Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another discussion panel with the National Crowdfunding Association of Canada. Today, we have a special topic with two expert panel guests. We're going to be talking about crowdfunding for university research. We'll be exploring how crowdfunding can excite innovation, make for a more connected academic network throughout Canada, and streamline the way research gets funded. The NCFA is Canada's crowdfunding hub, and we work to be a voice for Canadian crowdfunding, and we strive to strengthen the entire industry. So today, we have two guests. We have Ryan Davies from Carleton University in Ottawa. He's the Director of Advancement Communications, oversees all aspects of fundraising and alumni relations. He created FutureFunder.ca, which is Carleton's in-house crowdfunding platform, and it helps with philanthropic donations to research projects. Over 500K raised through that, which is great. Bravo to you, Ryan. And then we have, on our panel as well, Nick Dragojlovich, who is a Health Policy and Science Communications Researcher at the UBC in Vancouver, and he focuses on research funding for cancer and other rare disease in novel ways, like crowdfunding. So welcome, both of you. Thank you for joining me. So I will go ahead and direct the first question to you, Ryan. I'd like to find out how FutureFunder was created. Do you have a story behind how you guys came up with the idea, or what prompted you to pursue it?

Speaker 2: Well, thanks, Gabe, and thanks for having us. The thing we like about FutureFunder, the nugget at the heart of the story is that it's a site built for donors at the request of donors. A few years ago we had commissioned a series of focus groups with some of our annual giving level donors, so these are alumni and community members and students in some cases who give at the $10,000 to $500 level, or anything up to about $10,000 annually. All universities struggle with giving at that level, and especially in the alumni area, in ensuring that there's a healthy rate of participation from graduates. So we had commissioned these focus groups to ask them what our university could do to make the approach, make the offer to give back to the university more enticing, more attractive, more modern, more competitive with other charities. And in every focus group it was consistently about being specific, about presenting opportunities that were tangible, that had a sense of urgency to them, that were very related to their experience while they were at university, or the nature of their work now, which can be different things obviously. The day of asking graduates to trust their university philanthropically and give to one pooled fund that we would then be able to use at our discretion, that was disappearing. Graduates want to be able to, even if they're only giving $50, they want to participate in something specific. We heard this loud and clear in our focus groups. So we threw that knowledge back and forth a little bit. We didn't know what it meant, or what the best term was for it. We called it, for a while, project-based fundraising, and we experimented using our traditional models, using our student callers, through our direct mail appeals, through email appeals. We kind of translated the projects we were asking for funding for, turned them into very specific, time-oriented, tangible projects with lower funding ceilings, conveyed an opportunity for every donor to make a difference no matter how much they were giving. Increasingly we saw the benefits of this. There was great participation, great feedback. We were able to complete projects in short periods of time, and that gave us a great deal of reporting, of marketing opportunities, I suppose. So from there it just led into this idea of a crowdfunding platform. We thought there must be so many of these small, urgent, really compelling stories and initiatives going on on campus at any one time, and it's hard for an advancement, a fundraising department to find all these stories. So the thinking was, and it's proving that it has promise, to build a platform, invite the entire university community to participate, to put their projects forward. Almost in a purely democratic sense, we would put all projects forward and invite the community, invite the larger crowd of donors and prospective donors to Carleton to choose where they would make their philanthropic investment. So it all came from donors, that's the story.

Speaker 1: And that sort of organic development is something that we've seen a lot in crowdfunding, where it just makes things easier, and it just seems like the right solution. What about, let's say a university is looking to pursue this and they want to implement this into their funding structure, how can faculty sign in and get on board with this kind of thing?

Speaker 2: We know that there are researchers, there are academics who are already pursuing crowdfunding on the big platforms, and on the emerging ones as well, like experiment.com from the United States. So there are Carleton researchers who are participating there. What we offer with the future funder is a chance to lend the back office support to our academics, the back office support of the advancement department, in spreading the word in finding philanthropic angles or charitable angles to the research that they're doing. So we encourage academics and researchers to get involved on our side, through our platform, so that we can make the investment in their project an inherently charitable one and create a longer-term kind of donor relationship. I mean, that's the advantage, that's where we diverge from the larger third-party platforms. What we ask researchers to do when they get started, I mean, we'll work with them to find a charitable angle, the opportunity to issue a tax receipt for their investors. But what we encourage researchers to do is to think about their projects in a way that makes sense to a layperson, to think about the external implications of their research, to be grandiose, to be visionary and aspirational with their ideas, and to translate the work they're doing into soundbites, as it were, to kind of bold statements, ambitious statements about what the long-term implications of their research could be. And I know that can be a difficult thing for academics to get by.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's a good segue to introduce our other guest. Nick, can you talk a little bit about your role with research and how crowdfunding strengthens the research side of what Ryan's been talking about here?

