Communicating an investment product is a little bit different from communication around other services. But we have spent over a decade talking about investments - and have worked on raises with a large number of councils since 2020, and we have learned quite a lot about how best to communicate your investment to the public.

Before you get started on your own programme of investments, it is helpful to have the following principles in mind. It will help you to build your key messaging and comms plans in line with best practice and the experience of other councils, and help you ensure expectations are set correctly with all internal stakeholders.

The first few raises are about building awareness

Residents will not be expecting you to offer an investment, so you need to build awareness through your comms that will convert to investors over the first few raises. This can mean it feels ‘hard’ initially, while we build the latent awareness of your investment in the community to enable growth to become more organic and make it easier to recruit investors.

In financial services, it takes a few mentions before people click

People do not typically buy an investment the first time they hear about it. They need to hear about it a few times, ideally through different channels, to engage. This will be an important element of your communications planning.

You will probably reach people who are already engaged with you first

It is quite unlikely that a resident will go from disengaged -> investor in a single step. They early raises are therefore about communicating what you are doing to engaged groups, before broadening out to less engaged residents.

People invest at their own pace

Not everyone in your community will engage in the first raise. This might be because of timing (not everyone has money available to invest all the time), or simply because some are waiting to see evidence of the scheme delivering before they commit. This is why it is useful to offer multiple tranches over time, to allow as many people as possible to participate.

You won’t get loads of local investors straight away

You will typically see 20 - 75 local investors in your first raise, representing 10 - 20% of funds raised. The rest of the investment will be made by the existing Abundance community.

Momentum will vary through your raise period

We typically see brisker pace at the start and the end of your raise windows, with slower momentum in the middle phases. This is what we have typically seen, and there is also variance caused by macro factors - such as time of year, holiday periods, and bigger political factors such as budget announcements and other financial policy decisions. The Abundance team can help you to understand any factors that might be affecting your raise during the process.