Higher Ed Crowdfunding

Grappling with digital disruption in higher ed fundraising.

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The Power of a #Crowdfunding E-Mail

It's one thing to tell project teams that strong e-mail outreach is essential to their success. It's another thing altogether to get them to believe it and act upon it. That's why a good example that clearly demonstrates the potential impact of a single e-mail can be so useful.

Here's one such example: 

To: PA_CASUAL-L

Subject: I challenge you! (Yes, you.)

I hereby challenge all y'all who count yourselves in one or more of the following 10 categories to give a few bucks $<https://crowdfunding.cornell.edu/project/5436cf3f14bdf76c77a7ab9c> to help send a Cornell debate team to the national championships in Alaska in April:

  1.  Any alumni of the University of Alaska at Anchorage, the 2015 host school

  2.  Former members of a high school or college debate team

  3.  People over 6'3"

  4.  Anyone who got into an argument with a loved one today and lost because of faulty logic

  5.  Anyone wearing braids today

  6.  Anyone wearing anything velvet today (!)

  7.  Anyone with a standing desk

  8.  People with the initials CE or LH or ZZ or JC

  9.  Anyone who has ever had their driver's license suspended

  10. Anyone who just wants to support the development and celebration of high-caliber debate!

Wouldn't it be cool if we, as an AAD staff cadre, were able to at least double the number of donors to this good cause? (Right now, there are only 10 donors!)

If you do make a gift, whatever the size, please reply to this email and let us know. Let's get this started!

https://crowdfunding.cornell.edu/project/5436cf3f14bdf76c77a7ab9c

Best wishes,

Emily

This e-mail was sent to a departmental list-serv at Cornell earlier this week. It's not a pure peer-to-peer e-mail, since it's being distributed through a list-serv rather than being sent by an individual to an individual, but it has a peer-to-peer flavor in that the author clearly knows many of the people who will be receiving it well. There are several elements of the e-mail that are worth highlighting.

The author is direct about the fact that she is asking people to give to the project.

However, she expresses the request in terms of a challenge that is interesting, entertaining, and interactive. Does this category refer to me? Yes? Oh, ok, it does, so will I accept the challenge? And the categories are written with insider knowledge. She's calling people out, but in a gentle and humorous way that lets people remain anonymous.

It really worked. We can directly connect this single e-mail with 15 gifts that totaled $510.

Turning this e-mail into a literal template wouldn't work. However, using it as a conceptual template -- making your outreach as interesting as possible and showing that you know the people and/or the community that you're trying to engage -- is a very good idea. The right approach may vary considerably from person to person, project to project, and audience to audience. But this example makes it very clear that in the right context, a single e-mail can make a tangible difference to a crowdfunding project.

Thanks to Emily Hopkins for giving me permission to share her e-mail. (And I gave in response to it, being over 6'3"!)

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Small Projects, Big Impact: A Set of #Sesquicentennial #Crowdfunding Projects

It's Cornell's Sesquicentennial year, and Alumni Affairs & Development is running an engagement campaign to maximize the number of people who participate in the celebration. Unfolding over the course of the year, the campaign is intended to encourage event attendance, volunteering, giving, and digital engagement. Since crowdfunding sits at the intersection of giving and digital engagement, we developed a set of projects that will run through the month of November, wrapping up on Dec. 5, right after Giving Tuesday. We're trying to take advantage of two aspects of crowdfunding that we've learned about over the past 18 months.

Crowdfunding works with young alumni. Right now, young alumni comprise approx. 45% of the alumni donors who have made gifts to crowdfunding projects at Cornell. This is triple the rate of young alumni giving that we see in other giving areas.

Some donors like to know exactly where their dollars are going. We recently conducted a survey of the donors who gave to projects in the initial phase of our pilot (1300 gifts), and the results were clear: for the people who gave, knowing who was involved in the project and what the project was about were important factors in their decision to give.

Our hope is that by deploying crowdfunding in this way, in the context of a broader engagement effort, we'll offer an option that is attractive to both of these groups. It's complementary to the various other solicitation and digital engagement techniques that will also be employed. This is a strategic use of this approach within the overall effort to maximize participation in the #Cornell150 year.

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Cornell #Crowdfunding is Back!

Following a platform transition to ScaleFunder, the Cornell Alumni Affairs & Development crowdfunding initiative is back in action. We just completed a small set of projects that familiarized us with the ScaleFunder platform and allowed us to evolve our business and training processes to reflect the new environment. Two of the three projects hit their goals, and we're now hard at work on a set of eight projects that will launch simultaneously on November 3.