Speaker 3: Yeah, there's a, certainly I think there's an interest from the part of the universities to run the crowdfunding sites for a variety of reasons, including the ones that Ryan's been talking about. But from the researcher side, there's a number of reasons for faculty to want to get involved and the main, in terms of research funding, the main use of crowdfunding at the moment is as a way to fund early-stage projects, projects that might be a little speculative, high-risk, high-reward research that typically might not be funded by like CIHR or government funding agencies, etc. And if you can get, say, $20,000, $30,000 to fund or even less to fund, it might allow you to collect pilot data, which then makes, which then in effect de-risks the project and makes it easier to then convince funders like government agencies or potentially come in and support the broader research project. And so as a whole, that's where, at the moment, that's where crowdfunding seems to fit in the research funding ecosystem, or fit best, and the point at which it might have the largest impact is by allowing a lot more projects to test out, or a lot more faculty to test out some more speculative projects and see how they go.

Speaker 1: Okay, so to build on that, how else does crowdfunding engender innovation for these different sort of high-risk, high-reward research projects?

Speaker 3: Well, yeah, it goes well beyond funding. There's one of the ways in which I think it's possible to get faculty involved in which I think universities will have to try to make this case to try to get faculty more engaged in crowdfunding and more faculty involved in it is by highlighting a non-financial benefit. Because admittedly, the actual research funding that you might sort of be able to generate from one crowdfunding campaign is generally quite small relative to what you might be able to get from larger research grants, or even small research grants, and some faculty might question the cost-benefit in terms of the effort invested, but from my perspective, the value of running a crowdfunding campaign by a researcher actually goes way beyond that, in that it forces researchers to build an audience and build that digital capacity, that social networking online, and certainly from conversations or reports of researchers who run these crowdfunding campaigns, one of the big benefits they found was actually getting to know people in their field better through using social media to promote their crowdfunding campaign. So they've actually built collaborations as a result, they get to know what's going on in the field, and then more broadly, if you think, particularly for early career researchers who might be going into science and research, if you can build an audience and a fan base for your work early on in your career, this allows you to basically build that relationship and get resources to pursue your research over the course of your career, so the value of running a campaign right now goes way beyond, say, that $20,000 you might be able to raise right now. You might be able to run subsequent campaigns to fund different stages of your research, you might be able to eventually tap that network to bring in investors if you're trying to commercialize a project, and more broadly, just spread the impact and the awareness of your work and of science, and who knows what that might seed in terms of other research

Speaker 1: and collaborators elsewhere. I think that you bring up a great point that it sort of makes this holistic ecosystem within a certain topic, a research topic, for an entire country or even the globe. Ryan, do you want to add anything to that?

Speaker 2: I'd add that there is a great kind of untapped network of funders who are charitable funders too. They could be graduates of the university, they could be, as Nick mentioned, industry participants in a particular field who are interested in innovation in the idea and don't have a way to kind of engage with that researcher, and now this presents an opportunity for them to engage. Now suddenly they can get involved, they can really kind of grapple with the research question inherent in the project, and a researcher can build an army, build a community behind their idea and make their project a bit of a cause in a way. And I think that there's great potential for then angel funders to come in, people who are maybe retired faculty members or somebody connected to an industry, who knows where they come from, who might be really attracted to an idea and to the promise behind an idea, and participate as a member of a crowd, but not at a higher level. And then suddenly you've got a whole different equation here, when angel funders can get involved, the sky's the limit I suppose.

Speaker 1: So we're talking about creating a network and innovation through that network, and I know Nick that you work with cancer research and other rare disease research. How do you think the pharmaceutical industry could be, I don't know, could get involved with something like this, or maybe they don't like it? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 3: I think they're inclined to like it, in that one of their strategies of the pharmaceutical industry in the last few years has been to move to, let's say, outsource early stage R&D for potential drug, potential therapeutics, so by letting governments and other non-profit entities fund research at universities that then they can bring in and fund and get into at a more advanced level of development, so they don't have to do all the basic R&D. So to the extent that crowdfunding allows this to go on more, and in particular maybe even fund small biotechs, etc., or be the sort of the seed funding for biotech spinoffs, they probably quite like that actually. How they might be able to help, you know, I don't know, you might be able to, I mean they're already doing a lot of collaboration networks with the researchers.

