We are really excited about the ECS Virtual Soup project, and we think you will be to. It was created to help raise awareness to our members projects and actions and help them win some very valuable resources, including cash, to help launch programs.
The practice of hosting Community Soups has been around for a minute, and have always been exciting and fun ways to help raise resources for start-ups. They are very fun, effective, and inspire quick action to help you launch an new endeavor or support one that already exists.
You will need to create a 5 minute video that introduces the viewer to you and your project. Let them know who you project benefits and why it should be funded. You video will be viewed by many and they will vote up your idea if they think that it should be funded. So we suggest that you encourage your friends and supporters to vote up your video. Each person only gets one vote, but they can purchase additional votes for just a dollar each and use then where ever they like. 25% of that dollar is automatically distributed to the vote getter and 50% goes into “The Winners Pot”, the remaining 25% will be retained by ECS to help continue our programs.
We will host the Virtual Soup contest monthly with the top two presenters moving on semi-finals. So that after 5 months there will be 10 presenters going into the semi-finals round of voting. We will take the top 5 vote getters from this round and they will automatically get all the money accumulated for that round. There is no telling how much this will be. All depends on how the community reacts to it and how much support you gain during your presentation.
Each round of voting last for 3 weeks.
After the preliminary round, and semi-finals round we will start up the second preliminary round and start the process all over again and after the second Semi-final round we will host the FINALS round with the ten presenters, 5 from each semi-final round, going into the finals.
At this point you can either share new video or use the one that you already presented when you entered the contest. Either way this video will also only be 5 minutes long.
At the end of the Virtual Soup Final there will be 1 ECS Virtual Soup Fund Raiser winner that walks away with the 25% of money that they gathered during the three rounds of voting, and 50% of ALL the money gathered during this fund raiser.
Virtual Soups are about much more than the funds you raise. While participating in this contest you will also be sharing your ideas with the ECS community and our professional partners and sponsors. You will be attracting many new people to your project. These are people who will most likely want to participate with your project in some other way. Possibly funding, but more likely in the area of organizational support.
How ever you slice it, our goal is create powerful fundraising tool to help support our members and their visions to create sustainable projects that have the resources they need to succeed.
Much love and much love!
Soup’s On for the first every ECS Virtual Soup in the Spring of 2024.