However, if you’re from outside the European Economic Area and Switzerland and you would like to run your business within the United Kingdom, you’ll need to apply for a Graduate Entrepreneur visa.

AM I ELIGIBLE?

Before you can apply for a visa, you should check that you meet the criteria:

• The idea. You must have a realistic and well-considered idea for a business that has been endorsed by an approved body (i.e. by either UK Trade and Investment as part of the elite global graduate programme [Sirius] or a UK Higher Education Institution).
• The endorsement. As well as proving that you have a credible business idea, you’ll need to meet other key criteria in order to receive the necessary endorsement from UKTI or an HEI. These include, but are not limited to: proof that you can support yourself (by having a certain amount of savings – this could be investment from a crowdfunding campaign – which must be deposited in your bank account at least 90 days before you apply); proof of a suitable degree (UK-recognised bachelor’s degree or higher, depending on which body is endorsing you); and proof that you meet the English language requirement. Criteria can vary from institution to institution, so do check carefully.

You will also need to be from outside of the EEA or Switzerland in order to apply.

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE?

Not as long as you may think, though this can vary depending on which body is endorsing you. If you’re getting your endorsement from an HEI, you will typically be notified of the decision on your entrepreneur visa within eight weeks. If the UKTI are endorsing you, you should be notified of the decision within three weeks.

WHEN CAN I APPLY?

The earliest you can apply is three months prior to travelling to the UK.

HOW MUCH WILL I HAVE TO PAY?

The cost depends on where you are applying from, how you intend to apply, and your own situation (whether you have any dependants, for instance). As of summer 2016, it costs £342 to apply for yourself if you’re applying from outside of the UK (or £287 if you’re a citizen of Turkey or Macedonia). You’ll also need to pay the UK health surcharge as part of your application. We recommend visiting the UK Government website (Gov.uk) for up-to-date information on Graduate Entrepreneur visa fees and surcharges.

HOW LONG CAN I STAY IN THE UK ON AN ENTREPRENEUR VISA?

A Tier 1 visa will allow you to stay in the UK for one year, but you can apply to extend this.

ARE THERE ANY RESTRICTIONS I NEED TO KNOW ABOUT?

The visa is pretty flexible, and allows you to bring dependants and family members with you. You can apply to extend your stay if you need to and even switch to a Graduate Entrepreneur visa from another visa category. You aren’t able to settle in the UK on this visa, though; and you also can’t benefit from public funds or work in particular industries (a doctor or dentist in training or a professional sportsperson, for instance).

Crowdfund Campus is proud to support all budding entrepreneurs. For advice on how to make the most of your business idea by taking advantage of our unique platform, please give us a call on +44(0)7545 898120 or drop us a line at hello@crowdfundcampus.com– we look forward to helping you!

In this fast-paced modern world – with the memory of the recession clear in the minds of most – job security has become something of an outdated notion. Instead of looking for opportunity, the boldest and brightest youngsters are creating their own.

Nonetheless, whether as an entrepreneur or an employee, the ability to adapt quickly is a vital skill for all who hope to succeed in today’s job market; and universities, too, have had to adapt their own business offering in line with this new mode of thinking. Courses that focus on entrepreneurship and enterprise have become a key part of the curriculum.

The aim, of course, is to prepare budding businessmen and women for the ‘real’ world of business – but this, too, necessitates an adherence to the latest trends. And there’s been one trend in particular that has proved a game-changer in recent years, disrupting conventional funding methods: crowdfunding.  No longer do entrepreneurs need to rely on banks and investors to get a project off the ground; now an entrepreneur can open his/her idea out to the public and let them decide what it’s worth. As LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman puts it:

Call it the emergence of a “world’s bank” – a system built by and for the people, delivering credit in America and across the globe in a radically decentralized, highly scalable, and crucially equitable way.

The World Bank funds institutions. The world’s bank funds people.

If you’re an institution offering any kind of enterprise course, there are many reasons to involve crowdfunding within your curriculum. Here are our top three:

#1: THE DEVELOPMENT OF REAL BUSINESS SKILLS

A crowdfunding campaign requires all of the same processes needed for a successful product launch in any arena: marketing (including digital marketing, video production, copywriting, etc.), sales, strategy, social media and PR, as well as operational planning (manufacture, sourcing, logistics, delivery).