Speaker 1: On Nick, on your end, does it, you know, do you feel that sort of lubrication effect happening with projects where they just sort of, things just fall into place when the funding becomes more direct from the donors?

Speaker 3: Well, there's certainly some projects that just wouldn't get off the ground without direct funding. So there's a number of examples of this in specifically the medical community. So just to give one example, there's this project called Eye Cancer that last year in 2013 raised about $160,000 on Indiegogo to try to fund a clinical research trial at Uppsala University in Sweden for an oncolytic viral therapy. And so their goal though had been to raise about two million pounds, but, and so obviously they fell far short of that in the Indiegogo campaign, but in the process of the awareness building and the marketing for that campaign, they actually connected with a wealthy donor from Texas who was suffering from the disease they were targeting, and who then made up the difference. And so that's the, by all accounts in the media that was covering that project, that just would not have happened for a variety of reasons. There was, private investment was just not coming in to try to develop that therapy, and that just would not have happened without it. So that's where one of the real potential benefits of crowdfunding in the research arena lies is not just making it easy, just making it happen at all is a potential there.

Speaker 1: Well, I think that's a great example, and it's just a great example of another part of the magic of crowdfunding, and I'm just excited about all of those kind of things. So we're just, you know, for the sake of time, we should wrap it up here. Any final words, we'll start with you Ryan, or any questions you have for Nick?

Speaker 2: More of a, like an evangelical kind of statement, I think what, crowdfunding for us and our platform has had an unexpected side benefit, and it's helped build what we call a culture of philanthropy on campus. On any university campus, there's a fundraising department that's tasked with finding donors and turning, making projects marketable and, you know, considered worthy of investment from donors. But it's not enough today, or anymore, it probably never was, for just the fundraising department to participate, to lead this charge. We require, we need collaboration from the academic community as well. And I think building this platform has really made that evident, has helped build that culture and that sense of, that opportunity for collaboration with the academic community even more. I mean, Nick would know this better than me, but an academic, a researcher, has to do a great amount of work already in finding funding, in writing grant applications and such, and finding ways to translate their project, you know, for an audience, for a potential funder. We've just kind of added to that process and given another potential source of funding, but it's the same spirit, that we're asking the academics to get into the nuts and bolts of their project and rewrite it and translate it in a way that makes sense for another set of funding. So it's helped us develop this sense of collaboration, helped kind of engender this understanding in the academic community here at our university, that they have a role to play, that they can be active participants in fundraising, and it's not inherently different than the work that they're already doing. So it's not a benefit, it's not a goal we had going in, necessarily, when we created the platform, but we've seen it more and more that crowdfunding invites the community to be active fundraisers too.

Speaker 1: Very good. Well said. And Nick, I'll give you the final word here.

Speaker 3: For university crowdfunding to be able to meet its true potential, I think it's important to find ways to develop that culture of philanthropy amongst faculty and amongst students, obviously, as well. I think it's based on some initial data compiled on university crowdfunding student projects are tend to be more successful and are a much larger proportion of projects, which suggests that that culture of philanthropy is much more easy to build amongst the students. I think for a variety of reasons, you might find more resistance among faculty, not least being the fact that they're really busy and already doing a whole bunch of different things and are not familiar with this form of fundraising and with this sort of role. But I think if you can make the case, you can get, and can get at least a large proportion of faculty involved in not only in crowdfunding, but in building their audience and building their digital capacity. And in this outreach, which benefits the university in many other ways and benefits them in many other ways, then I think crowdfunding at the university level and for research, that's when it really hits its true potential in transforming and potentially accelerating the overall innovation. And I think that's an important sort of goal to reach for in the next couple of years.

Speaker 1: Yeah, very good, exactly. Accelerating innovation. Very well said. Exactly. I think that's what this whole thing's about and bringing the communities together, bringing the university communities together and getting the funding more efficient. I think we got some great soundbites from you guys. I really appreciate both of you coming by. You guys did a great job. Thank you so much for joining me this morning and waking up early in Vancouver over there. And enjoy the rest of your summer and I'll see you guys again soon, someday. Thank you both. Thanks for organizing this. Absolutely. I'm glad you joined us today and I look forward to seeing you all in the next video and the videos to come. And this is Gabe Nassar on behalf of the National Crowdfunding Association of Canada. Enjoy the rest of your summer.