Yes! Your New Nonprofit Should Do a Crowdfunding Campaign To Raise Money!

Crowdfunding campaigns are all the rage among entrepreneurs, creatives and innovators.  They’re funding everything from creative projects on Kickstarter to crowdfunding for personal events or causes on GoFundMe.

So why shouldn’t mission-driven innovators jump on the trend?

Well, they are doing just that, and there is literally a whole industry of online platforms that have emerged to help them.  

There are even crowdfunding platforms geared specifically for nonprofits, like CauseVox, Classy, StartSomethingGood and GlobalGiving.

In truth, nonprofits have been crowdfunding forever. 

Crowdfunding is really just a method for raising funds from your friends and supporters, and getting them to help you raise more funds from their friends. 

Sound familiar? It’s fundraising, and nonprofits are built on this concept. The difference with crowdfunding is that it’s online. 

Crowdfunding takes a Donation button and turns it viral.

All that sounds great, but when and why should you bother spending your (very limited) time on crowdfunding instead of, for example, pursuing grants?

Online crowdfunding has a lot of benefits that other types of fundraising do not have.

First, online crowdfunding combines fundraising with brand promotion.

Crowdfunding gives your organization a new and exciting way to raise funds, while simultaneously generating buzz, website traffic and media attention for your organization or idea. 

It’s like an email fundraising campaign that has the potential to go viral. Your crowdfunding campaign can be shared, tweeted and blogged about.

This means that your fundraising campaign and your promotion of your brand, mission and organization can feed off each other.  You have an exciting excuse to reach out to your supporters, who can then both donate and post or tweet that they donated.

This raises money, engages your supporters, grows your relationship with your supporters, expands your reach to possible new supporters and raises public awareness all at once!

Second, online crowdfunding is built for new ideas that don’t yet have a proven track record.

Crowdfunding is especially great for new nonprofits, including those that are still just in the idea phase without a proven track record or those that haven’t gotten their 501c3 status yet. 

It can be difficult to raise funds through traditional methods at this stage.  Foundations, government and corporate sponsors generally expect you to have a track record of success and your 501c3 status before they’ll even consider you.

But if you’re just starting out with a new and exciting idea, then you’re a visionary without a track record.

Crowdfunding is literally built to support unproven innovators.  It removes traditional institutional gatekeepers (the grant-makers) and replaces them with a method of accessing a lot of little donations.  

Even if you’re unsure about your new idea, crowdfunding can be a great way to market test a new project or program idea.

People are very used to giving money to crowdfunding campaigns without expecting any tax deduction. 

Many crowdfunding platforms even have other rewards built right into them. This gives you the opportunity to be creative with those rewards and use them as opportunities to engage your supporters more.

And, if your crowdfunding campaign is successful, and you carry out the funded project, then you have the beginnings of a proven track record! 

Crowdfunding can even be seen as a step towards readiness for other types of fundraising.  It gives you evidence of supporters, proof of engagement, and project funding.

Remember, all nonprofit fundraising pitches are meant to be expressed as an opportunity to partner with your organization to make a difference. Crowdfunding is just a new and innovative way of doing this.