘firsts’. It is the first crowdfunded and crowdsourced movie of its type (animated). The backbone of the entire movie experiment was to use the collaborative aspects of social media. The social media strategy for this purpose was designed by two communication experts, Shruthi Bopaiah and Gigi Mathews, and a social media start-up, Launchpad, was engaged under the leadership of Aishwarya Thapa to execute the strategy.

True to the spirit of distributed collaboration, Launchpad was based in Pune, crowdfunding platform Wishberry was based in Mumbai, the strategy was being planned in Bangalore and the movie was being designed in Trivandrum and Chennai.

What was just a crazy idea and a very niche subject now has more than 2,000 likes on Facebook from around the world. Of specific use was the way the movie used social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and collaboration tools to manage the entire pre-production in a distributed fashion through volunteers without the backing of any big studios. It went on to raise the highest funding through a crowdfunding platform in 2015. Presently under production, the movie is slated to release towards the end of 2016.

Among the highlights of the strategy was a clear segmentation of the audience and unambiguous messaging; and meticulous weekly meetings, analysis and flexibility to alter the strategy depending on the needs of the project. One of the inspirations that was an early marketing approach taken by the founders of Infosys is documented well in a book called ‘No Money Marketing’.