Whip-round for a skyscraper

The secret is 'crowdfunding'. How does it work? Crowdfunding is a means of raising finance for projects by a community. It has been gaining in popularity ever since the internet first took off. Kickstarter is the most popular portal that has been set up for raising such funds. The service has been operating since 2008 and its guiding concept is simple: if you have a brilliant idea, share it with other internet users. If you manage to convince them that it is worth investing in, you can count on their money. The proposed schemes vary widely in value: from a single dollar to a few thousand. People who opt for financing a chosen project can receive returns on their investment in a variety of forms, or none at all - small amounts are sometimes paid for with the word ?thank you'. Does crowdfunding actually work? Of course it does. Kickstarter has enabled game and film creators as well as young designers to raise funds for their projects - from several thousand to as much as several million dollars. How can you get the best out of Kickstarter? In most cases it is necessary to involve the local community - people who want to support an interesting or worthwhile idea. This was the method that Tim O'Connor used to save his cinema, Catlow Theater in Barrington, Illinois.

This highly atmospheric 85-year-old cinema is the antithesis of cold, modern multiplexes, and is marked out by its superb interior. Tim O'Connor and his partner found themselves needing USD 100,000 to exchange their old film projector for a digital one. Without this the cinema would have ceased to function as the Hollywood studios gradually phased out the distribution of films on traditional reels. And the campaign worked!

A total of 1,394 people in the l ocal community raised more than USD 175,000 and the Catlow Theater survived.
Could crowdfunding catch on when it comes to the real estate market? After all, just building a small office facility can require a dozen or so million dollars. So far no real estate schemes have appeared on Kickstarter. But crowdfunding is not only restricted to this particular service. Colombian company FiDi Global has also used crowdfunding as its basic source of financing - and it has turned out to be very effective. The company has already developed a number of projects this way: hotels, fun parks, clubs and shopping centres. And this is not all. The company has followed this up with an ambitious project: it is now building a 66-storey skyscraper in the centre of Bogotá with an estimated investment cost of USD 240 mln. The building, which has been called BD Bacatá, should be completed in 2014, when it will become the highest skyscraper in Colombia. It will also be the first skyscraper in the world to have been financed by the contributions of individual Colombians. Everyone can become a shareholder by way of purchasing a ?FiDi' share in the project. Sceptics will inevitably claim that this can't work. Perhaps not, but... FiDi Global has just announced that over 3,000 people have already decided to get involved in this atypical project, and the company has now raised more than USD 145 mln through their contributions. Of course, nothing comes for free. FiDi Global preceded this ambitious scheme with a large-scale campaign: publicity about the skyscraper was splashed all over the TV, radio, the press and the internet. It also focused on attracting the interest of the local community, erecting a pavilion on the site of the project for the marketing of their idea. It also has to be remembered that the company did not appear out of the blue and has already carried out a few smaller projects under the same format. Crowdfunding is such a new phenomenon that in most countries it has yet to be regulated. And this is exactly where its strength lies. Could it be possible to finance projects in this way in Warsaw or Prague? It's worth thinking about.