Crowd funding has become big business, with several major platforms competing for your social network-sourced dollar. But with so many campaigns across several website - what makes a successful campaign?
35-year-old Dr Ian Davis, has been using crowd funding to help raise money - and he's got a good reason for doing that.
"I was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in September 2011," says Dr Davis. "I love beer and thought that beer might be a great was to raise money and raise awareness for motor neurone disease."
Dr Davis is one of about 1,500 Australians currently diagnosed with the disease, for which there is no cure.
"I was 33 at the time a had a fiancé, I had a career, I had a future. We planned kids all those sorts of things and literally in one afternoon that was all taken away from me," says Dr Davis. "It's been a big sort of journey since then."
Dr Davis is using the little time he has left to help find a cure for motor neurone disease, and he's found support in a local craft beer manufacturer.
Owner of Cavalier Brewing, Heath Shirtcliffe, jumped at the chance to help raise money for the disease. Dr Davis and Shirtcliffe planned to launch a craft beer with all proceeds directed to help Motor Neurone disease.
"The next step in the project was actually making the beer and to make the beer we needed a fermenter," says Shirtcliffe.
The pair needed to raise $10,000 to purchase the fermenter and like so many projects with big ideas and no cash, these beer lovers looked to generate the funds using one of the major crowd funding sites.
The biggest two players in the crowd funding space are Indiegogo and Kickstarter.
Indiegogo started in 2007. Kickstater in 2009. But despite being the new kid on the block, Kickstarter has rapidly overtaken Indiegogo in terms of the number of campaigns and total revenue generated.
Indiegogo is rumoured to have raised about $193 million dollars by Forbes.com, although Indiegogo does not release that information, from their stated 150,000 campaigns.
In the same article, Forbes estimated that Kickstarter has raised $751 million from 110,000.
But these measures of success don't really show the full picture.
"There are a few reasons why we chose Indiegogo over Kickstarter at the time. I guess the first and most imporatnt is that Kickstarter said no to us, says Dr Davis. "They want some sort of tangible product that you are actaully manufacturing or creating and obviously we weren't doing that, we were trying to buy somthing."
In fact, the inflexible limitations on Kickstarter are seeing Indiegogo grow by 270 per cent. Australia is now the 5th largest market for the site that now accepts donations in Australian dollars.
"From the beginning we've been focused on creating an open platform which is something that made us unique back then and what makes us unique today," says Danae Ringelmann, co-founder of Indiegogo. "What I mean by open is we don't curate. We don't take applications we don't decide on who has the right to raise money and who doesn't."
"If we did decide we would be going back to the same old system of finance."
But crowdfunding campaigns can be challenging at the best of times. If people don't raise enough money then they don't receive a cent.
"Kickstarter is all or nothing and that sort of generates a bit of panic amongst us because if you don't actually reach your goal you get zero," says Dr Davis. "Indiegogo was willing to accept these sorts of campaigns where it was more about the person, more about the cause.”
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