Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: Fintech Interviews and Podcasts
Crowdlending platform InvestNextDoor CEO, Tabitha Creighton, Speaks to Empowering the Future of Economic Growth
NCFA Canada | Melissa Dysinger | August 2, 2016
Originally founded in the US three years ago by Co-founders Tabitha Creighton and Lisa Ohman, InvestNextDoor is a crowdlending platform focused on helping small businesses get direct loans from consumers, banks, and other private financial institutions that they may not have access to. InvestNextDoor recently published an excellent article titled "3 Ways that Empowering Women Leads to Economic Growth" that was the catalyst for reaching out to conduct the following video interview.
In this interview with Tabitha Creighton, CEO/co-founder of InvestNextDoor, we discuss Tabitha's experience as a Female Founder and the challenges in her road to success. We learned that to "InvestNextDoor", it is all about equalizing access to capital so that small businesses are on the same foot as bigger businesses in terms of options and ability to get the money that they need to borrow in order to grow. As a strong and passionate female founder, it is easy to look up to Tabitha and take her advice when she has been so successful in cofounding InvestNextDoor, while also being a mother of two. Throughout this video she talks all about the ups and downs in entrepreneurship while giving great advice to women to encourage others to follow in similar footsteps.
See: Only 7% of partners at top VC firms are women: The first comprehensive study on women in venture capital and their impact on female founders
Tabitha explains what peaked her interest in entrepreneurship when she was just a teenager. She liked the freedom to try new things and be creative, and these aspects started to form the roots in regards to her interest in founding her own business. Tabitha’s inspiration, she says, comes from anyone who seems to be able to handle “the impossible”, especially all the other mother’s out there in her similar position. The interview also consists of conversation about barriers to female leadership today, and in the next generation.
About Melissa Dysinger: NCFA Marketing and Events intern summer 2016. Melissa is a student studying Marketing in her fourth year at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, US. "Crowdfunding is creating a new market that connects both the general public and lead investors with investment opportunities that used to be available only to the wealthy. Soon Crowdfunding will become the future of how the majority of small businesses will be financed.”
The National Crowdfunding Association of Canada (NCFA Canada) is a cross-Canada non-profit actively engaged with both social and investment crowdfunding stakeholders across the country. NCFA Canada provides education, research, leadership, support and networking opportunities to over 1300+ members and works closely with industry, government, academia, community and eco-system partners and affiliates to create a strong and vibrant crowdfunding industry in Canada. Learn more at ncfacanada.org.
Why Crowdfunding is So Hot Right Now
ProfitGuide.com | Robert Gold | February 18, 2016
New regulations provide access a wider investor base, making the collective approach to raising capital even more attractive to companies looking for financing
Produced in partnership with Bennett Gold LLP Chartered Accountants and Write On The Money
Since the days of the first Kickstarter campaign, crowdfunding has grown from just another quirky form of Internet commerce to a well-established way to raise funds and generate buzz around a new product or company.
Need proof? At January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, more than half of the 478 companies with trade booths at the Eureka Park innovation showcase got their start through crowdfunding, says Craig Asano.
Related: 9 Key Questions About Equity Crowdfunding Answered
“I think it’s a stepping stone, or some people call it a ‘funding escalator,’” says Asano, the founder and executive director of the National Crowdfunding Association of Canada (NCFA).
The pre-sales generated by a crowdfunding campaign serve as tangible proof of concept, generating some growth momentum for your business and attracting advisors and investors. “You’ve got a proven model, you have quite great strength in terms of product as well as customer feedback,” notes Asano. “It’s a much more plausible pitch to [investors].”
On March 3, Asano’s organization will host the second annual Canadian Crowdfunding Summit in Toronto. The event comes at a pivotal moment for the financing model, with five provinces having introduced new regulatory model for equity crowdfunding in January.
The new rules allow startups and other companies to raise up to $1.5 million per year from retail investors, subject to certain conditions. Businesses looking to raise capital will need to list with an online funding portal. (Think Kickstarter, but for equity).But there’s a lot of prep work before you get to that stage, notes Asano. “You really need to have a better understanding [about] whether you’re ready to raise capital,” he says. “You’re going to want to learn about the cost to raise capital, and [to] connect with the people that can help you facilitate the actual process of raising capital.” One potential complication: managing the large number of stakeholders created by offering equity to the crowd.
Related: Equity crowdfunding will soon be legal in Canada. Should you jump in?
