Understanding Crowdfunding: Key Differences from Traditional Research Funding (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: So, the Oxford English Dictionary of crowdfunding is really just the practice of funding a project or a venture by sort of taking multiple sources of funds and combining it to raise a larger portion of money. And it's usually done via the internet. I included two definitions, the one from Indiegogo, because it's really telling a story that's going to resonate with your audience, but keeping this in mind that it is the story that you're telling people, like why do they care? I mean, that is one of the critical components to having a successful crowdfunding campaign. Probably the type of crowdfunding that universities are most familiar with and will utilize the most is the charitable type, so it's for non-profit causes, different types of projects. We're not really giving anything back in return. And so, what are some of the primary differences between what we as research administrators think about as traditional sponsored project research and crowdfunding? So, one of the most obvious ones, you know, is it relies on a social network. So when you think about faculty or researchers who are putting together a traditional research proposal, you know, they are working with their lab and they're putting this scientific proposal together and they're sending it off to a sponsoring agency, right? So they are not shopping it around to their neighbors or their family or their professional colleagues saying, hey, I have this amazing idea, do you want to give me $2 to help support my, you know, amazing idea? So that is a huge, huge difference. It's not peer-reviewed in the traditional sense, so there isn't another scientific peer counterpart on the other end saying, you know, this is a great idea or this has already been done, so that is another big difference. But I will say that the social community may be a little, can sometimes probably be tougher than peer review. You get multiple contributions at varying monetary levels, so, you know, for NIH or NSF, you usually have a set budget that you're going for. Crowdfunding, you can set a minimum for your campaign, but, you know, you could set it as low as $1, right, so you're not going to ask NIH to give $1, DOD to give $10. No traditional spending restrictions, so once that money, once your campaign is over and those funds are received, you're sort of responsible, you know, to do due diligence and do what you said you were going to do, so it's not like you have a traditional sponsor who's saying you can do this, you can't do that. And then the minimal traditional reporting requirements, so you're responsible to report back, you know, depending on your institutional policy or how, best practices of your campaign, but it's not, again, you're not like reporting back to a sponsor because it could have, that could have thousands of sponsors.