This set of projects, which will be promoted collectively as part of Cornell's Sesquicentennial, will enable us to examine some questions that we have had on our minds since the beginning of this process 18 months ago.

How much staff time is required to support this volume of projects simultaneously?

What's the baseline level of staff support necessary to position a project to succeed?

As you add projects, do any economies of scale emerge? For instance, can you onboard and train multiple project teams at once, instead of doing it on a team-by-team basis?

How much of the training has to happen in person? Could it make more sense to develop a training curriculum that is available on demand?

Is there a threshold at which having multiple projects live simultaneously results in diminishing returns? What's the point at which we start oversaturating our audience and they lose interest?

The answers to all of these questions will be of critical importance as we begin to map out what an ongoing investment in crowdfunding could and should look like.

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100% Funded: How to Promote a #Crowdfunding Project - Advancement Live

Last week, UTSA’s Megan Miller and Heather Green joined me on Advancement Live to discuss ways to promote individual crowdfunding projects. With a broad range of digital and analog resources at your disposal, it’s important to prepare project teams to promote their projects successfully. This episode covered topics including project team training, social media promotion, promotion at live events, and cross-promotion with other institutional and organizational channels. 

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Teaching and Learning the Culture of #Philanthropy

Stewardship has been on my mind recently, mainly because last fall's projects are in stewardship mode and we're not ready yet to launch the next phase of the pilot. I've been focusing on the importance of stewardship in the lifecycle of crowdfunding campaigns, as well as the fact that stewardship doesn't have to be fancy or complicated to be effective. And these points are important for Advancement professionals charged with figuring out how to deploy crowdfunding on their campuses. They're also important for the donors. A positive donor experience increases the likelihood of future giving.

But it would be a mistake to overlook the impact of stewardship on the people involved with the project. I just received a packet of thank you letters from a DonorsChoose project called Tiny Violins for Tiny Students. The letters reminded me how effective crowdfunding can be at teaching a culture of philanthropy.

I wonder how many of these students even knew the word "donor" before their teacher got them involved in this project. They clearly know it now. And while there's a clear difference between elementary school students and undergraduates, I also think about the time and effort Advancement professionals invest in trying to get undergraduates involved in giving. Based on giving trends among young alumni, senior class gift campaigns are having limited impact. I received financial support from a named scholarship fund as an undergrad, and I dutifully wrote my thank-you letters to the donor when asked to do so by the Development Office. But while I certainly appreciated the support, it was pretty abstract -- there was simply a portion of my financial aid package that came courtesy of the scholarship fund. It was great, but it wasn't very tangible. A similar dynamic is at work when you sit in named seminar room in a named building. Sure, you know that someone gave money to build the building, but you rarely focus on that.

Crowdfunding can make the impact of donors in your life tangible. There is great value in this. Holding an instrument in your hands, or teaching ecology to a group of grade school students who are sitting on chairs paid for by your campaign, or seeing the water filter your class worked on being used by a community in Honduras -- these experiences are all as concrete as it's possible to get. The generosity of others made them happen. No-one needs to teach you about the culture of philanthropy, because you've had first-hand experience of its impact. This is yet another way in which crowdfunding can complement existing Advancement programs.

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#Crowdfunding #Stewardship Doesn't Have to Be Complicated

Another one of our crowdfunding projects is moving into the stewardship phase of the campaign. The Latino/a Studies Program's project to improve its space on campus, thereby enhancing its effectiveness as a focal point for the Latino community at Cornell, was the most successful of the seven pilot projects in terms of exceeding its goal. It reached 148% of its $10,000 target, with a final total of $14,811.

Now, they're using the funds to make the project happen. And they're making effective use of the Facebook page they set up for the campaign to share photos with donors and the campus community. Here's a nice example.

This isn't complex or time consuming or something that requires mobilization of communications and donor relations staff. It's simply sharing with donors evidence of the direct impact of their gifts. It's being thoughtful of the people who made the project happen and maintaining the relationship.

Crowdfunding stewardship doesn't have to be complicated. Show donors that they made a difference, and they're likely to give again.

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100% funded is not the end of a #crowdfunding campaign.

While it might be tempting for a project team that has reached its goal to kick back and celebrate a job well done, it's crucial to remember that stewardship is an essential component of any good fundraising effort.

In the short term, you owe it to your donors to say thank you and show them the impact of their gifts. In the longer term, you've now got an opportunity to transform a one-time gift into an ongoing relationship between the donors and your organization. You want to give them a donor experience so positive, so interesting, and so meaningful that next time you are raising money, it's very easy for them to say yes.