The difference is that these elements are extremely accessible: most of the ‘pre-campaign’ can be delivered via the platform of choice, and it requires little expenditure. Most importantly, crowdfunding is a direct test of an idea in an open market: instead of a handful of investors (or similar) deciding about the viability of a product, it’s the general public who decides. There can be no better test, in a sense.

#2: THE ABILITY TO FAIL

Better still, it gives students the chance to fail. Failing is a key part of the entrepreneur’s journey (a theory that is easy to prove – one need only think of Steve Jobs); and providing a safe environment by which students can try, and fail, and try again may be the greatest gift a university enterprise course could give.

Platforms like Crowdfund Campus are ideally placed to help with this; our Sandpit tool allows students to test an idea fully by using ‘virtual’ currency before transferring over to a live marketplace.

#3: PRACTICE IN BUILDING EFFECTIVE RELATIONSHIPS

Traditional funding routes often promote working in solitude (or small groups) as opposed to real teamwork, which can be to the detriment of the entrepreneur in question; indeed, the ability to build relationships with a number of people can often be the difference between success or failure for a fledgling company.

Crowdfunding forces students to think out of the box and – more importantly – come out of their box. To make the campaign a success, they will need to muster support: from friends, family, teachers, and beyond. This practice will provide valuable insight into networking and relationship-building; moreover, it has the added benefit of raising the profile of the course across campus and – if really effective – the profile of the university as a whole to wider networks.

At Crowdfund Campus, we provide full support to students and universities who wish to embrace crowdfunding. Our offering includes – but is not limited to – step-by-step guidance to creating a successful campaign; free educational workshops; and a full vetting process of each campaign before it is launched. There are also no participation fees! The only fees that will be payable to Crowdfund Campus are those stipulated by our payment provider for card processing.

If you think your university is ready to enjoy the multiple benefits of crowdfunding, please email support@crowdfundcampus.com – we’ll be delighted to help.

But speak to any campaign team, successful or not, and most will only mention money as a by-product. Instead, what the casual observer might see as ancillary benefits are actually understood by savvy startups as the primary purpose of crowdfunding: to determine if there is demand for an idea or product before making risky investments. Indeed, as Ethan Mollick and Venkat Kuppuswamy – authors of After the Campaign: Outcomes of Crowdfunding – write:

“Crowdfunding is not just a means for immediate funds. Rather, it’s a way to validate ideas, test markets, launch brands, find customers and impress investors.”

Marketing, not money

The most basic mistake a crowdfunding campaign can make is to focus solely on boosting profits rather than building awareness. Funding should be seen as validation that an idea has an audience; to affirm if it really is a good idea. If the crowd gets behind it and feels invested in it (both literally and figuratively), then the entrepreneur will have tested and marketed a product with very little risk. Even if they don’t, it will still count as a valid trial which can inform any iterated offering. There can be no better mode of market research.

At its heart, crowdfunding is a participatory tool focusing on people, not just pennies. It enables a budding entrepreneur or business student to apply their knowledge in a physical setting – upholding the Aristotelian belief that we learn by doing. This is why crowdfunding on campus is so important: where better to introduce the idea of enterprise than at university, where intellectual, financial, and, critically, social infrastructure abounds? Whilst a lecture or textbook can teach key principles, crowdfunding presents an opportunity for hands-on learning, allowing students to participate in, and feel empowered by, their own education.

Moreover, a university campus represents an engaged community of students, teachers, staff and alumni. Here, the budding entrepreneur will find a willing audience to test and validate their idea (and hopefully throw in a little spare change if they’re interested) – or show them they need to go back to the drawing board. In fact, it is ‘failing well’ – not achieving the stated financial goals but tapping into a target audience and learning more about market demand – that can teach the most valuable lessons.

The proof is in the pudding

One young entrepreneur who understood the importance of ‘crowd’ first, ‘fund’ second, was Yannan, a Warwick University student who wanted to sell unique tea-based products. In the first iteration of her campaign, Yannan intended to open a tea shop in Leamington Spa, a quaint Midlands town – teeming with tea rooms.

