It's hardly doomed to failure given that it has already been a success, allowing the club to borrow funds from the pool when it was needed. Even if we don't raise another penny, having that line of credit available to club of our size is pretty important.
It might not be as large a pool as we hoped, but that is mostly down to the lack of business investors rather than individuals. From what I understand, the Board and the Society are working on ways to address that include offering businesses alternatives to 'Well Society investment.
I think we should have been pursing that approach anyway, in parallel to the Society. Derek Weir talked to this point at the last Society meeting.