For those of you familiar with athletics fundraising, is this a new concept?

https://ohio.scalefunder.com/cfund/project/33927?utm_medi...

Nope, every sport is doing some sort of crowdsource funding now.

1% of the goal is a start!

Volleyball, Field Hockey and Soccer are currently ongoing. Last year, I know that Track and Field, Wrestling, Field Hockey, swimming, and baseball all did this last year. In a donor report that I obtained last spring, I believe baseball is the only one who hit their goal but wrestling made the most money.

I wonder how donors and potential donors feel about that. The reason I ask is that I'm working with my alma mater (Muskingum) in the Institutional Advancement office raising money primarily for student scholarships and we continue to use the traditional methods - personal visits, phone calls, emails and mailings.

There is very little investment in time and money in a Crowdsourcing campaign but I wonder if it's really worth it and/or how much money you leave on the table because their is no real donor engagement. I met with a guy a few weeks ago and went from a conversation with no support for the university to a five figure gift for a specific sport.

Interesting question, and I will point you back to that webpage, where the University in 18 months has raised just under $1million with no to little effort. I see these linked to various FB feeds, Twitter hashtags, and etc.,

Thanks for pointing out the bigger site. This is a pay portal much like GiveCampus that many colleges use. In this case, it looks like it's an OU site. The key to making this sort of thing work involves getting the word out hence your reference to links on various social media platforms. This sort of thing will generate two things - lots of small gifts and hopefully futher engagement potentially leading to much larger gifts if development folks follow up. Generally someone is willing to open their pocket for something like this is willing to listen to an additional pitch or at least have a cup of coffee.