Now for the rest of New Perspective Café’s crowdfunding story…
As their locations are campus focused, the team at New Perspectives Café expects members to be mostly students and faculty, plus some alumni. As such, they created rewards with a broad appeal. “Some will join just for 10% off their orders, while people who want to be a part of something bigger will appreciate their picture on the nostalgia wall, and others might just want access to unique prizes and giveaways.”
Most donation-based crowdfunding sites offer tiered rewards, something New Perspectives Café considered. As they view all their members as VIPs who will be spending a lot of time around each other, they wanted to avoid a hierarchy. Further, a broader voter base gives them more buyers to base decisions off of.
Despite the ambition of a member-led concept, this will not be the wild, wild west. The company’s operations and culinary team will provide members with a wide range of options for each decision. That ensures each new offering can be executed within the shop and will appeal to a broad section of membership. They will also be measuring how closely member votes correlate with consumer preference to improve the concept over time.
If investment crowdfunding were legal today, Jon said he “would absolutely be interested. Members are investing their faith in us. Because this is food service, we are lucky to have valuable, tangible rewards. While we believe we thought of great prizes we ultimately would prefer to offer monetary rewards. Hopefully investment crowdfunding and monetary payments to investors will come to fruition soon.”
To learn more about the New Perspectives Café membership drive visit their website or their Facebook page. Jon also encourages readers to visit the more traditional crowdfunding platforms “to see lots of great projects that deserve to be funded”. Cheers to that!
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