Presentation on how to understand and implement crowdfunding delivered at the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America in Washington, DC, November 10, 2014.

1. Understanding Crowdfunding: Viral
Events and the Future of Nonprofit
Fundraising
Gregory Saxton, PhD
Twitter: @gregorysaxton
November 10, 2014

2. The Printing Press

3. European Book Production

4. Daily Activity
• 3.5 billion Google searches
• 3.2 million blog posts
• 573,000,000 tweets sents
• 108 million posts on Tumblr
• 90 million photos uploaded on Instagram
• 6,733,747,000 videos viewed on YouTube
• 190 billion emails

5. Information Overload

7. HOW SOCIAL
MEDIA IS
DISRUPTING
PHILANTHROPY

15. Normal Distribution

16. Power Law Distribution

25. CROWDFUNDING DATA
Variables positively associated with amount of funds raised:
• Size of Fundraising Goal
• Number of Updates
• Number of Photos Uploaded to Gallery
• Number of Fundraising Links on other Social Media Sites
• Size of “Team”
• Number of Perk Levels
• Number of Times Appeal Site Tweeted
• Number of Times Appeal Site Shared on Facebook
• Length of Text Describing the Team

26. Up to now we’ve dealt with the
CAMPAIGN – the analogue to
the cat video. But you need to
take a step back – first find
your NICHE, build your
NETWORK, then feed, mobilize,
and leverage that network

27. HAVE A SOCIAL MEDIA
STRATEGY: FIND YOUR NICHE

28. CHOOSE A VOICE

29. NETWORK STRATEGY:
IDENTIFY KEY TARGETS

30. Making Network Connections

31. BUILD AND FEED YOUR
NETWORK THROUGH
MESSAGES AND CONNECTIONS
….AND THEN CAMPAIGN