Surround Yourself with People Who Believe in Your Dreams
Hello again Everyone!
Today's blog is going to be all about crowdfunding and crowdsourcing, I might have already talked about it in my previous blogs because it is also our main theme but I will go more in depth of it as I have gained more knowledge about it!
Like every project community class we watched a video in which they were many points which I found essential to have success in terms of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing:
Reach media
Join social media to help with funding
Create ways to promote the NGO by creating a video to get more volunteers
Always move forward, think beforehand what you want to do.
I thought these points are really necessary for our NGO. As our NGO really needs more volunteers to move forward and they can only get volunteers by promoting their NGO through various ways.
Crowdfunding, its benefits and limitations:
To begin, when talking about crowdfunding the first thing you need is a platform like for instance 'kickstarter' then you want as much people you can to donate money to your organization. Taking into account that By crowdfunding you are basically allowing the 'crowd' to come in and support you, for some people this 'support' is seen as an interference as they want to establish their organization/company without anyone's help.
According to the research I have done and what I have heard from my uncle (who started his company by crowfunding) I think crowdfunding is a very helpful thing,
It can allow your company to grow even further
It reduces risks when trying to build a new company by the money you get
However the limitations of crowdfunding would be that it consumes a lot of time when trying to obtain as much funds as possible and also you always have to prove you're company is real and its not some fraud especially if you want to provoke people like me to donate. *Sometimes its really hard to build people's trust for something.
Crowdsourcing, its benefits and limitations
Similar to crowdfunding, when talking about crowdsourcing you are basically inviting the crowd/people to take part in whatever you are doing but its more than crowdfunding. Based on my research crowdsourcing is all about allowing people to guide you or give you ideas over a particular thing. This particular thing could be very specific like designing a logo, where a group of people together will come up with a design.
Crowdsourcing is very beneficial as:
Something better can be created as there will be more ideas by each person put together as one
It saves time
The limitations of crowdsourcing would be that it can only be done if the company has a lot of volunteers. Along with that the volunteers might be unreliable so you have to dig in and find the right people for your organization/company which can be hard and time consuming.
For our NGO
For our NGO both crowdfunding and sourcing are very beneficial and important to allow the NGO to grow. The NGO needs a lot of funds from people to establish, but what we as a group have thought that it first needs a firm platform and permanent donators which is also where the part 'promotion' come is. As said in my previous posts that the NGO has very few people working for it so it needs many volunteers and this can only be done by promoting themselves, and so far our NGO has in no way done any effort in promoting so they really need to work on this. When they will have a lot of volunteers like students or people they will be able to carry out to say 'crowdsourcing' in a proper way.
As a designer
When I think of myself as a designer I think that there are times when you want to work individually without anyone bringing in their own ideas but you have to realize as i did, that there is always one thing that someone does better than you then why not allowing him to do it and together you can create something magnificent! As said before when you want to start from scratch and you have no single penny on you, you need crowdfunding as a first step to grow.
Sometimes you need more people with different ideas to complete your puzzle piece!
(Source: http://www.com-unity.nl/images/puzzle-people-cover.gif)
So I prove my point that as designer both crowdfunding and crowdsourcing are very essential!