Getting your crowd-funding project off the ground

8 October 2019 by Leave a comment

Lauren GawneLauren Gawne is a David Myers Research Fellow at La Trobe University. Her research focuses on grammar and gesture in Tibetan languages of Nepal. She is one half of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics, with Gretchen McCulloch. You can find bonus episodes on Patreon, and they also have a range of stylish merch. Lauren also runs the blog Superlinguo and By Lingo for The Big Issue (Australia).

She tweets from @superlinguo, and through the Lingthusiasm Twitter account, @lingthusiasm. Her ORCID is: 0000-0003-4930-4673.

Lingthusiasm banner | Image courtesy of Lauren Gawne.

Crowdfunding a project is a great way for your research, or research communication, to connect with a wider audience. Sometimes, it’s the only way to make a project happen if it doesn’t fit into traditional funding models.

Crowd-funding can also support projects that are joyful or beautiful, which are not standard grant metrics. Crowd-funding is not a panacea for the continued shortfall in government and philanthropic funding, but it is an exciting tool for research.

Jonathan has already written a great introduction to patronage as a funding model. This could be a one-off campaign on Kickstarter or Pozible, or a monthly subscription type project through platforms like Patreon or Substack. If you have an idea for a project, this post has some advice for how to think about setting up a crowd-funded project. The patronage model isn’t for everyone, but I’ve enjoyed learning how to run a project in a way that draws on business planning as well as the usual project planning that I do as an academic.  Read more of this post

Filed under funding, Research communication Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Worth more than money

5 August 2014 by 8 Comments

Power Ranger for sale (Photo by Peter Dutton: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik)

Power Ranger for sale (Photo by Peter Dutton: https://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik)

At the moment, there isn’t a lot of glory for an academic in crowdfunding.

If you want to get promoted at a university, you need to secure funding from one of the key funding bodies in your country (the National Science Foundation in the USA, for example, or one of the Research Councils if you are in the UK, Canada, or Australia).

There is this dodgy hierarchy of funding with one or two national funding schemes at the top, followed by other national funding, then by other government funding, then industry/philanthropic funding (depending on your discipline). In that hierarchy, crowdfunding sits somewhere down the bottom, as a type of philanthropic funding.

Crowdfunding is a lot of work, and it isn’t work that most researchers are familiar with. It takes most people into areas where they may not be comfortable. At its heart, crowdfunding is a funding campaign and the two key tools are Facebook and Twitter. Not everybody wants to take their professional identity into Facebook. They might prefer to keep it as a personal realm (despite the fact that work leaks in). While they might be happy to build a professional identity on Twitter, for most academics this is new territory. Unsettling new territory.

The point of a funding campaign is to ask for money. That’s what the ‘funding’ bit means.

While academics are generally good at promoting their research, they aren’t good at asking their friends and family to give them money to fund their research. Often, they don’t understand why anyone would want to fund their work. They like it, and they see the benefit in it, but they’ve spent the better part of their lives explaining to Uncle Ted ‘exactly what is it that you do, again?’.

Given that most crowdfunding campaigns start by mobilising personal networks, that means not just explaining to Uncle Ted what the work is, but asking Uncle Ted to put his hand in his pocket and donate to it, and have him then tell all his friends to do the same. A lot of people feel uncomfortable about that.

I don’t shy away from these topics when encouraging people to try crowdfunding, which may explain why I haven’t had any takers at my university yet. Perhaps I should try to emphasize the positive side of a crowdfunding campaign. There are lots of positives to emphasise.

Read more of this post

Filed under funding, Networking Tagged with , , , , ,

Crowdfunding your research

8 October 2013 by 2 Comments

Dear researcher

Thank you very much for sending through your funding proposal. You mentioned that you are trying to obtain corporate sponsorship for this project. That is excellent, and you should continue.

You might also like to think about using a crowdfunding service. Crowdfunding allows you to raise funds from the public. It isn’t for everybody and it is a lot of work but I think that it might suit your project.

To this end, I’ve done a quick analysis of your project’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) that might help you to decide if you want to try to raise funds this way. I hope that you find it useful. Let me know if you want to go ahead.

