Type of site | Crowdfunding |
---|---|
Available in | English |
URL | crowdfundedu |
Commercial | Yes |
Launched | 2012 |
CrowdFundEDU was a US-based private for-profit company founded in 2012 that provides a crowd funding website for education. People hold online fundraisers to get contributions for tuition, student loans, [1] books and supplies, sports equipment, events and extracurricular activities. Student debt is recognized as a growing financial burden to young adults, but crowd funding brings an alternative to this form of lending and is considered by some to be one of the greatest financial creations of the digital age.
Students and educators can fundraise for all levels and types of education, not just college and university, but also vocational school, grades K-12 and for a career training seminar. [2] People can fundraise for individual needs or for school fundraising. It has been described as the “Kickstarter for education”. [3]
Many of the fundraisers on the site seems to be focused on college students hoping to raise funds to pay tuition or student loans, but there are also online K-12 school fundraisers, [4] teachers raising funds for classroom expenses, as well as people crowdfunding for e-learning platforms and elementary-age children. [5]
CrowdFundEDU provides users with a platform to create a fundraising page, offer rewards for different contribution levels, and share their fundraiser through social media. There are many other crowd funding sites, but CrowdFundEDU is a niche site that focuses on education. [6]
CrowdFundEDU seeks to broaden the scope of educational fundraising from the local community to the global population through the use of people's social networks of family, friends, co-workers and colleagues, who can help further spread the word through their own extended networks. [7] Success in funding is largely contributed to the fact that it is easier for many contributors to donate a smaller quantity of money than for a single person to donate a large sum of money. [8]
CrowdFundEDU has a flexible funding approach, which means that fundraisers receive the contributions whether or not their funding goal is reached by the deadline. CrowdFundEDU charges 5% to the fundraiser if the goal is reached and 9% if the goal is not reached. . [9] The difference in fees is to encourage fundraisers to set a realistic goal.
CrowdFundEDU is a preferred PayPal Partner and uses PayPal for all fundraising payment processing and transaction services. [10]
Fundraisers are categorized into the following categories: Student Debt, College/University Tuition, Trade School, Books & Supplies, Sports, Visual & Performing Arts, Extracurricular Activity, Event & Field Trip, Study Abroad, Certification, Seminar & Workshops, High School Fundraisers, Middle School Fundraisers and Elementary School Fundraisers.
Tuition payments, usually known as tuition in American English and as tuition fees in Commonwealth English, are fees charged by education institutions for instruction or other services. Besides public spending, private spending via tuition payments are the largest revenue sources for education institutions in some countries. In most developed countries, especially countries in Scandinavia and Continental Europe, there are no or only nominal tuition fees for all forms of education, including university and other higher education.
Fundraising or fund-raising is the process of seeking and gathering voluntary financial contributions by engaging individuals, businesses, charitable foundations, or governmental agencies. Although fundraising typically refers to efforts to gather money for non-profit organizations, it is sometimes used to refer to the identification and solicitation of investors or other sources of capital for for-profit enterprises.
College tuition in the United States is the cost of higher education collected by educational institutions in the United States, and paid by individuals. It does not include the tuition covered through general taxes or from other government funds, or that is paid from university endowment funds or gifts. Tuition for college has increased as the value, quality, and quantity of education have increased. Many feel that increases in cost have not been accompanied by increases in quality, and that administrative costs are excessive. The value of a college education has become a topic of national debate in the U.S.
University Charles III of Madrid (UC3M) is a public university in the Community of Madrid, Spain. Established in 1989, UC3M is an institution with a distinctly international profile. It offers a broad range of master's and bachelor's degree programs in English, and nearly 20% of the student body is made up of international students. It is the first university in Spain and the third in Europe in the number of its students participating in the Erasmus student exchange programs.
CrowdRise is a for-profit crowdfunding platform that raises charitable donations. CrowdRise was founded by Edward Norton, Shauna Robertson, and the founders of Moosejaw, Robert and Jeffrey Wolfe. CrowdRise was acquired in 2017 by GoFundMe.
The higher education bubble in the United States is the concern that excessive investment in higher education could have negative repercussions in the broader economy. Although college tuition payments are rising, the supply of college graduates in many fields of study is exceeding the demand for their skills, which aggravates graduate unemployment and underemployment while increasing the burden of student loan defaults on financial institutions and taxpayers. The claim has generally been used to justify cuts to public higher education spending, tax cuts, or a shift of government spending towards law enforcement and national security. There is a further concern that having an excess supply of college graduates exacerbates political instability, historically linked to having a bulge in the number of young degree holders.
RocketHub was an online crowdfunding platform launched in 2010, its first use was September 1, 2009. Based in New York City, its users included musicians, entrepreneurs, scientists, game developers, philanthropists, filmmakers, photographers, theatre producers/directors, writers, and fashion designers.Users posted fundraising campaigns to it to raise funds and awareness for projects and endeavors. Operating in over 190 countries, RocketHub was once considered one of America's largest crowdfunding platforms.
