Founded by Claudia Duffy, Innovare IP is a boutique full-service patent and trademark attorney practice working with early-stage businesses, investors, accelerators and universities. They strive to provide commercially driven IP advice tailored to their clients’ business needs.
Claudia ran a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to support her project ‘Changing Perceptions’, an initiative to support women entrepreneurs to identify the worth of their intellectual property.
It was a donations and rewards-based campaign. Being a service business, the rewards were based on (i) providing services at discounted prices, (ii) delivering tailored workshops, (iii) an attorney being a Guest Speaker and (iv) a donor being a ‘named supporter’ on the White Paper to be produced based on the findings of the ‘Changing Perceptions’ campaign.
In order to determine how much funding she needed to raise to create, deliver, and write a White Paper (the first step in her longer-term vision to create an online platform supporting women in their identification, protection and valuation of all types of IP across all sectors) Claudia considered all the human-resource costs. Overall, the project was costed based on the total time it would take her to run the project.
Claudia spent three full days preparing the campaign and approximately half a day a week supporting it during the four week period that it was operational. Unfortunately, the campaign wasn’t successful in reaching the desired fundraising target. But undaunted, the project will be pursued by other means. Entrepreneurial resilience in action!
Claudia really enjoyed being part of a cohort of other women entrepreneurs all fundraising together at the same time, benefitting from support from both peers and Women’s Enterprise Scotland (WES). There was a great team spirit all round. And the process of preparing for the campaign really helped her to crystalise her “Changing Perceptions” project.
It was difficult at first creating the actual campaign, but like many people crowdfunding, what Claudia found most difficult was ‘asking for money’ from her network. Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone is always hard!
Claudia says if she is to run a campaign again, she would perhaps publicise it more to her close network before launching it. This would also help her to ensure the campaign aim was clearly understood by her network. Running a service-based business (as supposed to a product-based business), meant that she was a little unsure as to whether or not the campaign had really resonated with potential supporters.
However, despite not reaching target, Claudia says she greatly benefitted from the increased exposure for both her own profile and also for her business.
Claudia’s top three tips for you if you are thinking about crowdfunding?
- Have a plan for the campaign and stick to it
- Be resilient
- Become comfortable asking for help and money.
Claudia advises you to get as much tailored support as you can from organisations running crowdfunding platforms (such as Women’s Enterprise Scotland) and remember…
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
But you can do it!
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