Before I begin, I should make it clear that everything that follows is just my opinion. It’s early days for crowdfunding, and I don’t have any working experience with it yet. Read more of this post

Filed under funding Tagged with , , , ,

Deakin’s crowdfunding success

2 July 2013 by 15 Comments

Sophie counting out Chinese money in to piles of 100 Yuan bills

After the heist, by Jonathan O’Donnell on Flickr

Over the last two months, I’ve been watching Deakin University’s venture into crowdfunding research. It has been an exciting and very successful initiative.

Deakin University is based in Australia, so they worked with an Australian crowdfunding platform, Pozible, to make this happen. In May-June 2013, Deakin ran eight funding campaigns through Pozible.

Six of the eight exceeded their targets!

Pozible is an ‘all or nothing’ crowdfunding platform, so the projects that didn’t succeed won’t get anything at all. The others will get about 93% of the contributions after transaction fees are deducted.

Here is a breakdown of the numbers. The two projects marked ‘N/A’ did not reach their target, and so raised no funds at all.

Table 1: Deakin University fundraising on Pozible, June 2013.
Project title Raised Supporters $ / person
‘Caching’ in on game play N/A 42 N/A
Healthy gigglers $12,832 45 $285.16
Mighty maggots v flesh nom bugs $9,970 129 $77.29
Discovering Papua New Guinea’s mountain mammals $21,913 298 $73.53
Retake Melbourne $6,417 68 $94.37
How salty is your seafood? N/A 11 N/A
Would you like seaweed with that? $5,435 88 $61.76
Voyages of discovery $5,005 41 $122.07
Total raised $61,572

I love what Deakin has done! When I saw what they were trying to do, my initial reaction was “Why didn’t I think of that?”. I have been trying to convince individuals at my university to try crowdfunding, without any success. By taking an institutional approach, Deakin were able to get more traction.

READ MORE

Filed under Be strategic, funding, Networking Tagged with , , ,

Kickstarter vs. the National Science Foundation

19 June 2012 by 10 Comments

A hologram of a lightbulb

Detail from ‘Parade of Holonzki’ by Ingo Maurer and Eckard Knuth.

What is Kickstarter?

Kickstarter (USA), Pozible (Australia), Fondomat (Czech Republic), Sponsume (European Union), Peerbackers (worldwide) and a host of other crowdfunding solutions provide platforms where people can solicit funds for projects. There are specialised crowdfunding platforms for music, education (Funding4Learning), and even for research and invention (Rockethub). Anyone can contribute to the projects, and it often takes more than 1,000 contributors to provide $10 – $50 each before a project is fully funded.

It is a bit unfair to compare the National Science Foundation (NSF) to Kickstarter. One has an established proven model to “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense”. The other provides a new, disruptive model that is yet to demonstrate its resilience. Still, that’s what I’m going to do. I want shine a light on Kickstarter, throwing it’s shadow in stark relief against the edifice of the National Science Foundation.

Kickstarter is seen as a leader in this emerging field, in part because one project, the Pebble watch, has attracted more than $10,000,000 in funding. Ten million dollars… that’s serious money! Especially considering that they were asking for a budget of $100,000 to start with. While Pebble is an outlier, there are at least five other projects that have attracted over a million dollars. In 2011, Kickstarter funded almost 12,000 projects.

At a very basic level, the two models are not that different. Both provide funding for projects based on feedback from external people. Beyond that, everything else differs: the underlying idea; the way that you pitch your idea; the assessment process; the budget and the grant that you finally get.

The idea is different

The idea behind Kickstarter is different to funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation. You can see this clearly in the way that they describe themselves:

With an annual budget of about $6.9 billion (FY 2010), we [the National Science Foundation] are the funding source for approximately 20 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America’s colleges and universities. In many fields such as mathematics, computer science and the social sciences, NSF is the major source of federal backing. (About the National Science Foundation)

Kickstarter is not trying to fund basic research. It is trying to fund creativity.

Kickstarter is focused on creative projects. We’re a great way for artists, filmmakers, musicians, designers, writers, illustrators, explorers, curators, performers, and others to bring their projects, events, and dreams to life. (Kickstarter Basics)

READ MORE

Filed under funding Tagged with , , , , ,