Last week we officially completed our crowd equity raise via the CSF platform Birchal. The campaign proved a great success, attracting the attention of 431 investors. Together they invested $750,000, hitting the maximum subscription target in just 8 days!
The success of the raise supports the founding Directors Jonathan and Gerald’s long-standing hypothesis: Australians have an enormous appetite for investing in renewables and community-scale solar.
How do you run a crowd equity campaign?
This raise ran off the back of months of planning and coordination from our project team. It started with content strategy by Ash B Content, Design by Sandcastle Designs and the production of an awesome campaign video by GoodchatTV from January to April.
The campaign opened to EOIs for three weeks during May, in which time we quickly attracted a keen audience from across Australia and internationally. During this period the team worked furiously to finalise the Offer Document, hosting investor webinars and building the Grong Grong Solar Farm investor community. This meant once the raise went live it was a fast and furious process!
Now, our work has culminated in an impressive list of campaign achievements, including:
- 744 EOI submissions during our 3-week EOI campaign
- A 12% conversion rate from those who viewed our Birchal landing page (and video) to submitting an EOI – normally 5% is good, and 8% is excellent – Birchal reported this is one of the highest figures they have seen. It was great to get such a positive response from our landing page content and campaign video efforts
- When our raise went live, we hit $100,000 in 10 minutes
- We reached our $250,000 minimum in 80 minutes
- We reached our $750,000 maximum in 8 days
These 431 investors join our seed investors in becoming the 90% owners and shareholders of Australia’s first crowd-equity funded and owned solar farm. It is our hope that the Grong Grong Solar Farm will be the blueprint for plenty of future green crowd-sourced funding projects.
What comes after financing?
The onboarding of our investors is now being finalised. With material price hikes and long lead times on some items, the success of this campaign represents a huge win for the Grong Grong Solar Farm. Our team has already begun to finalise negotiations on key supply contracts such as the transformer and inverter, trackers and solar panels.
As the AEMO calls for more investment in renewables, Grong Grong Solar Farm has shown a new model for investment in community scale solar storage. There is no doubt that the Grong Grong Solar Farm will not be the last project of this nature and we cannot wait to watch and support the growth of the community sector.