Women are outperforming men in number of entrepreneurial ventures of late; a new report from Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) and Crowdfunding Centre shows that across the world women are outperforming men when it comes to raising funds from crowd-funding platform. This clearly shows that female entrepreneurial potential is unleashing. Crowdfunding donors are now preferring and exploring women-led projects by giving them the adequate seed funding, working capital, to raise their enterprises.

While men typically seek higher funding targets, female-led projects achieve a greater average pledge amount than male-led projects. Many findings show that while more men use seed crowdfunding than women, women are more successful in reaching their finance goals than men in all sectors and geographic regions across the globe. While a man may start a business with the vision of being the next Bill Gates/Ambani/Mark Zuckerberg/Zeff Bezos, a woman may start a business simply to gain financial independence and nothing more. Most women become entrepreneurs for very different reasons than men. Women don’t like pomp and show; they don’t glorify their achievements. They simply remain grounded. They have very practical and rational reasons for starting business.

One of the analytical reports shows that over 450,000 seed crowdfunding campaigns from nine of the largest global crowdfunding platforms shows that female-led campaigns were 32% more successful at reaching their funding target than male-led campaigns. Even in more male dominated sectors, such as the technology sector, where there are nine male-led campaigns to every one female-led campaign, female-led campaigns are more successful, and 13% to 10% respectively. The US and the UK are the most thriving countries for seed crowdfunding with the largest volumes of campaigns. In both countries, 20% of male-led campaigns reached their targets compared with 24% and 26% of female-led campaigns respectively.

Crowdfunding is essentially the opposite of the typical approach to business finance. Conventionally, if you want to raise capital to start a business or launch a new product, you would need to set up your business plan, market research, and prototypes, and then shop your idea around to a limited pool or wealthy individuals or institutions. These funding sources included banks, angel investors, and venture capital firms, really limiting your options to a few key players.  You can think of this fundraising approach as a funnel. Crowdfunding platforms, on the other hand, turns that funnels on-end. By giving you, the entrepreneur,  single platform to build, showcase, and share your pitch resources, this approach dramatically streamlines the traditional model.

Crowdfunding is an unruly innovation which has provided new routes to funding for individuals, startups and growth businesses. It enables them to engage and interact directly with the market and with thousands of backers, supporters, customers and potential partners like never before. Seed crowdfunding is the use of ‘rewards based’ crowdfunding platforms to fund the creation, launch or development of new businesses, products and services where backers pay upfront for a product, service or project. Since its inception, seed crowdfunding’s footprint has continued to spread with the levels of finance raised through the nine platforms analyzed. Women-led projects are preferred by funders because the fact is that women are naturally blessed with certain qualities and aptitudes such as follows:

Women are better collaborators: No matter what type of business one runs, collaboration with others is essential. Business cannot be run in vacuum; it operates in society it therefore needs cooperation from stakeholders and the society on the whole. Sharing ideas, maintaining compatible relations with all and working in harmony is very important for achieving good results, it cannot be done single handedly. Women realize this fact easily. According to a recent study conducted by researchers at the Royal Economic Society, women are in fact much more open to collaboration than men. Be it with colleagues, business partners, suppliers or clients women simply do this better.

Women are more honest about the business: Women prefer sticking to the point, and therefore they open up, they talk about their fears, they are not afraid of sharing their failures because they have less ego attached to the success or failure of the business and they want to address issues and not ignore them. In short women are more open and honest about what is going on, and that makes it easier for others to help. Humanity and business cannot be separated. We all need to run our businesses with much greater consideration for the people we interact with, our employees, our customers, our suppliers, our communities. Women are inherently geared to be emotionally strong. They want to make the world a better place, they want to take care of those around them, and they sincerely treat people with respect. Women are fairer negotiators.

Women are better at getting to the point: Women like to get straight to the point; they don’t really want to beat around the bush. After few moments’ pleasantries, they get to the business point. Men can talk about sport, politics, sport, the economy, sport, the weather, sport and then in the last five minutes of a meeting try to hammer out a deal. Women also make better networkers for the same reason. They don’t really want to sit around talking about anything other than business.

Women appreciate the value of creativity: We live in a world where creativity is a very important commodity. We need to be creative in every aspect of running a business and I think that any business that has a creativity shortage will find it very hard to survive in the coming years. Women tend to be more open minded, in touch with the creative aspects of life and they see value in creativity. Women are better decision makers in stressful situations. Several researchers have cited that women have better ability to make decisions in stressful conditions also. Women bring some unique strength to the table that result in better decisions.

However, the fact is that men continue to use seed crowdfunding substantially more than women and raise substantially more finance than female-led campaigns. This article is written for awareness of women that crowdfunding avenues can be tapped for faster and genuine funding.

Small budding entrepreneurial enterprises need not wait any longer for want of the endless procedures for raising funds any longer. All that is required is a good, workable idea and there are people known and unknown who are ready to back a venture. This practice is called crowdfunding. One can raise money from a large number of people, usually through social media – via the Internet.

In India, filmmaker Srinivas Sunderrajan raised Rs. 5,26,000 from 79 supporters for the post-production of his film Greater Elephant. Student filmmakers Aniket Dasgupta and Swathy Sethumadhavan raised Rs. 1,01,000 from 49 supporters for the pre-production of their documentary The Other Way on the indie film movement in India while 21-year-old Vanshaj Kapur raised Rs. 1,15,000 from 32 contributors for completing his film through Wishberry.  Vasudha Sharma’s raised Rs. 5,65,000 from 119 supporters for her music album. So, things are changing fast. There are people out there who would like to support a good idea, a good movement, a good workable business.

Traditionally, if you want to raise capital to start a business, you need to work out your business plan, for which you need to knock on doors of market research companies and consultants, prepare prototypes, and then shop your idea around to a limited pool or wealthy individuals or institutions. These funding sources included banks, angel investors, venture capital firms, non banking finance companies NBFCs were just few options to whom you would go for funding. And, you would experience frustration losing time, energy and money to get the funds required to start your enterprise.

But, with crowdfunding you can think of this fundraising approach as a channel tapping into wide audience and investors all over the world. Crowdfunding platforms give you, a single platform to build, showcase, and share your resources. This approach noticeably outsmarts the traditional model of fundraising. In the older method where you would spend months examining your personal network, selecting potential investors, and spending your own time and money to get in front of them, in crowdfunding, it’s much easier for you to get your opportunity in front of more interested parties and give them more ways to help grow your business. It’s worth a mention here that there are a plethora of crowdfunding platforms available today. There are industry-specific general platform; so you can go to one in which your startup fits the best. This will also enable investors who are willing to invest in specific sector. This will also enable you to get some tips and advises from other entrepreneurs who have used crowdfunding.

From tapping into a wider investor pool by enjoying more flexible fundraising options, there are some other benefits to crowdfunding over traditional methods.

Wider Reach: Through crowdfunding, you have access to thousands of accredited investors whom you can see, interact with, and share your fundraising campaign. Through this platform, you can present the precious process of looking at your business in a wholesome manner; its history, grip in terms of workability, offerings, market, value proposition, and much more. All this can be presented in a polished easily digestible manner.

Sales & Marketing: Right from launch, you can share and promote your business and ideas through social media, email, and cloud computing and other online marketing tactics. As your marketing campaign progresses, your business gets more noticed allowing you to grow faster. Also, your concept gets validation from the masses. As potential investors begin to express interest and ask questions, you can swiftly see if there’s something missing that would make them more likely to buy in.

Effective impact: One of the best things about online crowdfunding is its capacity to centralize and streamline your fundraising efforts by just building a single, comprehensive profile to which you can pull all your prospective and potential investors. You need not follow each of them individually. This process eliminates duplication of printing documents, compiling binders, and manually updating each one. You can present everything online in a much more accessible format, leaving you with more time to run your business instead of fundraising.

There are three general categories crowdfunding. They are Equity, Donation, and Debt.

Equity-based: Equity–based crowdfunding is asking a crowd to donate to your business or project in exchange for equity. Equity crowdfunding is a method that enables broad groups of investors to fund startup companies and small businesses. Investors give money to a business and receive ownership of a small piece of that business. If the business succeeds, then its value goes up; just like the value of a share in that business. Coverage of equity crowdfunding indicates that its potential is greatest with startup businesses that are seeking smaller investments to achieve establishment, while follow-on funding required for rapid growth. The funds might come from many sources.