The project teams from our Fall 2013 round of campaigns are now shifting into stewardship mode, and the Cornell Baja Racing team is doing a particularly nice job of keeping donors up-to-date on the progress of their project. Above, you can see a stewardship e-mail that they sent out earlier this week. This is exactly the right feel -- it tells donors what the team has been doing and how the car is coming along. It includes photos. It's informal. It's interesting. It gives a glimpse into the daily routines of team members. And from an integrated communications perspective, it also points recipients to the team's page on Facebook, where more content and interaction is available.

Different projects will have different stewardship styles, of course, and that's a good thing. That keeps the donor experience direct and authentic, two aspects that crowdfunding donors value highly and that differentiate the crowdfunding donor experience from many of the other giving opportunities we offer our constituents in higher ed advancement.

Crowdfunding stewardship isn't a burden but an opportunity. You've got a friendly audience that has already proven that they care about what you're doing by supporting your project financially, and that gives you lots of latitude to be creative in how you share what you're doing. The only mistake that you won't be able to recover from is treating this sort of follow-up as optional, rather than a vital step toward your long-term fundraising goals. If you treat your donors poorly, they won't be back.

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#Crowdfunding is not a Silver Bullet

One of the nice things about pilot projects, if you design and execute them well, is that you learn a lot. The crowdfunding project team in Cornell's Division of Alumni Affairs & Development knows much more about crowdfunding than we did a year ago, and we have probably learned lots more than we're aware of at this point.

We suspected going into the first phase of the pilot that crowdfunding successfully would take time and effort. In fact, one of the key questions we're thinking about is how much staff time it will take to incorporate crowdfunding into our fundraising operation on an ongoing basis. Far too often in higher ed, initiatives get launched without a plan in place for sustaining and evolving them over time. We do not yet have an answer to this question, but we know that our initial suspicion was correct: crowdfunding does require a commitment of staff time.

We knew that this would be the case. However, we have now also got a much better appreciation for the time and commitment required of the project sponsor and fundraising team. Providing potential campus partners with an accurate account of what they will have to do to be successful is essential.

At a minimum, a crowdfunding campaign is an eight week commitment. It takes four weeks to get a project ready to launch. This includes writing text, producing videos and other branding or marketing collateral, recruiting and orienting the fundraising team, and putting everything together on the platform. The campaign itself then runs for four weeks. During this time, the team will be sending e-mails, spreading the word on social media, posting campaign updates to the platform, and thanking donors. This requires attention on a daily basis. 

If a campus partner cannot make this level of commitment, it's far better to find out right up front than after you have invested weeks of work. We found that as we sat down with potential partners and walked them through a sample timeline, a small number backed out, saying that this was more work than they had anticipated. The importance of this point cannot be overstated. Crowdfunding is not a silver bullet. It is not a magic process where you post a project online and money rains from the sky. For a project team that is willing to focus on the campaign for eight weeks, it is an amazing tool that empowers them to help themselves. For a team that would prefer to receive funding without having to work too hard, it is likely to lead to disappointment.

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Phase One of our #Crowdfunding Pilot Project is a wrap!

Over the past four months, the Cornell Alumni Affairs & Development crowdfunding project team has worked with USEED and campus partners to launch and complete seven crowdfunding projects. Now that the final project is in the books, we're beginning to take a look at the results. I'll share more details as our analysis gets deeper into the numbers, but here's a first look:

All seven of the projects were fully funded.

In total, the projects raised $114,554 against an aggregate goal of $101,000.

The lowest project goal was $5,000. The highest was $30,000.

The average project raised 113% of its goal.

The most overfunded project raised 148% of its goal.

The projects were funded by a total of 1,300 supporters.

The highest number of supporters for a project was 310.

The most basic question we were trying to answer with this pilot project was, "Would crowdfunding work at Cornell for a Cornell audience?" The answer is an unqualified yes.

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The Case for #Crowdfunding in #HigherEd #Advancement

  This is a TED-style talk that I developed for the CASE Summit for Advancement Leaders in San Francisco in July 2013. It lays out the case that crowdfunding is far more than just a tool for raising money online. It's also a means of driving participation, teaching a culture of philanthropy, communicating effectively, mobilizing constituents' networks on behalf of the institution, building and cultivating a donor pipeline, and a fantastic mode of stewardship.

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Advancement Live, 9/3: Crowdfunding and Higher Ed. Pt. II

  On yesterday's Advancement Live, Abby Reinhard from USEED, Bre DiGiammarino from IndieGoGo, and Michael Greenberg from ScaleFunder joined me to talk through the potential of crowdfunding in higher ed from the perspective of people involved with crowdfunding platforms. During a wide-ranging hour-long conversation, we talked about the challenges and opportunities that crowdfunding presents to higher ed, with a special focus on the potential of crowdfunding as a powerful tool for telling stories.

