Crowdfunding

Expanding, renovating, or starting something new? Get your customers involved!

With our crowdfunding tool built for brick and mortars, easily activate and grow your core group of supporters.

The Third Place helps you offer perks that set up brick and mortars for long-term success

House accounts

Events

Reward redemptions

Physical products

House account perks

Reward contributors with a house account and pre-loaded credits that can be used at your space.

Unlike gift cards, which strains cash flow if everyone redeems at once, house accounts let you distribute credits over time (e.g. $50 every quarter for 4 quarters).

Best of all, if your guests use up all their credits, they can seamlessly pay the difference with a card on file.

Events for contributors

Memorable events make great rewards. To run them well, you'll need more than the list of contributors. The Third Place helps collect RSVPs, plus-ones, dietary and special requests, all in one.

If the event is open to the public, you can even sell the extra tickets without having to manage a separate guest list.

Perk redemptions

Your rewards should help guests keep coming back. The Third Place makes it easy to offer perks that can be redeemed multiple times, without the headaches of manual spreadsheets.

Contributors can track their perks in their own portal, too.

Physical products as rewards

You can offer physical products for pick-up, local delivery or shipping. Our fulfillment dashboard keeps you organized.

For perishable products, you can open up a few pre-selected delivery days for guests to choose from.

You can even reward a recurring subscription. For example, contributors can become members of a monthly beverage club, and receive complimentary access during the first year.

Your supporters spend more, bring their friends and loved ones, and spread the word on your behalf.

No Saint

Carving a place amongst Portland's best new pizzerias. Walking through its doors still feels like showing up to a candlelit dinner party hosted by owners Gabriella Casabianca and Anthony Siccardi.

They used The Third Place to fund a remodel of the space, including building a six-seat bar, expanding dining room seating, and redesigning the kitchen around a wood-burning oven.

Reward tiers

House account with quarterly credit distributions
Branded tote bag
Branded hat
Branded wine key
Prepaid buyout

Potential New Boyfriend

Rated “one of the best wine bars to open in the South in the past several years,” PNB began as a cult-favorite ice cream pop-up in Asheville.

When the owner, Disco, set out to bring his full vision of a hi-fi listening bar with wine and dessert to life, he turned to The Third Place to crowdfund for the concept, and then launched a membership program prior to opening.

Reward tiers

House account with preloaded credits
Branded T-shirt
Custom-scent candle
Invitation with plus-one to opening party
Invitation to album listening party, guest chef's dinner
Private ice-cream-making class
Prepaid after-hours private party

Launch a crowdfunding campaign with The Third Place

Best of all, when the fundraising concludes, you can convert your campaign into a membership sign-up to continue building deep relationships with guests.

Nothing is cookie cutter here. Your goals, your story, your voice.

We help you build a crowdfunding page that translates your vision, brand, and fundraising goals into a layout and reward tiers that are optimized for contribution.

Enjoy the best-in-class restaurant email and text platform built-in

Our Marketing Companion lets you send announcements, updates, and personalized thank-yous. This sets in motion your Customer Database, which can grow with you well after your campaign.

Pricing

5% of the funds raised*

Flexible fundraising. You do not need to meet a fixed goal to get your funds.

*A payment processing fee of 2.9% + 30¢ also applies.

Ready to use a crowdfunding solution built for brick-and-mortar businesses?

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Your guide to brick-and-mortar crowdfunding

Have questions that we didn't answer here? We're always one call away!

Let's talk

What makes you different from platforms like Kickstarter?

Brick-and-mortars have specific needs that general-purpose crowdfunding tools like Kickstarter does not support, for instance, less than 5% of projects on Kickstarter are for brick and mortars. This is for a few reasons:

Low chance of success: only 1 in 4 projects under food and beverage actually get funded. In contrast, The Third Place uses a flexible funding model so any amount you raise will go to you.
Minimum support for fulfilling rewards: Kickstarter simply provides you a list of funders and their reward tiers and you need to figure out the rest. The Third Place has tools that help you manage and track reward redemption that you can continue to use for other purposes long after your campaign.

Why should I run a crowdfunding campaign instead of only using traditional financing?

Crowdfunding should be a portion of a restaurant's overall financing. Anywhere from 10-150k is a great supplement to traditional financing options. Plus it's a way to get your customers involved in your journey and to create excitement and word-of-mouth around your launch.