Lee Schneider, founder of Digital Fundraising School, chats with Rodrigo Davies of the MIT Center for Civic Media about civic projects and crowdfunding. We’ll talk about how civic and non-profit projects succeed in the crowdfunding space, recommend some platforms to try, and discuss best practices.
Rodrigo is a civic technologist, researcher and problem solver whose work focuses on designing, building and analyzing tools to help communities and governments collaborate for social good.
As a Research Assistant at MIT’s Center for Civic Media, Rodrigo founded the Civic Crowdfunding Research Project, a platform for social research on crowdfunding, and leads the development of Call to Action, a web-based tool to enable community groups to design and deploy voice-based services. He has served as an adviser, product manager and practitioner on civic projects with the Mayoral offices of San Francisco and Boston, the United Nations Development Program and Gateway House, a Mumbai-based foreign policy think tank.
Rodrigo has been invited to speak about civic technology, design and engagement by SXSW Interactive (Austin, TX), Personal Democracy Forum (NYC), the Library of Congress, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Kansas City Community Capital Fund and Boston Civic Expo.
Key points in the conversation include a discussion of the Community Capital Fund (http://www.indiegogo.com/partners/ccap) and its role in encouraging civic crowdfunding.
Rodrigo’s key tips for success in the civic crowdfunding area include:
– Start early. A crowdfunding campaign for a civic project should come after 6 months to 12 months of community building.
-Post updates. Community projects need to be accountable to their supporters.
– Have a clear «ask.» Commercial projects have set the pace here, and community projects also need to be clear about what they want and how the funds will be used.
-Crowdfunding offers community projects and non-profits access to fresh audiences.
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