Aluminati has partnered with Stockcrowd to provide organisations with enhanced community platforms featuring sophisticated fundraising capabilities.
We sat down with Ben Parker, Managing Director of Stockcrowd UK to discuss why fundraising is more important than ever in a post-pandemic world and how our companies can offer best-in-class solutions to modern fundraising problems. The result? Aluminati and Stockcrowd have formed a partnership to tackle these pressing problems.
Get notified when we publish more news and interesting content.
Who are Stockcrowd?
Stockcrowd was founded in 2015 with the vision of helping organisations maximise their fundraising opportunities by turning their own existing websites and social media channels into crowdfunding platforms.
Stockcrowd wanted to open up online spaces for financial organisations to deliver their projects and company goals together with their own communities.
“Stockcrowd gives back control of payments and ownership of data to the fundraising organisation” explained Ben, “enabling it to better connect with its community and receive donations immediately rather than weeks later, as is often the case today with third party fundraising platforms. Knowing who your donors are and being able to explain how their donations have positively contributed to a campaign galvanises long-term support”.
Ben wanted to create a way for organisations to not experience these delays.”Money from projects should go directly to projects, with no delays in between. The data of people who support a cause should be owned by the organisation that is driving the cause and not by third parties that simply aggregate and accumulate projects. Organisations that promote a cause must gain the advantage of their digital traffic without sending their community to a domain that is not theirs.” We agree!
The Stockcrowd platform that will be integrated into the Aluminate Community Builder will allow organisations to have more engagement with their communities, to develop a shared ethos and a more personal, emotional connection.
Community Fundraising in a Post-Pandemic World
Building an engaged community within an organisation is now more important than ever before. By the end of 2019, there was already an established trend of organisations moving their primary fundraising programmes online. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated this trend in 2020, and we expect to see it continue in 2021 onwards.
With everyone moving their programmes online, online spaces quickly became crowded with third-party providers. “This made it difficult for organisations to stand out”, Ben said. “Donate buttons just don’t cut it anymore and organisations need to engage in a more creative way. The fundraising templates and content designs that Stockcrowd offers really allow organisations to engage with communities in a unique and fun way, and emotionally connect the donor to the end cause.”
In other words, the Stockcrowd platform helps companies to bridge the gap that online fundraising has struggled with, namely: the lack of human interaction in online spaces.
“You’ve got to be able to connect people to the end cause. To show them in a visual way where their money is going and make that virtual connection between their donation and what that money is going to do to help the cause,” Ben explained.
Stockcrowd tackles this interpersonal problem in a unique way. Stockcrowd’s platform enables donors to associate their giving not just with affiliations to organisations or institutions, but with particular causes and themes that they are passionate about.
“For example, if a university is performing cutting-edge research into a societal issue such as dementia, they now have an opportunity to not just connect with its alumni but a far broader network of people who feel an affiliation to the cause, in this example dementia.
A Partnership with a Shared Ethos
The partnership between Aluminati and Stockcrowd was born out of a CASE conference where Daniel Watts, Managing Director, Aluminati and Stockcrowd’s co-founder Sergi Pallares met. Both sharing similar backgrounds and interests in community-focused platforms, they hit it off and actually started embedding the Stockcrowd platform into the Aluminate Community Builder then and there on their laptops, between conference sessions!
“The Aluminate platform is the obvious choice as it is built to bring communities together and Stockcrowd provides the engine room for fundraisers to actually take action together”, said Ben.
The Importance of Community Engagement
An all too common occurrence in the fundraising sector is frustration with a lack of communication between the community and charities.
“They
This is the problem that Stockcrowd is able to solve by giving organisations, institutions and charities the opportunity to own their data and clearly identify who in their community is a regular giver. With Stockcrowd, you are also able to see areas of the community with the highest or lowest engagement and make informed decisions based on this. From this, organisations can create agile and robust strategies to move their fundraising programmes forward to achieve their goals.
The Stockcrowd platform is now integrated into the Aluminate Community Builder, adding value to our users and additional functionality that will merge the benefits of community and fundraising.
We are happy to welcome Stockcrowd to the Aluminati community and look forward to future collaboration.
