On Thursday, the Crowdfunding Centre announced it has opened its all-female BizFunding Accelerator. The launch of the program comes after Facebook’s #SheMeansBusiness campaign revealed the main barriers to women starting a business are around raising money and financial security.
According to program co-founder/director, Kay Klug, the key element of the accelerator is seed-crowdfunding. She stated statistics have proven that women are more successful at crowdfunding than their male counterparts.
“We’ve collected extensive data from almost half a million crowdfunds across the world which reveals that women are significantly more likely to hit their crowdfunding target than men, on average – reversing the ‘old normal’ where women get less than a tenth of such support. Not only that, the amounts pledged are larger and there are more backers for each campaign. The third barrier to women starting a business, according to Facebook, was confidence, and we know from experience that women who crowdfund experience a boost in confidence from the support and evidence based success of their business. So it makes perfect sense to create an all female cohort for our accelerator programme and we look forward to working with some of the brightest and most committed entrepreneurs.”
The Crowdfunding Centre also shared that the BizFundingAccelerator will be using a new funding model built on seed crowdfunding, which will provide the following:
- Access to finance – Seed and/or working capital
- Market validation – proving the concept and quantifying market demand
- Brand development
- Pre-sales
The Crowdfunding Centre added that while applications are normally by referral or invitation only, women can apply to be part of the accelerator here.
