University and college crowdfunding platforms

In many cases, universities will use crowdfunding to add to existing unrestricted funds such as scholarships, annual funds, or emergency funds.[6][7] Typically these crowdfunding campaigns will use offline donations concurrently with the crowdfunding campaign in the form of gift matching,[8] or by hosting in person fundraising events during the run of the crowdfunding campaign.

Another way the universities use crowdfunding is to increase their alumni engagement through giving to the institution. This is done through projects that place focus on participation as opposed to donation amount, measuring the success of the project by how many people gave to the cause instead of how much the total giving amount was.[9] This type of project can also be used to generate excitement for an alumni challenge, as used by University of Texas at San Antonio in their “Alumni Challenge City Race”.[10]

Universities have found that crowdfunding is great resource for large and small research projects in a few different ways. The obvious resource is the gain of funds from donors that are interested in the specific project. However, the use of crowdfunding for research projects also helps to boost the popularity and interest in a project, increasing its visibility to the global community.[11] These types of campaigns use effective marketing and communications strategies to engage their potential donors.[12]

Other highly successful types of university crowdfunding campaign are athletics based campaigns. These campaigns use the pre-existing popularity of college sports to boost their fundraising capacity for different sport-related projects. One notable such project is the UCLA Spark campaign to renovate the gymnasium used by the UCLA Gymnastics team. This campaign used crowdfunding and gift-matching to raise over $150,000 for the extensive renovations.[13] Another notable and attention-grabbing university athletic crowdfunding campaign was the “Ole Miss Football October 4, 2014 Victory Celebration”.[14] This campaign gained media attention when it went viral and raised its total goal amount of $75,000 within three hours of going live.[15]

University crowd funding platforms also focus on student run projects that benefit a specific student group on campus. For example, the MIT Ski Team successfully funded a "snow day fund" with the use of MIT's crowd funding platform.[16] The project highlighted the group's needs and used appropriate perks to incentivize their potential donors. In this way, student run projects are usually very specific to the group that is creating the project and will use that specificity to garner new donorship for the university. The University of Maryland uses mostly student run projects on their crowd funding platform.[17] One such project used the vast network of the student group by reaching out to similarly inclined student groups at other universities to raise 276% of their original goal amount.[18]