Last month's panel on online fundraising was one of the best yet! If you missed it, one of the handouts was a chart that Kassy and I created that compares nearly 40 different tools, or platforms, for online fundraising. It is now online for anyone to use: Crowdfunding Platform Comparison Chart, created by Lisa Bunker and Kassy Rodeheaver for Pima County Public Library.
We discovered enormous variance in the uses and rules about who may fundraise, and how. Individuals? Yes. Businesses? Yes. Non-501(3)C organizations? Yes. There seems to be a tool for everyone. There is a wide variety of fees assessed too.
The other thing that we thought hard about was how one might assess the reliability of these new companies, so included in the chart are two approaches: 1) we looked the company up in the BBB, and 2) We looked at the "Alexa rank," an indicator of how popular a website is relative to the rest of internet traffic. A low rank number equates to high traffic, and high numbers mean it is little-used. The idea there was to see if the website was actually being used, and talked about.
The chart is the first I've seen for this purpose, so please share it widely, and let people know it came from your library!
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