Crowdsourcing For Dummies

Chapter 6

Raising Money with Crowdfunding

In This Chapter

Understanding how crowdfunding works

Thinking about budget, benefits, and deadlines

Getting the crowd onside

Using equity crowdfunding to boost your business

Unlike other forms of crowdsourcing, crowdfunding is not about work. Crowdfunding is about raising money in small donations from a large crowd of people. You can quickly identify two fundamentally different kinds of crowdfunding: crowdfunding for charity and crowdfunding for commercial companies.

The easiest type of crowdfunding to understand is charitable crowdfunding, where you go to a crowd and ask each member for a donation to a cause. That cause can be an organised charity, a personal need (such as a medical expense or home repairs after a natural disaster), a community activity or an artistic endeavour.

Some crowdfunding sites identify another kind of charitable crowdfunding, usually called fund-your-dreams crowdfunding, where you try to raise money to do something that you’ve always wanted to do, such as travel to Rwanda to see the mountain gorillas, learn to ...