Campaign Success: Charm Impact

Charm Impact is a peer-to-peer impact investment platform empowering individuals to earn financial returns whilst benefiting society. The company is currently live on Crowdcube and has raised over £270k from nearly 550 investors. We spoke with Co-founder and CEO, Gavriel Landau to hear their equity crowdfunding success story.  

How has Charm Impact been funded to date?

To date, Charm has been funded via a combination of boot-strapping and grants that we have been able to secure; this includes two grants from Innovate UK and one from a private foundation.

What attracted Charm Impact to equity crowdfunding?

Equity crowdfunding was quite a strategic decision for us. Some people use crowdfunding to turn customers into shareholders, but we are looking to change shareholders into our customers! Whilst we wanted to run our seed round to fuel our growth, we also were excited by the prospect of curating hundreds of brand champions to help further our cause.

What did you do to prepare for your Crowdcube campaign?

Preparation really was the key to success for the campaign. This included identifying strategic angel investors to act as our anchor/lead investment, refining our messaging to resonate with this audience and informing our existing community what we were doing and how they could get involved! End to end this process took several months allowing time to ensure COVID-19 had not dampened investor appetite.

How much investment did you have pre-aligned before going live?

We had around 60% of our target secured from angels before we announced to our community what we were doing. Honestly, their support was pivotal to the success of the campaign and not to be underestimated!

Did you use any external support services?

One of the challenges from the nature of our work is that we really wanted to highlight the impact that we create through our investments rather than simply talking about the concepts. We enlisted the help of Story By Design, a specialist creative agency that makes inspirational videos to tell impact stories. This became quite a global affair with a videographer in Nigeria, a team in Kenya and a fantastic videographer in London from Lightmill Media – all coordinated by our creative director in Australia! We were thrilled with how the video turned out and have had great feedback. 

What’s been the most challenging part of the process?

The biggest challenge was not knowing what to expect from the crowd once we put it out there! You can test propositions with people, but it really changes the dynamic when you’re asking them to put their money into something. Thankfully we have had a fantastic response so far, and the results have been incredible.

What do you think has been the key to your Crowdcube success?

I think the key was in really taking the time to refine our messaging and think about our audience. We needed to not only hit emotional heartstrings but also demonstrate a clear value proposition and growth prospects to open the purse strings.

What would be your top equity crowdfunding tip?

My top tip would be to really prepare as much as you can in advance, from warming up your investors to prepping media relationships.