Donation-based: Donation-based crowd-funding is a way to source money for a project by asking a large number of donors to donate small amounts to it. In return, the donors may receive token rewards. The tokens might be pre-sale item, some small gifts. The donors contribute their monies for the idea or concepts of the business. Sometimes donation crowdfunding is also referred to as rewards crowdfunding. Donation-based crowdfunding can also be used in an effort to raise funds for charitable causes. Because this type of crowd funding is based on donations, funders do not obtain any ownership or rights to the project, nor do they become creditors to the project.

Debt-based: This type of crowdfunding is asking a crowd to provide funds to your business in exchange for financial return and/or interest at a future date. In the U.S. debt-based crowd funding from non-banks became more prominent as a form of crowd funding in 2012, with the launch of the lending clubs which use technology to operate a credit marketplace at a lower cost than traditional bank loan programs, passing the savings on to borrowers in the form of lower rates and to investors in the form of solid returns. In U.S lending clubs have distributed more than US$500 million in loans via its website by April 2012. Prospective borrowers of the Lending Club first submit their requirements, and are then matched with pools of investors who are willing to accept the credit terms. Platforms such as the Lending Club gained popularity, as banks increased interest rates or reduced their level of lending activity.

Crowdfunding is useful for a variety of opportunities; fundraising for disaster-relief, creative projects, creating a salable product, or creating a start-up. Crowdfunding platforms allow you to market your project, generate interest, and receive funds. Because it works on social media platform it can provide useful feedback about a project. Once your business idea and concept gets a support, there is no looking back. Crowdfunding is not limited to certain kind of project, there is no discrimination, only great ideas. The more creativity and fun you have, the more likely you’ll get funded.

There is also a bad side to it. Your project can be copied by potential copycats. There are some delays here also. It just doesn’t happen in jiffy. Crowdfunding platforms often limit the amount of funds you expect to receive. Crowdfunding regulations and taxation can be difficult to work with.

Last piece of advice to all those young budding entrepreneurs is that you are lucky to raise a large amount of money from crowd but that does not give you assurance that your startup will run successfully; you have to still run your business by putting in hard efforts on daily basis. There is still no substitute to working hard. And, the future of crowdfunding largely depends on how successfully startups use it to build their companies and repay the investors. The startups need creative and workable ideas and of course smart strategies. I wish to list few leading crowd-funding platforms for the reader’s choice.

RocketHub: Initially launched with the arts in mind, it expanded to include science, education, business and social good projects. It gained footing in the sciences with its annual SciFund Challenge, an online effort to fund science projects. It also launched a partnership with A&E Networks through which some select projects will be chosen to receive extra support from the joint initiative.

Peerbackers: Recognized as one of the top crowdfunding websites in the industry, peerbackers, focuses on funding entrepreneurs and innovators. The platform has hosted thousands of creative, civic and entrepreneurial projects from around the world. Recently it has extended its arm to young entrepreneurs who are aged 13 to 17 through partnerships with student organizations.

MicroVentures: Calls itself an “investment bank for startups.” It carries out  due diligence on startups and then, if approved, helps raise capital from angel investors via its SEC-approved online platform, giving angel investors the ability to invest small amounts of capital to crowdfund a startup.

Crowdfunding in India is still in its nascent stages. However, the potential is incredibly high for Indian crowdfunding; 50% nation is youthful, educated, and restless with big dreams. There are lakhs of dynamic and fascinating independent projects breaking boundaries. The Securities and Exchange Board of India has proposed new norms for ‘crowdfunding’ or collection funds through web-based platforms and social networking sites; a move that would help start-up companies raise capital and also check misuse of such avenues. Under the proposed norms, crowdfunding platforms can be provided by only SEBI-registered entities, while companies can raise up to Rs.10 crore in a year through this route. Given the high-level of risks associated with this new way of fund-raising activity, SEBI has also proposed that only ‘accredited investors’ be allowed to participate in crowdfunding activities.