Main Street Crowd - Funding

Main Street Crowd was developed not to simply bring crowdfunding to businesses or to replace the human networks working in business development today, but to give communities the tools they need to connect with each other in the cloud.  Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing are two of those tools.  And economic development in any community must happen at the local level, not in a national warehouse of projects.  The “crowd” in crowdfunding must be a local, involved, and informed crowd to know what the community needs, and they must be networked in order to make informed decisions.

With Main Street Crowd, community organizations such as Chambers of Commerce have a crowdfunding tool for their use at no cost to the organization.  These are called “Clowdz®” … the crowd in the cloud.  Like other crowdfunding sites, Main Street Crowd generates its revenue through commission on successful projects.  However, unlike other sites, Main Street gives 30% of their fees back to the organization making it the lowest cost crowdfunding alternative available today.  These fees represent non-dues revenue to Chambers.  Beyond that, these community crowdfunding sites will soon have advertising revenue that will also be shared with the organization hosting the site.

With the planned site redesign on the launch of equity crowdfunding, Main Street Crowd will also provide more social networking features within each clowd, endorsements and recommendations, options for matching contributions by businesses, and will give small business the ability to apply for commercial loans with local lenders of all types.

Programming is currently underway to allow Chamber Nation subscribers to easily create their clowd network on Main Street Crowd and export and register their members automatically with the ability to opt out.  Members of the clowd can list themselves as service providers within the clowd and offer their services to other clowd members.  Members are encouraged to invite their clients and customers to register on Main Street Crowd (free) and join the Chamber clowd (free) to participate in and support the local projects.