Fundraising Best Practices and Key Ingredients for Success

16 April, 2021

You and your team have worked for months to develop a sure-fire, can’t miss project that will change the world. The problem is, you need to raise a lot of money and to do that, you’ll need to convince a room full of skeptical investors of the merits of your project.

Key Ingredients for Fundraising Success

A fundraising presentation proposal requires a rigorous due diligence process. Your team must assemble a host of documents, many of which will undergo analytical review and multiple updates. Among the likely document categories:

  • Investment Objective and Strategy
  • Market Conditions and Competitive Environment
  • Background Information on the proposed Management Team
  • Investment, Withdrawal and Transfer Procedures and Limitations
  • Risk Factors
  • Tax Issues and Legal Considerations
  • Conflicts of Interest, Management Fees and Expenses

Effective management of the due diligence process is crucial. The four key ingredients for success are Organization, Collaboration, Confidentiality and Speed. The good news is that ShareVault software has the ingredients you need.

Instant Organization

ShareVault is an online platform for deal-making. Your team accesses an ultra-secure Virtual Data Room (VDR) where you will develop your proposal. The fastest way to proceed is to start with a ShareVault Due Diligence Checklist, which provides a built-in system for file organization. The Due Diligence Checklist uses “Hierarchical Tags”, which work like folders but have the added benefit of faster tracing of a document that appears in multiple folders.

Once the folders are named, ShareVault’s intuitively designed software allows fast customization of your folders:

  • Drag-and-Drop Editing: Reorder files tags and documents within a folder with a simple mouse movement
  • Index Auto-Numbering: Add or delete documents and numbering automatically adjusts
  • Smart Filters: Speed search by using filters, like Recent, File Type, Read/Unread, Published By
  • Zoomable Thumbnails: Zoom into the first page of a document to gauge its relevance
  • Seamless Integration: ShareVault works with multiple file-sharing applications, including DropBox, SharePoint, OneDrive and DocuSign
  • Built-in Auditing: ShareVault’s Page-level Tracking provides an audit of user interaction, reporting date/time, activity, group, user or tag. Results can be shown as a scrollable list of events or a graphical timeline.

Fast and Efficient Collaboration

ShareVault’s VDR can readily accommodate participation from dozens of collaborators, both on-site and remote. Based on a rigorous set of user permissions, your team and your collaborating attorneys, auditors, analysts, and consultants can review materials safely and securely. This includes collaboration with remote parties, who can join in from any device, anywhere, anytime, to view and add or remove documents, analytics and data.

Bank-grade Security to Control and Monitor Access

ShareVault’s VDR is designed to provide maximum security through the due diligence process. Only a user with the proper password authentication has access. As the due diligence process proceeds, your proposal is protected by multiple security features:

  • Define which users have access to specific folders and whether the user can print or save. Team leaders can enhance security by selecting a two-step verification of a user’s log-in
  • Restrict access by IP address and computer and the ability to set a user’s access expiration date
  • Ability to remotely “shred” documents, even after they’ve been downloaded
  • Through ShareVault’s partnership with DocuSign, a user can sign and transmit a document without leaving the VDR’s ultra-secure environment

Files posted to a ShareVault VDR are ultra-secure:

  • Files at rest are encrypted with AES-256
  • File connections are via HTTPS over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), providing AES-256 encryption in transit
  • ShareVault’s security is backed by multiple certifications, including SOC 1/2/3, PCI, ISO 90001 / 27001 / 27017 / 27018, FedRAMP Moderate, DoD CC SRG IL2, HIPAA, and HITRUST

Speedy Due Diligence Process

ShareVault integrates multiple software technologies that can dramatically improve the speed of development. Unlike other VDRs, ShareVault’s software does not require a plug-in to display documents in a secure environment. Users, both on-site and remote, can view documents immediately.

Additional ShareVault document viewing technology features that improve the speed of your fundraising proposal:

  • Batch download and print of large numbers of documents
  • Fast and smooth continuous document scrolling
  • The ability to “skim” through multiple pages of a document, as versus the traditional click-each-page-to-proceed process
  • Inter-document hyperlinking, that allows a user to click a link to another document
  • A secure spreadsheet viewer that displays Excel files in the user’s browser
  • A secure audio/video player that uses Apple’s HLS live-stream video protocols

A Faster and Better Presentation

The value of ShareVault software doesn’t end with the development of your fundraising proposal: it also speeds presentation to your target audience of investors. ShareVault’s built-in security measures continue to protect your deal room even when your investor audience is joining from a platform of unknown security quality.

24-hour Support

ShareVault knows that with a deal on the line, time is everything. That’s why ShareVault provides round-the-clock support from our IT team, who can answer questions and resolve issues quickly and efficiently.

Final Words

The value of a great M&A team is their ability to examine, analyze, evaluate and recommend. ShareVault’s VDR deal rooms allow a team to focus on that value, without cumbersome and time-consuming document processing or concerns about security.

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LEARN MORE:

Fundraising

M&A Due Diligence Checklist

Investor Presentation Software

Features