Agne Petroseviciute is the founder of A. Pastry Shop, a vegan and vegetarian bakery in the southside of Glasgow, also delivering locally and shipping wonderful treats around the UK!
Agne and her team ran a very successful donations and rewards-based crowdfunding campaign to raise extra funds to buy some much-needed new equipment for their bakery. In just under six weeks, they raised over £5,000 from hundreds of people in their loyal and supportive customer community. Although they didn’t quite reach their stretch target of £10,000, the money raised went a long way in helping to buy the new equipment and made a real tangible difference to her business.
A.Pastry Shop offered a lovey variety of delicious rewards and with both her team and colleagues in other businesses who were crowdfunding at the same time, she found group discussions very helpful in deciding what types of rewards to offer. The discussions with others were also helpful in setting the price of the rewards, especially since they kept low-pricing and needed the confidence to price their rewards higher!
And despite a comprehensive range of rewards at different prices to include suit everyone, including goodie boxes and vegan cookery classes, Agne was very touched by number of people who simply donated to support her and didn’t want anything in return.
Agne didn’t spend too much time working out the costs of her campaign, focussing her time, money and energy on promoting her campaign as much as possible and then on fulfilling the rewards quickly. But she says that about 25% of the total amount raised (i.e. £1,250 out of £5,125) was what it cost her to deliver and fulfil the campaign, giving her a healthy profit to buy the equipment.
Initially the campaign was due to run for four weeks, but when a fabulous PR opportunity came along at a late date, she extended her campaign to make the most of it – and a lot of extra donations came in on the back of the PR. In hindsight though, Agne feels it would have been much better to have pre-planned PR opportunities before the campaign started.
Before launching the campaign, Agne and her team spent about four hours a week for five weeks (total 20 hours) preparing, during the campaign about three hours a week for five weeks (total 15 hours), and after the campaign about five hours a week to fulfil all the rewards. Although a couple of months after the end of the campaign, they are still working on fulfilling rewards, contacting people by email to get their addresses or sorting the time and date they want to pick up their reward. So, it does take quite a bit of time and effort – at least 40 hours so far!
The guidance from other entrepreneurs and the organisation managing the crowdfunding platform was very helpful in helping Agne and her team to write their story, work out their key messages to get across to potential donors and deciding on how much to raise. Being a bakery meant that her rewards were very tangible and easy for customers to see, helped along by having a QR code in store for customers to scan and donate when they were in buying their regular cakes and cuppas!
What was most difficult though was not having an email list of all the shop’s customers – it made it very hard to get information to people, depending instead on the limited reach of Instagram. Agne says she wished she had started an email list of names and email addresses when she first opened her shop as it would have made this campaign – and future communications work for the shop – so much easier. Take heed of Agne’s advice and early on set up a database of customer information that will make it easy to contact customers (remember to check any data protection requirements and keep all the information very safe and secure)!
Whilst Agne says the money raised was so helpful for her business, the whole team spent a lot of time reaching out to the shop’s fans and followers who then shared it with their friends, and this definitely made their bakery more well known amongst Glaswegians. And they are still benefitting from all that outreach months after the campaign ended.
At a personal level for Agne as a founder, the campaign was a real learning and development journey, pushing her to overcome her personal fear of asking for help from other people… and then realising that no one (with a few exceptions!) were criticising her for needing help. All her supporters really showed up and had nothing but good things to say about her business…so that was a real confidence boost for the entire team!
Agne’s top three tips for you to have a successful campaign are:
- Have just four to six rewards. Any more is confusing for your backers.
- If possible, post a video, a story or anything else EVERYDAY your campaign is running. Some people need to see the same prompt for 10 days until they action it!
- Have a ready to print story and pictures you can send out to news outlets. Most of the journalists find it easier if you provide them with all the material and you will find it’s more likely they will publish a story about you.
And a final comment from Agne to inspire you to crowdfund for something your business needs:
“Don’t be worried or ashamed to ask for help, you will be surprised how many people are looking to back someone’s passion. They backed me and they will back you too if you ask them!”
