We have seen many universities go the way of running their own crowdfunding portals in recent years. The projects can range from raising money for charity actions or research into new innovative ideas. It certainly has opened up new opportunities for students to further learn, perform research and give back to others in need among some of the cases. Students are also adding valuable experiences to their profiles and promoting themselves as well. All while the school itself can reduce some costs, by steering in funds from backers that see value in these projects, want to provide the support.
One of the earliest success stories was the FutureFunder initiative from Carleton University. They built a custom in-house platform which allows the university to receive micro-donations online. They saw the potential and opportunities in crowdfunding. They understood early on where the industry was headed and how it would affect universities. Similarly many other universities have taken the initiative to run their own crowdfunding portals. It allows students to undertake in projects that may have never been realized.
What does the future hold? The future is certainly promising, there are many more schools that could take advantage. As mentioned there are many different scenarios of how their needs can be meet. It could be simple as just supporting a school’s swim to team to enter competitions that under some circumstances may be hard to achieve. Or an charity project to benefit people in a disaster stricken zone. These kind of crowdfunding portals would usually be running under donation or rewards model.
Thrinacia offers a perfect setting for anyone to build out their own custom ecosystem around a webservice that already exists. With regard to school type crowdfunding in the reward and donation setting. Many of the keyfeatures already exist, which are needed. These would be launched turnkey, therefore only limited customizations would be required to get the portal running successfully.