8) What Happens After the Fundraising Campaign?

Once you have reached your target, it’s time to collect the funds and close the campaign. How to do it and what happens after.

Reaching the fundraising target is great news to any company raising funds. It is important to note, once you have successfully reached your funding goal, there’s still some work to do.

Running and closing a campaign is slightly different for each fundraising platform. So, in a part of this post, we’ll be using Funderbeam’s platform as an example. Just keep in mind, when using other platforms you need to become familiar with their terms and processes.

Reaching the target and collecting the funds

During a fundraising campaign, interested investors place an indication of what they would like to invest. Those indications are not legally binding but are there to give you a rough idea of how much money and how many people are willing to invest.

You, as Lead Investor or the company, acting alongside Funderbeam, can now choose which indications to accept and which to reject. After this, you can start sending out investment proposals to the investors to make them an offer to participate in the syndicate. The investors can now either accept or refuse your offer but you will have some idea how much will be invested.

Funderbeam offers a variety of instruments to choose from when fundraising — equity, convertible note, bond and a fund.

After all the funds from investors, who accepted the investment proposal, have been collected the SPV is created.

On Funderbeam, we are using a special-purpose-vehicle, or SPV for short, in the fundraising process. There are two different structure types on Funderbeam used when raising funding — nominee SPV and loan-based SPV. Read more about those types here.

Once the SPV is established, there’s some additional paperwork to do. Namely, you then need to sign the shareholders’ agreement (the SHA) and register new shares.

The shareholders’ agreement is there to regulate the relationship between the shareholders, the company management, ownership of the shares and the protection of the shareholders. Once the shareholders’ agreement is signed, the collected funds will be transferred to the company.

Life after fundraising

When all the above mentioned is done, the campaign is closed. Now you need to start thinking about post-campaign communications. The right steps taken after the fundraising campaign will make your investors happy and help to build trust.

The first step to take is to contact your investors, most likely via e-mail, and thank them for their participation. For some substance, add a summary of the fundraising campaign with some key metrics for example how much was raised, how many backers did you have, and what are the next steps you as a company will plan to take.

A “thank you” e-mail will show investors that you care, and help build good communication between you and your investor-base for the future.

If you had a motivational package to go along with the fundraising campaign, now is the perfect time to send it out to your investors.

Don’t forget to update your social media channels communicating the successful closure of the campaign. If you let your fundraising campaign fizzle out on social once it’s finished, your followers might think nothing came out of it. Share your success story!

It’s a good idea to have a post-campaign meeting with your whole team. Reflect back and discuss what went well, what didn’t go so well, what did you learn from the experience and so on. This is especially important if you plan to raise funding in the future. You will most likely gain some new perspective and ideas to use or things to change in future campaigns.

Stay focused on the product. Now that you have the funds, it’s easy to start entertaining new ideas for features or second product versions, but try not to deviate from your original course. Or at least evaluate each opportunity to see whether it fits with the company’s goals.

Last but not least, keep your investors in the loop. This is extremely important to let your investors know what’s happening with the company, what are the future plans, how has the company been performing in the past, etc. You can do this by sharing monthly or quarterly reports with relevant KPIs and a short summary of your activities during the time period.

Make every effort to provide detailed updates on a frequent basis.

Updating your investor base on what’s happening and how the company is doing, is crucial in building trust and keeping your investors happy. Remember, they were the ones willing to support you in the first place.

The Funderbeam Guide for Raising Funds

In case you missed the previous chapters in our series and want to know more, check them out here:

• 1) Is Equity Fundraising a Good Idea for Your Company?
• 2) How to Create a Campaign Page?
• 3) How to Create a Video Pitch?
• 4) How to Get a Lead Investor on Board?
• 5) How to Create a Marketing Plan for Your Campaign?
• 6) How to Use Direct Outreach to Your Advantage?
• 7) How to Manage Your Campaign After Launching?

About Funderbeam

Funderbeam is a platform that combines the three most important pillars of investing: Access to data, capital, and liquidity.

Raise money from local and global investors, without the usual hassle of cross-border deals. Only one new entry to your cap table.

Our vision is to provide everyone in the world with equal opportunities, whether you are building a company, or looking to fund the next big thing. What if the next Silicon Valley is not a place, but a platform?

> FIND OUT HOW TO RAISE FUNDS ON FUNDERBEAM.COM, OR WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW: