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Description
StartLab helps civil society organizations and active citizens raise and build financial and social capital. The aim of the project is to raise awareness of the possibilities of crowdfunding, its benefits and to attract civil society organizations to make more use of the service to fund their public benefit projects. The Nadácia Centra pre filantropiu will create a stable system of education and support for civil society organizations for a successful campaign. At the same time, the project will strengthen the Nadácia''s internal capacities in the field of communication and marketing, so that they can develop this service in the long term. Supporting small donations from large numbers of CSOs makes it possible to become stronger, more publicly recognizable, sustainable and independent of state funding. StartLab, as the only functional Slovak crowdfunding platform based on the remuneration principle, is an important infrastructure tool in the environment of development of civic activities. StartLab helps build the financial and social capital of public benefit project implementers and complements a key component of the ecosystem of support and mobilization of resources for civil society in Slovakia. The main activities of the project are: Information recruitment campaign, systematic work with organizations, educational program for authors of developed plans, building know-how, marketing tools for the StartLab platform, matching partners for organizations.
Summary of project results
StartLab helps OOS and active citizens in acquiring and building financial and social capital. It is an important infrastructure tool for obtaining financial resources. Before the implementation of the project, the OOS did not use it enough, the goal was to show what benefit it can have for them and help them implement successful campaigns. The goal was also to create a stable education and support system for campaign authors and to strengthen the internal capacities of project implementers in the field of marketing. The goal of all activities was to move StartLab forward. The main activity was the creation of educational materials and their dissemination in the online space through social networks, newsletters and training. The project implementers prepared an ebook and 53 educational articles, which, together with information about active campaigns, were distributed through more than 300 posts on Facebook and Instagram. Thanks to sponsored promotion, they reached thousands of relevant users. The project implementers also sent more than 60 mailings to approximately 20,000 users, which, thanks to the integration of contacts with MailChimp, brought content relevant to various target groups. Within the project, more than 20 events were organized on how to prepare a successful campaign. The project implementers managed to get 3 new matching partners who will provide extra financial support even after the end of the project. Thanks to the grant, the organization also updated its legal documents.
During the duration of the project, the CSOs who had a campaign on StartLab received 10,983 contributions in the total amount of €347,596, the project implementers helped finance 87 projects of non-profit organizations. These values exceeded the planned indicators. The interest in the educational events exceeded expectations, 371 participants took part instead of the planned 288. At the beginning of the project, there were no materials that would explain how to do it to those interested in the StartLab campaign, today there are dozens. They helped the authors during the duration of the project, but they will also help others after it ends.
Summary of bilateral results
Cooperation with the Norwegian organization Norsensus Mediaforum was of great importance for the project. They collaborated with the project implementers on two project activities – building know-how (creating educational articles) and an educational program. They also regularly consulted together on the communication strategy. As part of the creation of educational articles, topics were selected in which the partner has professional know-how and which are relevant to the activities of the organization that implemented the project. The partner supplied the necessary information, which was subsequently processed into the final articles. Methods of sharing information in prepared articles via social networks and newsletters were also consulted on a regular basis.