Class trip crowdfunding: Fundraising for the digital age

You’ve booked an educational tour with Explorica. You’ve held an informational meeting with students and their parents (Step Three in the tour process). Everybody’s on board.

Great! Now what?

Establish a plan to reach your fundraising goal for the overall cost of the class trip.

Nowadays, online crowdfunding can be a powerful asset. Think of holding a bake sale where anyone, anywhere, and at anytime can donate to your cause.

Though crowdfunding—raising money in small amounts from many people over the Internet—is still somewhat of a new phenomenon, a multitude of sites have sprouted up within the last few years. They’re not all for everybody, but these three sites may help you and your class get to your destination.

Three crowdfunding sites for class trips

It’s important to note which sites are appropriate for your specific needs. Kickstarter.com, for instance, is a popular crowdfunding site, but caters to causes attempting to finance creative projects.

You won’t find much support for a class trip on Kickstarter, but these three sites may show you and your students some love…

“I had an idea that it should be easy for friends and family to come together online and raise money for life’s important events.” — Brad Damphouse, co-founder and CEO of GoFundMe

GoFundMe.com is great for individual fundraising. It’s the #1 crowdfunding site for personal causes and life events, according to its media page.

This may come in handy if, as the group leader, you decide that each student should raise their own fare. You could even show kids how to set up their own fundraising page during your trip’s informational meeting.

Fees for this site amount to about eight percent. So certainly aim higher than the bottom line to pad this cost. Unlike other crowdfunding sites, however, there’s no time limit on your campaign. In this case, time really is money. And you’ll have more of it to reach your monetary goal. GoFundMe collects donations through a third-party website called WePay.com.

Fundly

Like GoFundMe, Fundly processes donations through WePay.com, as well. And much like GoFundMe, it’s also geared toward the individual fundraiser.

The site walks users through a step-by-step process, when setting up their online fundraising page. It taps into their Gmail or Yahoo contacts for an email blast that will drum up donations. Fundly also avails the user options to connect Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Tumblr accounts for further promotion. And the page provides embed code so that the user can feature their Fundly campaign on any website or blog they administer.

The upper-left corner of the screen—prime real estate on any webpage—provides space to upload a video or engaging picture. Further down the page, the user’s wall features campaign progress in the form of comments and blog posts. The blog is particularly useful, when the user needs more content (they can share on social media spaces like Facebook and Twitter) to generate buzz about their trip. Fundly gives fundraisers 60 days to reach their goal.

Indiegogo

Indiegogo.com is a bit more basic and sports a slightly pricier, 9-percent processing fee. Its comments section is not as prominent. So funders have to click around the page, if they want to check progress.

A unique feature to Indiegogo, however, is its right margin, which allows users to display prizes based on the amount of donation. Depending on decided rewards, these conditional incentives could convert more people to support your class trip.

Perhaps, for $5, you’ll promise to send supporters a postcard from one of these life-changing tours…