Regardless of whether in our professional organizations or in our personal lives, time and time again we all find ourselves asking how to best make ends meet. When it comes to your nonprofit organization, making ends meet relies on getting your audience to engage beyond simply recognizing that you are working toward a good cause. In most cases we all know that you have a good cause, and if you were to ask a stranger on the street they would probably agree. The question we all struggle with is how to get your audience to go beyond saying you have a good cause to actually donating towards that cause. A very legitimate answer to that age-old question, I believe, is crowdfunding.
Here are three simple reasons why today’s nonprofit organizations should consider crowdfunding:
- It is goal oriented. While your nonprofit may have a generalized goal (i.e. to provide nourishment for impoverished children), crowdfunding allows you to hone in on a more specific goal. Crowdfunding projects are done to publish books, create movies, and just about anything else you can imagine.
- It brings people together. Because crowdfunding is done via the Internet, it allows people from anywhere in the world to view your work and donate to your cause. Crowdfunding projects are centered in San Francisco, London, Johannesburg, Moscow, and everywhere in between.
- It makes the impossible possible. Crowdfunding brings projects to life. Since the genesis of crowdfunding, projects that never would have happened before have become a reality. This can entice donors to be a part of something that has either never happened before, or was made possible by them because of their donations.
Of course not every single nonprofit activity is the right activity to consider building a crowdfunding campaign around, and as an organization you will carefully consider how to construct a crowdfunding campaign in the most effective way for the most appropriate parts of your effort. However, in the big picture, this social phenomenon is, at its least, breaking with tradition, and at its most, disrupting the status quo within corporate economics. The ability to achieve one’s goal is no longer based solely on immediately available capital. Now, anyone with a great idea can achieve their goal by asking the entire internet-accessible world to fund it. So, when will you start?