For the donation-based crowdfunding business model, donors agree to fund a specific financial or production goal in return for giveaways, incentives, or rewards. Fulfillment.com (FDC) can coordinate your crowdfunding fulfillment program, taking into account different products for different donor levels and segmenting your inventory and outbound shipments based on specific target dates and concurrent donation spikes. For example, if your campaign goes live on a Monday and funders who make a donation within the campaign’s first 24 hours receive an additional reward bonus, FDC’s flexible system adeptly controls and responds to the potential order uptick. Additionally, as your campaign winds down and shipments decline, we can help you coordinate final orders to complete your offerings as well as manage product returns. After an initial quality check, acceptable product returns are restored to inventory for concluding any remaining outstanding orders.

New funding sites are popping up on an almost daily basis to address everything from personal financing to non-profit needs to niche markets to those who offer simply being part of the group as its own reward. Forbes.com created a list of their top 10 recommended sites, but if you read through the blog comments, you will see that many readers include additional suggestions and links for platforms that they have successfully used. The choices are numerous, with brand new sites tweaking existing models and striving to differentiate themselves through targeted niches and goals. Fulfillment.com creates an environment where anyone offering reward-based order processing can benefit from our fulfillment expertise.

Crowdfunding is not an overnight sensation—it is bridging the gap between entrepreneurs and philanthropists, driving market innovation, and experiencing exponential growth and popularity around the world. In 2013, estimated volume of funds raised worldwide by crowdfunding platforms was over 5 billion dollars. Are you currently operating on this platform or actively pursuing a similar model for your fundraising? This market provides a huge opportunity for small businesses that would have a difficult time getting financing from a traditional bank or lending institution. Launching a crowdfunded campaign also identifies your company as cutting edge, flexible, and willing to try new things rather than relying on the same old way business used to be done.

Many campaigns offer additional bonuses for social media shares, incentivizing funders to tweet, post, pin, and otherwise help spread the word to their network of friends and families. In this way, the campaign organizers are encouraging donors to work for them to further increase donations or, at the very least, grow awareness of the company and/or cause. Think about the recent snowballing of support for ALS through the ice bucket challenge. Their outside-of-the-box thinking catapulted donations beyond the non-profit’s wildest expectations and exposed them to a brand new donor audience of every age and across the globe. Even many traditional sports-oriented fundraising opportunities like 5K walks, half and full marathons, and triathlons now have an internet payment application, again allowing participants the opportunity to tap into their social networks to raise additional funds. The crowdfunding model essentially eliminates the middle man, allowing donors to put their proverbial money where their mouth is and directly support a cause that they believe in, whether big or small. Even a whimsical project like the now infamous potato salad campaign, can quickly go viral and surpass their creator’s humble projections.

FDC’s Crowdfunding Fulfillment Services

So you’ve created a popular crowdfunded campaign and donors from around the world have flocked to your site to pledge their support. Now what? Hopefully, when you were laying the ground work for your promotion, you had the foresight to contact Fulfillment.com to handle all of your fulfillment needs, so everything is on track. Our system will integrate with your CRM or CSV order upload to manage reward shipments just like any other E-commerce order. Regardless of whether you are sending 10,000 t-shirts to the minimum donation group, 1,000 posters to the mid-level donors, and 100 personalized, signed photos to the elite contributors or all of the above at the same time, Fulfillment.com can inventory and coordinate your shipments. Where needed, we can even pre-assemble kits of products that ship together, such as a combination of an autographed poster and thank you letter for supporting the promotion. We can affix additional labels or stickers to personalize the shipment and order accuracy is the hallmark of FDC’s processing teams.

Our experienced Warehouse team has firsthand knowledge of crowdfunded promotion fulfillment as we have been working with similar platforms since their inception. The complexities of segmented giving levels are no match for our technology and expertise. Fulfillment.com provides state-of-the-art order grouping technology, recognizing complete matches for customer and name on multiple orders, so if your campaign rewards a top-level giver with the additional items given to all levels below them, their orders would be grouped and shipped together, saving you money on postage and packaging fees and saving your customer time waiting on their order delivery as well as receiving multiple shipments. In addition, our system performs automatic address validation, comparing your order address against Google maps and US postal service listings, ensuring that your shipments are delivered to a legitimate location. In instances where the address is flagged as undeliverable, our Account Management team promptly identifies the issue and resolves it with your customer service team.

Crowdfunded campaigns benefit from FDC’s negotiated shipping rates. Whether you offer your donors a variety of shipping options including expedited delivery and package tracking, or stick with just one option such as 2-5 day ground shipping, our extensive network of carrier relationships and worldwide shipping volumes allow you to save money on postage regardless of where your products are shipping. One of the key advantages of a crowdfunded fulfillment program is that the world can literally be your target market. Conversely, figuring out the best, most cost-effective method of delivering thank you acknowledgements to those donors located all across the globe provides a logistical challenge for even the most seasoned supply chain manager. Fulfillment.com easily addresses this challenge with our logistics know-how, worldwide fulfillment capabilities, and industry-low shipping rates. It’s a win-win situation—your campaign gets the funding you need and your customers get the attention-to-order accuracy and 24 hour order turn-around times that Fulfillment.com guarantees.