Based on your experience, what makes a request for financial support credible?
First of all, it has to be concrete. If you ask people for 10,000 euros to install an electrical system, they immediately understand what their contribution will achieve: they can picture the lights coming on, the rooms being used and the activities beginning. A generic request to ‘support our work’ is much harder to grasp. Who is asking also matters, as does what they have built over time. Cascina Albaterra is not an isolated organisation: it is part of the Sulle Orme community, together with the association of the same name, which has supported people experiencing severe vulnerability since 2005, and the Multiforme social cooperative, which focuses on pathways into employment. The three organisations share a mission, relationships and a common approach. I believe crowdfunding rarely finances an idea; it finances the next step in something people can already see moving forward. Proportion matters too. The amount you ask for must be consistent with the result you promise. If the two are out of proportion – even because the request is overly modest – people notice. In our case, working through successive targets helped: each milestone had a precise cost and corresponded to a tangible change.
To what extent is crowdfunding about raising money, and to what extent is it a process of building support and a sense of belonging around a cause?
The two cannot be separated, but they do not carry the same weight. An online donation is not a private bank transfer: the donor’s name appears, and people almost always tell someone about it. Donating involves putting yourself out there to some degree, and that very act creates a bond with the project. We tried to recognise this participation by giving every contribution the same value. Everyone received a thank-you video featuring the farm animals and an invitation to the closing event, regardless of the amount donated. That said, I am wary of the phrase, ‘We didn’t raise much, but we built a community.’ It is usually not true. If a campaign does not raise funds, it is because that connection was not there or no one activated it. Belonging is not a consolation prize when the money fails to come in; it is the reason the money comes in.
What needs to be in place before an organisation even considers a crowdfunding campaign if it is to have a genuine chance of success?
I see four priorities. First, there must be a real community made up of people the organisation knows and can reach directly. Before launching, you should already have a fairly clear idea of who might make the first twenty donations, because a campaign rarely begins with an anonymous audience. It almost always starts with relationships built over time. Next, you need a concrete objective with a clear, verifiable cost – one that even someone outside the organisation can explain in a few words. If the project is too vague or too complex to describe, people will find it difficult to understand, support and share with others. The third condition concerns internal resources. A thirty-day online campaign requires a much longer period of preparation and a constant presence while the fundraising is under way. It therefore needs dedicated people and time; it cannot be managed solely in whatever gaps remain between other tasks. Finally, you must be willing to put yourself out there. Crowdfunding makes public not only the project and its objectives, but also the campaign’s progress – including the possibility that it may not reach its target. Accepting this risk is part of the decision. Asking your community to trust you also means being willing to show yourself transparently.
What does it mean to translate a project into a proposal that people unfamiliar with its language and context can understand and make their own, without sacrificing complexity for the sake of communication?
It means giving up professional jargon without giving up substance and replacing categories with scenes. We chose to portray people through what they do: caring for the animals, working in the vegetable garden or making cheese. We did not want to show people in need of help, but people with skills, responsibilities and a role in the life of the farm. Humour also carried the complexity better than a solemn tone could have done. Comic social media videos and animals thanking donors allowed us to talk about marginalisation without asking for pity. It worked because it was not a device invented for the campaign; it reflected the way the farm experiences and talks about diversity.
How much does the quality of the project matter, and how much depends on the capital of trust an organisation has built over time with its community?
You could say that trust determines the start, while the quality of the project determines how far you go. None of the first supporters read the quotation for the electrical system. They placed their trust in people they had known for years. That trust is not built in thirty days; it accumulates over twenty years of serious work, communicated without embellishment. But the person who takes a campaign beyond its first target is someone else: someone who did not know us and heard about the project from a friend, perhaps in a rough thirty-second explanation. That person will donate only if the project can withstand an imperfect explanation. In this sense, quality is not the same as technical merit; it is the project’s ability to pass from person to person without losing its meaning. It is no coincidence that one of the campaign’s indicators is the number of new donors and where they came from: a concrete measure of how far the supporter base has expanded. I would add that trust is capital in the literal sense. It grows slowly and can be spent very quickly: asking too often, asking vaguely or failing to explain afterwards how the money was used is enough to erode it.
What can an organisation that has built its sustainability mainly through projects and institutional funding learn from crowdfunding?
The main difference is the audience, and that changes everything. You write a grant application for an evaluator who knows the field, speaks the same professional language and is expected to read the proposal to the end. You write a campaign for someone who owes you nothing and will leave after two lines if they have not understood or felt anything. The kind of feedback also changes. A grant application gives you an outcome months later. A campaign tells you in real time what is working, and you can adjust your approach that same day. The relationship between resources and responsibility changes as well. The funds are not tied to a reporting template, but to a promise made in public: you have greater freedom in how you use them and a much stronger obligation to explain how they were spent. Crowdfunding also makes it clear that the organisation has a supporter base that must be nurtured throughout the year, not contacted only when something is needed. One final point: in terms of financial volume, crowdfunding does not replace grants. It complements them and puts different organisational capabilities to the test.
When would you advise an organisation to choose crowdfunding, and when would you suggest it stop and reconsider?
We would recommend it to an organisation that has a real community, however small, and knows how to reach it directly. It also needs a clearly defined project, a visible result and people who can devote time to preparation, fundraising and relationships with supporters after the campaign has closed. We would advise against it if crowdfunding were intended mainly to cover a deficit or fund ordinary activities in general. The same applies when an organisation expects the platform to find donors for it, or when no one inside the organisation can follow the campaign on a daily basis. Careful thought must also be given to what can be shared publicly. If a project involves people for whom confidentiality is essential, the need to communicate must never take precedence over their protection. Crowdfunding requires a willingness to be visible, but that choice must remain consistent with the organisation’s work and values.