Digital Commons newsletter: learning from our crowdfunder
Hi everyone, and welcome to new subscribers!
Our experimental crowdfunder closed last week. We raised 15% of our target - around £1500, from 31 donors. We are really grateful to everyone who chipped in, but obviously 15% of a relatively small target isn’t exactly a resounding crowdfunding success.
We always knew we had a challenging ask for a crowdfunding campaign. We’re trying to do a complex thing, which is in many ways only just becoming clear to us as it evolves. But trying a crowdfunder has been part of our thinking for a while, and while we had invested some decent time in crafting messages and making our video, we knew there would never be a perfect time to launch.
So we took a deep breath, and put it out into the world. One of our key goals was to find out more about what would resonate with people. Another was to learn by doing, trying different ways of engaging with people and growing the number of people interested in what we do.
The money we have raised will be really helpful - we are a bootstrapping small community tech start up, and every penny certainly counts! In particular it will help us move towards opening up our governance as a multi-stakeholder cooperative: watch this space for more on that.
But the lessons we have learnt are just as valuable. Most importantly, we have been talking about our (great) community tech tools as the way into Digital Commons Coop. But actually we’ve learnt that this isn’t a great way of engaging people (learning things is kind of painful sometimes!). This has actually sparked some really great reflective internal conversations.
We’ve been teasing out our theory of change in a bit more detail and recognising that the impact we create is actually through the projects that we deliver or support. Projects like Resilient Green Spaces, the Owned by Oxford project, and our new Housing Data project (see more on this below!). The tools inform and are informed by the projects. So we will be reflecting this in the way we talk from now on, and see what we can learn from that.
Other key things we are taking away from this include:
We don’t yet have a crowd! We have networks, and connections, but we don’t have the depth or breadth of connections with people that make a crowdfunder successful yet. We hope that will emerge but we’ve certainly learnt that retweets and shares (thanks for all of those!) don’t necessarily result in donations. We needed a far larger reach to make this successful.
Successful crowdfunding often needs a sense of urgency, or jeopardy. We don’t have this, and we are actually trying to build the kind of organisation that doesn’t rely on false urgencies. We want Digital Commons Coop to be doing the right work, at the right time, and maybe that’s more of a slow burn than a fire sale.
There still isn’t an easy way of funding community tech or social tech infrastructure. We are very excited about the recent great work on community tech coming out of Power to Change and Careful Trouble, and are hopeful that there will be more funding out there for the work of creating the digital infrastructure that communities need.
So, lots to ponder, lots to do!
One really exciting piece of news is that we will be doing a deep dive into the data and digital tools landscape for housing justice in 2023. We’re really excited to welcome Samanthi Theminimulle to the team on a part time basis to lead our Digital Tools for Housing Justice project - an open and participatory exploration of whether digital tools could support a more collaborative housing justice movement in the UK, funded by Oak Foundation.
Also on the blog you can catch up on the story so far of Land Explorer - a focus on the trials and tribulations of trying to build socially-focussed software.
And finally, we’re in the process of setting up on Open Collective, so if you were reading this thinking “dammit, I was meaning to give them a tenner”, any contributions will be gratefully received here soon - https://opencollective.com/digitalcommonscoop!
All the best
Kate