Researchers: Can Scholarship be Crowdfunded? | Stanford Graduate School of Business

"For many research projects the first step is often getting funding, typically from academic grant-making organizations. But applying can be time consuming, funding can be slow to materialize, and the process is not always as flexible as a scholar might want. So when a group of economists wanted to begin a study on rural Uganda last February they turned to an unusual source for funds: total strangers. The three academics leading the research — assistant professors of finance Brett Green and William Fuchs (both PhD graduates of Stanford Graduate School of Business) and professor of business administration David I. Levine, now all at UC Berkeley — decided to try crowdfunding their project on Indiegogo, a site used for all kinds of projects worldwide. 'We were curious: could this work for academic research? The idea was that we would go online, get people interested in our work, and raise money at the same time,' says Green. 'It seemed like a way to get people thinking about issues that they otherwise wouldn’t have known about.' Academic research projects are fairly new to the world of crowdfunding. New platforms geared towards raising funds for research include sites like GeekFunder and Microryza. Rather than getting a T-shirt or poster as they might on Kickstarter, funders are kept up to date on the progress of research. Green and his colleagues posted their campaign, 'Light the Future for Rural Ugandans,' with a goal of raising $20,000. Although they didn’t reach their goal, the campaign did raise $16,650, about $10,000 of which came in during one weekend, after a post about the project on the Freakonomics blog. 'That’s when it got exciting,' says Green. 'We were actually surprised at how much we raised. We had 165 funders on Indiegogo, including three very generous donations from people we didn’t know.' The publicity the campaign received after that post brought in other donations — outside of Indiegogo — which ultimately pushed them over the $20,000 goal ..."