Indiegogo is an American crowdfunding website founded in 2008 by Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin, and Eric Schell. Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California. The site is one of the first sites to offer crowd funding. Indiegogo allows people to solicit funds for an idea, charity, or start-up business. Indiegogo charges a 5% fee on contributions. This charge is in addition to Stripe credit card processing charges of 3% + $0.30 per transaction. Fifteen million people visit the site each month.
Funding4Learning is a "human capital oriented" crowd funding platform for educational projects. Funding4Learning provides its users with fundraising tools for study, volunteering, as well as a diverse array of education related initiatives.
FundaGeek was a crowd funding resource designed for funding project involving technology, scientific research, inventions and community support. Funding is provided through backers who make pledges in return for rewards provided by the project owners. Fundageek does not regard crowd funding as an investment or a debt instrument, and pledges do not involve any form of equity interest. The April 2012 JOBS Act opens up the prospects for "equity crowdfunding" however the SEC has not yet defined the required rules for participation. The industry expects this to happen in 2013.
GoFundMe is an American for-profit crowdfunding platform that allows people to raise money for events ranging from life events such as celebrations and graduations to challenging circumstances like accidents and illnesses. From 2010 to the beginning of 2020, over $9 billion has been raised on the platform, with contributions from over 120 million donors.
Crowdfunding is a process in which individuals or groups pool money and other resources to fund projects initiated by other people or organizations "without standard financial intermediaries." Crowdfunded projects may include creative works, products, nonprofit organizations, supporting entrepreneurship, businesses, or donations for a specific purpose. Crowdfunding usually takes place via an online portal that handles the financial transactions involved and may also provide services such as media hosting, social networking, and facilitating contact with contributors. It has increased since the passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act.
FundRazr is a free crowdfunding and online fundraising platform released in 2009. FundRazr operates internationally in 35+ counties with the largest markets being United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Australia. It allows users to run a wide-range of crowdfunding campaigns by creating fundraising pages and sharing it via social media, messaging apps, email and more to raise money for over 100 types of causes such as nonprofit, medical care, education, community help, poverty alleviation, arts, memorials, and animal rescue causes. FundRazr also works with more than 4000 nonprofits, charities and social enterprises with an advanced fundraising toolset for free. The digital fundraising platform provides 8 different campaign types. They include microproject fundraising, peer-to-peer campaigns, wishlist campaigns, recurring donations, branded sponsorship campaigns, DIY projects, sweepstake campaigns, and storefront campaigns.
YouCaring was a crowdfunding website for personal, medical, and charitable causes. The company was a Certified B corporation based in San Francisco, California. YouCaring did not take a percentage of funds raised on its site, or charge those raising funds a fee. The company relied on voluntary donations from donors to fund operations. YouCaring was acquired by GoFundMe in 2018.
Rally.org is an American social online fundraising platform for use by a wide range of individuals and organizations. It allows users to set up their own fundraising page, through which supporters can find information about their campaigns and make donations through Rally.org's proprietary payment system. The platform is best known for its use by causes including the Make A Wish Foundation and Jon Bon Jovi's Hurricane Sandy relief effort, filmmakers including the director of Buzkashi Boys, and political campaigns in the United States 2012 election cycle. In May 2012, Rally.org closed the largest Series A round of venture capital ever raised online. The company was founded in Austin, Texas, as Piryx, in 2009 by Tom Serres, Brian Upton, Jonas Lamis and Naveed Lalani.
Community Funded is a crowdfunding platform based in Fort Collins, Colorado allowing project creators to create one or more fundraising projects on the site with the goal of helping people and organizations with projects find the ideas, funding, and resources they need to be successful.
Garnering funds in the form of donations has always been a major focus for university leaders. These donations are usually found in the form of large annual gifts by alumni and friends of universities, along with funding from government entities for public universities. More recently, universities have been taking steps to modernize their giving structure through the use of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is an online tool utilizing peer-to-peer relationships to help gain funds for different aspects of university culture.
The School Fund is a person-to-person crowdfunding platform and nonprofit organization through which donors directly contribute to educational scholarships for low-income students in countries that do not offer free, public secondary school. Like other civic crowdfunding platforms, through The School Fund, large numbers of online visitors support philanthropic efforts by pooling small contributions. The School Fund crowdfunds for students who have been identified by their teachers or local school officials as not having enough money to continue paying to go to school.
Charles Best is an American philanthropist and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of DonorsChoose.org, a crowdfunding platform for K-12 teachers serving in US schools, and the founder of Irregardless, a crowd-sourced writing style guide.
Financial issues facing students in the United States include the rising cost of tuition, as well as ancillaries, such as room and board, textbook and coursework costs, personal expenses, and transportation.