Fundraising

The purpose of fundraising is to get the money to develop our technology. Although our start-up capital was 2,900 CNY at the beginning, these funds were still not enough to carry out the scientific research activities of our wet lab, so we decided to customize 5 different exquisite pendants online and then put them on the market at a reasonable and loss-free price to carry out our scientific research activities with more profitable funds.

Graph 1. Some peripheral products for fundraising activity

After completing the planning of the fundraising activity, firstly we started a face-to-face marketing activity in an office building where our meeting room was located. Each member carried with our peripheral goods as well as team flyers and went to those staff in different offices for promotion and sale. After hearing about our team and our project, many people showed their support and bought our peripheral goods.

Graph 2. We were proposing our project solution and our peripheral products to the staff who was working in the office building

After that, we went to the street and found a spot for selling our goods where some passers seemed interested in our goods. With the practice in the office building, we were quite experienced and enthusiastically talked to the potential buyers for promotion.

Graph 3. We were proposing our project solution and our peripheral products to passers on street

Besides offline charity sales, we also created a WeChat store so that people could easily purchase online. In order to announce this news to more people, we took some photos of our peripheral goods and posted this on our WeChat Official Account, then spread the news. Surprisingly, within two hours, the online sales of products were as high as more than 1,800 CNY, far exceeding our expectations of 1,000 CNY.

Graph 4. Sales promotion on WeChat Official Account
Graph 5. The homepage of our WeChat store

Since we still had some inventory left over, we chose a shopping plaza with a relatively large flow of people and started our sales. Unfortunately, we didn't sell out many peripheral goods probably due to our limited publicity and insufficient preparation work. But we chose to look at this positively, anyway during the communication with our potential buyers we promoted iGEM, our project, and tried our best to dispel the bias that a lot of people had about genetic engineering.

Our offline fundraising activities raised a total of 1182 CNY and our WeChat store has an additional 2135 CNY in sales, and the sales are still going on. Excluding the start-up capital of 2900 CNY, which we applied for at the beginning of the project, so far we made a total profit of 417 CNY. Therefore, we spent another 400 CNY to buy another batch of our most hot item, the keychain, and are ready to continue our selling.