| Crowd Funding: A more casual way to fundraise |
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| Written by Jennifer Flaten | ||||||||
| Friday, 24 June 2011 00:00 | ||||||||
 Crowd funding, which draws its inspiration from crowd sourcing, is gaining popularity in the non-profit sector as a way to raise money. Just like crowd sourcing, crowd funding uses media (usually the internet) to encourage a network of people to pool their money together to support a cause.
While it remains to be seen if crowd funding will replace traditional fundraising efforts, right now it is viewed as a low-key yet, powerful way to raise funds, a way to turn supporters into fundraisers. Several companies provide crowd funding platforms including Causes, Nadanu, and GoFundMe and CauseVox. CauseVox, the newest crowd-funding platform to enter the ring is a SaaS platform that helps non-profits launch a customized, branded site on their own domain. In no time, at all they can begin accepting donations. CauseVox gives the non-profit all the tools they need to design a fully branded page, without having to know any code. For those non-profits without a tech savvy staff member or volunteer, it is simple to upload a logo, change the color scheme and presto the site is ready to go. Alternatively, for non-profits with slightly more technical skills CauseVox allows them to customize their site. By using CauseVox, mark up language (much like wordpress) users can create a custom layout and design. Changing content on CauseVox is also relatively easy, by simply cutting and pasting links users can embed YouTube/Vimeo videos and Flickr slideshows. CauseVox also give non-profits the ability to customize their URL for more brand recognition. With CauseVox, once a non-profit’s site is up, supporters of the non profit can create fundraising pages of their own and invite their friends/family (the crowd) to support and donate to the non-profit. http://www.causevox.com/ | ||||||||
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About the Author: Kurt Martin is a Founder and Group Publisher of Progressive Media Group (PMG) and the Publisher of Nonprofit Technology News. During his 4 years as Publisher of The NonProfit Times, he grew the imprint from a single newspaper to a community of websites, online job boards, email newsletters and digital editions of the print editions. Prior to taking the role of Publisher he was the East Coast Sales Manager for Broad Daylight, Inc. a knowledgebase company. He also held management roles in advertising and ciruclation sales at American Banker/Bond Buyer (Thomson), Faulkner & Grey (Thomson) and SourceMedia (Investcorp.) Kurt graduated from Montclair State University with a B.A. in Political Science and Public Administration. |
