Ulule

Brings good ideas to life

Thursday 8 June 2017, by Carmen Mingueza, Judith Pont

0 inspired

A. The main facts about the activities of the company.

Ulule is a Crowdfunding platform that was founded in January of 2010 by Alexandre Boucherot y Thomas Grange in Paris (France). After its web launch in October 2010, 28.987 creative, supportive and innovative projects have been funded thanks to the support of Internet users around the world.

Crowdfunding is an alternative method to raise funds to bring projects and ideas to real life. Crowdfunding is an innovative concept that is becoming a very popular way to create startups, to finance creative or social projects, and it’s also a useful method to test the chance that a product or service has enough acceptation in the market.

The Ulule’s main function is to facilitate monetary resources between the public and the project creator, a new financing model, which complements traditional investment ways. This company offers personal advice and a personalized follow-up to the project creators and its team assesses. Ulule has raised funds for different kind of projects such as short films, recording of albums, ecologic projects, humanitarian missions, comics projects, technology projects and related with food or fashion; you can find an enormous variety of projects.

People from all over the world can contribute to their projects, regardless the age or nationality. Everyone can create an account with Ulule to exchange ideas with the community, discover projects and be part of this network. To create a project with Ulule advice you must be of legal age and have a bank account. Creating an account with Ulule is completely free.

The fundraising campaigns of each project have a maximum of 90 days. Ulule charges a commission rate only for the sums collected by projects that have successfully reached their funding objective. No commission is applied if ever a project does not reach its objective. Ulule’s commission for successful projects that collect money in another currency than euro is 6.67%

Finally, to get funds for your project you must achieve your objective, otherwise, the money will be refunded to those who have contributed on your project.

B. The Ethical challenges this company is addressing.

All the projects that Ulule work with must meet the ethic requirements included in the company’s mission, such as not harming the environment, providing some added value to society, avoiding racism, violence and hate actions.

Ulule does not provide help to those projects which don’t take care of our planet being sustainability, respecting our society and taking care of the environment.

Moreover, this platform refunds the money to those contributors who have invested money in projects that finally do not work. With this, what Ulule is doing is to make people trust on it, because even the project does not achieve the funds as an objective, contributors won’t waste money.

To sum up, projects accepted by this crowdfunding platform must reflect the company’s mission and be ethical with our planet and our society. Furthermore, Ulule does not try to take advantage of people who want to be part of its network.

C. What makes you believe this company is really ethical and why you trust it?

The reason that make us believe that this company is completely ethical is because they refuse projects which meet certain conditions such as:

•Projects that have no fun of political parties, ideological movements, religions or sects.

•Projects whose intentions or outcomes are racist, violent, abusive, defamatory, revisionist, apologist for war crimes, or paedophilic.

•Projects that incite murder, suicide, discrimination or hate.

•Projects that could cause physical harm to the project owner or project donors.

•Projects which content borrows copyrighted work without permission

•Projects that do not have an outcome that is artistic, community-minded, or for betterment of society and without community-based strategy.

Ulule will approve all projects that not contain any of these characteristics, but meet the company’s mission conditions.

Another reason that make us trust on their way of work is that launching your project with this platform means getting benefits of this experience, thanks to the expertise as a graphic, artists, developers, legal experts and so on..

Ulule is more than only a “crowdfunding platform”. It is much of the interaction will take place before the search for funding even begins. From them, you can get advices, exchange TIPS, drum up support, etc.

Furthermore, here you have attached two projects carried out by Ulule that have impressed us the most:

The first project is called “Refugees 4 Refugees”

This project seeks to create an organisation that addresses the needs and concerns of refugees, while also encouraging other refugees to get involved in their work. In addition, the NGO provides assistance to people still living in Syria, and has begun collecting clothing and toys to send to refugee camps in the region.

The second project is called “Five days to dance”

“If people can dance together, people can live together”. This project consists on picking up a group of teenagers who have five days to get on stage and dance. Dance allows these young people to break off with their social roles when their lives are becoming entrenched. While these teenagers are communicating each other, are becoming equal as persons. This project is using dance as a common language between people.

D.The possible challenges facing the company in the future and how you think this company may improve.

Unfortunately, crowdfunding is a new system, so is a bit difficult to make all people know about this kind of financing and it generates two problems.

The first problem is that sometimes it is difficult to find companies that wanted to collaborate, because they don’t see entirely clear what these companies do.

The second problem is we have to educate consumers to use crowdfunding, because it is something that people do not know and it is not common, such as borrow a loan.

Therefore, Ulule would have to invest more money to make this kind of funding known. But in the way of explaining what’s crowdfunding in general and what’s their advantage in relation of the competence. In our case, they have a strong feelings towards financial social, ethical or humanitarian projects and also guide participants about how to use the platform

Finally, in Spain, there is a huge presence of a crowdfunding company called Verkami. This crowdfunding platform is more consolidated and known than Ulule. Therefore, since Ulule is a French company and it is expanding, they would also take marketing campaigns in the foreign countries to make themselves more known.

* Verikami is a crowdfunding platform for creatives projects. It’s an alternative to finance artists, designers, creators etc.

Bibliography

https://es.ulule.com/
https://www.owler.com/iaApp/127035/ulule-company-profile?onBoardingComplete=true
http://www.infocrowdsourcing.com/plataformas/crowdfunding-ulule/

Location: Paris (France)

Sector: Financial and insurance activities

Official website: https://es.ulule.com/

Key figures:

Annual revenue:3,2 m $
Nº of employees: 118
Countries of operations: Spain, Italy, France, Belgium and The Netherlands.

Nbr. visits: 432