Crowdrise: The Facebook for Philanthropy
Ever since I discovered my passion at a young age, I have had to find creative ways to raise money for causes I support -- especially animals and the enviroment, two issues close to my heart.
Now lets ask ourselves: how many times have we tried raising money for a cause? And how successful were we? Let's be honest. Although money might not buy happiness, it can certainly make life easier and provide services to people and animals in need. That's where social fundraising comes in.
Social fundraising is becoming a buzzword within the cause space. This growing trend allows citizens to create their own fundraising campaigns independent of, but still benefitting, non-proftis. These efforts use a middle platform, or set of tools, to create grassroots communications across traditional social networks like Facebook and Twitter.
While Facebook and Twitter continue to dominate the general social networking space, there is a need for middleware platforms to provide additional functionality when it comes to causes. These solutions can also incorporate the traditional outreach mechanism like email.
Causes, Crowdrise, Jumo, and Razo are some of the early leaders empowering cause fundraisers like me as well as donors and non-profits with grassroots functionality. Whether raising money for disaster relief, promoting a cause, or mobilizing action globally, they have found effective strategies to tweet, post, blog and email to coordinate their specific goals.
"If you do not give back, no one will like you." That's the slogan for Crowdrise, the social fundraising platform launched in 2010 by actor Edward Norton (yes, that Edward Norton) and his co-founders Robert Wolfe, Shauna Robertson and Jeffery Wolfe. If you find it a little too straight, a little too irreverent, well, that's the point. These creative minds conceived the idea in 2009 while trying to raise money for the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust. They originally set out to raise $75,000, but the group ended up raising $1.2 million through a personalized online platform.
Now, that's something worth sharing with family and friends, don't you think? Let's take a look, in the chart below, at how Crowdrise actually works:
In the video below, watch Edward's Norton's interview with Katie Couric and learn about why Crowdrise is described as the "Facebook for philanthropy".
(Photo Credits: Crowdrise; Video Credit: Yahoo News)