Realising her audience would not stump up support in an already saturated market, Yannan reworked her offering, focusing instead on selling her ‘Teamisu’ – a tasty tea and tiramisu treat – rather than taking on the risk of an entire premises. Within two months, Yannan had lined up her first commercial partner and prepared her market test, pre-selling her products on Crowdfund Campus. In fact, her campaign not only went on to be over-funded, but also affirmed that her ‘crowd’ were prepared to pay a profitable price. Since no brand (however tasty!) can trade without a loyal band of customers, it is this test of desirability and viability that must been seen as the real value of crowdfunding: it’s not about the money, it’s about the market response.

“The medium is the message”

When done well, a crowdfunding campaign can teach so much – far more than investment alone. Here at Crowdfund Campus, we support students and universities seeking enterprise education and profit sources, providing both a simulated experience (called Sandpit) and a live marketplace. If you would like to introduce crowdfunding to your classroom and lead an enterprise renaissance on campus, please email support@crowdfundcampus.com – it would be our pleasure to show you around our setup.

But why?

You have a project in mind, you create the campaign, you attract a crowd of backers and the payment processor (usually Stripe, Paypal or GoCardless) transfers the funds. So what service are these platforms providing for their fee? Is this too much to pay for a ‘place’ online for this to happen? And what are your other options if you want to raise funds through pre-selling?

Let me start by dispelling some myths about Reward crowdfunding:

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Myth 1

The platform supplies the crowd

One of the biggest misconceptions about crowdfunding is that, simply by putting your genius idea up on the internet, legions of bored netizens waiting on the crowdfunding site will fund you. This is not how crowdfunding works. You have to prepare your own crowd for funding and bring that crowd to the platform. There are an abundance of failed campaigns that never took off on these sites because these campaigns relied on the hosting platform to do the work for them, instead of going out themselves and asking for funds from their networks.

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Myth 2

You need a platform to crowdfund

The second falsehood surrounding this form of crowdfunding is the idea that you need a platform to host your campaign. Reward crowdfunding isn’t regulated in the same way as equity and P2P lending, both requiring expensive and time consuming HMRC authorisation. You can get your own ‘Out-the-box’ solution with something like Ignition Deck. That, by the way, is how we started.

It was a clunky, difficult thing to get working, and the support was awful, but it worked. Until these products improve as the market matures, I’d say you’re better off using an existing platform rather than having that hassle, especially if there is no tech expertise in the business. But the key question is why is there a market for ‘Out the Box’ software?

This is good evidence of Myth 1. You supply the crowd therefore it doesn’t really matter where your campaign is hosted. You could do as Brewdog did for Equity crowdfunding, Rhino Rugby bonds did with lending and the MYO gesture wrist band have done with reward crowdfunding; you could crowdfund on your own site.

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Myth 3

The percentage fee structure represents value added

The percentage fee structure works when someone is giving you access to a network. Take for instance, equity crowdfunding. An equity platform will have a crowd of investors perpetually on the look out for opportunities. The platform acts as the gatekeeper to that group. If you want to pitch to them, and you are successful, they’ll take a cut.

It works because it is their network, they are giving you access, and they will also be giving the investors a screening service, making sure they don’t see any projects that are wasting their time. In essence, they’re adding value to both campaign creators and investors, so the percentage fee model makes sense for equity crowdfunding.

With reward crowdfunding, however, you are being given access to no such network. In reality, you are bringing your network and your customers to the platform. The platform usually isn’t screening projects either, so they aren’t providing a service for the contributors. Where is the added value?

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Essentially this blog sets out to make one point. You are responsible for preparing and building your own crowd for crowdfunding.

It is for that reason, at Crowdfund Campus, we don’t believe in success fees/campaign fees and why we are pioneering with a different business model. One where the campaign creator keeps everything they earn (after payment processing fees).

Our model means we can spend more time with our campaign creators, giving them the skills and knowledge to run a successful crowdfunding campaign and build their own crowd. That is how we add value and that’s why 70% of campaigns have successfully hit their targets on our platform. If you are connected to one of our member institutions then start your campaign today and book your FREE online crowdfunding workshops at http://crowdfundcampus.com/workshops

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Don’t lose out to success fees on other platforms and get #FundedOnCampus

Follow the blog at https://crowdfundcampus.com/blog for great crowdfunding insight.

We’d love to hear from you, ask us anything via facebook or Twitter or e-mail us at support@crowdfundcampus.com