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104% Funded in 10 Days!

The Dilmun Hill project, the first project launched as part of Cornell's crowdfunding pilot with USEED, started and finished strong. The project went live on August 12, and reached its funding goal ten days later, on August 21. We couldn't have asked for a better start to this initiative.

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#Crowdfunding and #HigherEd

This is video of the Advancement Live show that I did on August 13, 2013, with Colleen Wainwright and Ryan Davies. Colleen talked about the success of her 50-for-50 campaign on IndieGoGo, and Ryan talk about Carleton University's Futurefunder pilot project.

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Meaningful Impact: Show vs. Tell

Recently, I received a post card from an organization to which I made a gift. This card, the first image above, expressed gratitude for my "meaningful contribution". While I appreciate the sentiment, my immediate reaction was that if you're telling me that my gift was meaningful, you're not showing me that my gift made an impact.

Contrast that with the second image above, which is taken from the Impact tab of my DonorsChoose account. Here, aggregated in one place, are photos of from the classrooms that I have supported over the past few years, showing me the impact of the projects that were funded through the platform. I can also read messages from the teachers who posted the projects, giving me further detail about how the projects are enhancing their work in the classroom and the experience of their students.

If the point of stewardship is to make donors feel that a) the organization is grateful for their gifts and b) their gifts had a tangible impact, the showing approach will beat the telling approach 100 times out of 100. With the emergence of crowdfunding platforms, this technique for illustrating the meaning of philanthropy in a highly personal way is increasingly in reach for higher ed.

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Is #crowdfunding heading toward a #tippingpoint in #highered?

There's a groundswell of interest in crowdfunding building that reminds me of the growth of interest in social media back in 2009. Representatives from crowdfunding platforms are beginning to show up at CASE conferences and EDUCAUSE. An increasing number of forward-thinking institutions are convening working groups to think through the risks and opportunities of taking the crowdfunding plunge. We'll be talking about our crowdfunding pilot with USEED at the CASE Summit in July. All of this is a good thing. In recognition of the increasing number of institutions that are beginning to explore this area, here are some principles that may help guide your exploration.

Do your due diligence! This is not something to rush into. You're going to need to figure out how crowdfunding complements and/or competes with your established fundraising programs.

Make sure that the right people are involved in the exploration process. Our core project team includes people from Alumni Affairs, Donor Relations, Annual Fund, Development Communications, IT, Prospect Development, Metrics & Marketing, and Advancement Services. Our pilot project will impact all of these areas, and all of these perspectives have been necessary to map out how the pilot will work and assess the likely workload.

Think about a few controlled experiments. Our initial plan was to draft a white paper outlining a full-scale pilot project. The crowdfunding model differs dramatically from all of our existing programs, however, and we realized rapidly that we're going to need to run a small test to prove the concept and get the experience necessary to design an effective pilot.

Think about scale, but don't let it paralyze you. One of the things we hope to learn as we move through the phases of this project is what it will cost us, both in terms of budget and FTEs, to incorporate crowdfunding into our core fundraising efforts. Higher ed is notorious for launching new initiatives without accounting for post-launch maintenance, and it doesn't make sense to compromise an opportunity like this by not staffing it properly.

Manage expectations. Our initial conversations with potential campus partners and potential alumni donors have been extremely positive. The level of enthusiasm could make it tempting to rush things, and it's easy to see how things could spiral out of control rapidly. It's going to be easier for everyone involved if you're clear about the scope and pace of your initiative from the beginning.

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Does your audience even know what #crowdfunding is?

That's an important question to ask as you think about the risks and opportunities associated with deployment of this model in #highered. We decided to ask the main Cornell Alumni group on LinkedIn. We couldn't have asked for better results. If 51% of respondents have used crowdfunding platforms before, and another 36% know what crowdfunding is, we shouldn't have to work terribly hard to sell the concept. At the same time, however, these results underscore the need to focus on a quality user experience. If we can't provide a donor experience comparable to the major crowdfunding platforms out there, our audience will know the difference.

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While this post by @StartupPro at Forbes is written for entrepreneurs interested in the JOBS Act, not #highered, he provides a clear breakdown of the major crowdfunding models that are currently in use. For #highered, good-cause crowdfunding seems like the best model, at least in terms of fit with existing strategies. There is also some potential for rewards-based crowdfunding, but the stakes are high. Done right, rewards could provide an incredibly interesting opportunity to engage donors in the work of the institution in a new way. However, rewards almost necessarily mean that you're moving into the fulfillment business, and that is going to have staffing implications, as well as raise a whole new set of donor expectations.