August 19 was a sad day for the group of entrepreneurs and investors that lobbied hard for nearly two years to pass intrastate crowdfunding in the state of North Carolina.

Political jockeying doomed the bill despite its nearly unanimous approval in the House in 2013. Legislators thought it could help other economic development measures pass the Senate and the full legislature, so they entwined crowdfunding with various bills throughout the legislative session, to an ultimate failure. 

WRAL TechWire coverage of crowdfunding:

  • Backers must reboot after key legislative election defeat
  • GroundFloor widens range of investment offerings
  • Prediction: Crowdfunding bill defeat is bad news for state
  • Crowdfunding bill fails after getting caught up in broader economic incentive debtate

The same day, national headline-grabbing real estate crowdlending startup Groundfloor decided to move its operations to Atlanta. Though Groundfloor’s cofounders said the bill’s failure didn’t prompt the move, intrastate crowdfunding is already happening in Georgia and investors and developers there were Groundfloor’s earliest adopters. 

Professional lobbyist and political campaigner Jeff Tippett attributes the bill’s failure to the lack of an organized grassroots organization representing the growing community of entrepreneurs in the state and lobbying for the issues most important to them. 

So he’s kicking off a new effort with a lobbying campaign called Raise the Capital, aimed to pass crowdfunding during the 2015 legislative session. But his bigger vision is to gather and unify entrepreneurs around the state around any issue in which government could impede or spark growth. 

“When we rally around crowdfunding this year and get the changes we want, in 2016, there is going to be something else that we need,” he says. “And when bills go to Congress, (legislators) will want to know what entrepreneurs think across the state just like they do the Chamber of Commerce.”

Read more details at ExitEvent.

(Note: ExitEvent is a news partner of WRAL TechWire.)