As an entirely new industry, there’s plenty of opportunity for new businesses and new kinds of businesses: platforms, vendors, consultants and so on. “It’s early days—there’s a lot of innovation to [come] in this space,” says Asano. “But the idea is that we’ll have wider distribution, streamlined costs, and eventually entrepreneurs could focus on their business rather than spending so much time trying to raise capital.”
Listen to the PodCast Now
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Register today for the 2016 Canadian Crowdfunding Summit | Innovation | Investors | Entrepreneurship
The National Crowdfunding Association of Canada (NCFA Canada) is a cross-Canada non-profit actively engaged with both social and investment crowdfunding stakeholders across the country. NCFA Canada provides education, research, leadership, support and networking opportunities to over 1300+ members and works closely with industry, government, academia, community and eco-system partners and affiliates to create a strong and vibrant crowdfunding industry in Canada. Learn more About Us or visit ncfacanada.org.
Equity crowdfunding will soon be legal in Canada. Should you jump in?
Canadian Business | Murad Hemmadi
When Palmer Luckey needed money to develop his virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift, he turned to crowdfunding. Over a month-long Kickstarter campaign in 2012, 9,000 backers put up US$2.4 million; a year and a half later, Oculus VR was acquired by Facebook Inc. (Nasdaq: FB) for US$2 billion. If the US$300 many of those online supporters pledged had bought them equity instead of an early version of the Rift, they would have netted a $43,500 payout, by some estimates.
Equity crowdfunding, the offering of shares of (typically startup) companies on crowdfunding platforms akin to Kickstarter, has been legal in Europe, Australia and Israel going back as far as 2010, but it’s only now catching on in North America. Saskatchewan was the first province to formally recognize this web-enabled alternative to traditional venture capital or private equity fundraising in 2013.
Regulatory changes set to take effect on Jan. 25, 2016, will legitimize equity crowdfunding in Ontario, Manitoba, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Accredited investors will be able to invest up to $25,000 per company (up to a $50,000 yearly total), while non-accredited investors will be restricted to $2,500 per investment (and a $10,000 cap in Ontario).
British Columbia adopted rules in May capping individual investments at $1,500. The provinces restrict the kinds of companies that can seek funding and how much they can raise. Those looking to set up online portals where issuing companies can list their offerings will also be required to register with regulators and fulfil certain gatekeeper functions, like doing background checks on issuers and reviewing disclosures.
See:
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Data on Equity crowdfunding performance in the UK
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Alberta and Nunavut Securities Regulators Publish Proposed start-up Business Exemption for Comment
For retail investors, crowdfunding offers a way to diversify one’s portfolio into private equity, normally the preserve of institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals, says Don McDonald, president of Waverley Corporate Financial Services. “I think most people are probably underweighted in private equity,” he adds. Waverley licenses the SeedUps and InvestX platforms in Canada, which allow users to invest in fledgling and established private companies, respectively. (The company uses existing memorandum and accredited investor exemptions, and McDonald says it is unlikely to make heavy use of the new equity crowdfunding regulations.)
Since private company valuations are not strongly correlated to the swings in public equity markets, crowd holdings can provide diversification to investors who already have conventional stock and bond portfolios, he says. “You could even view it as a bit of a hedge.”
Still, it’s a high-risk asset class. Investors would be wise to approach crowdfunding campaigns the same way they do the long-standing market for exempt securities. Most companies seeking funding are in the startup stage, and the failure rate of such enterprises, statistically speaking, ranges between 75% and 90%. “If you’re thinking about investing in crowdfunding, limit your exposure to something that you’re comfortable losing,” says Michael Pieciak, chairman of the corporate finance section committee of the North American Securities Administrators Association. The asset class also has limited liquidity. “There’s no secondary market for trading in crowdfunding,” notes Pieciak. “If you need to access the cash in an immediate way, then you are in sort of a bind. You can’t go to the stock exchange and trade the shares in for dollars.”
See: Early bird registration open for 2nd Annual Canadian Crowdfunding Summit in Toronto (March 3)
Another issue is the lack of transparency. Notwithstanding regulators’ intrusion into the market, the requirements for financial and governance disclosure are nothing like those for publicly traded companies. You can’t expect to find third-party analysis of the venture, and your financial adviser likely won’t be much help either. McDonald suggests sticking to companies in sectors you understand well.
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The National Crowdfunding Association of Canada (NCFA Canada) is a cross-Canada non-profit actively engaged with both social and investment crowdfunding stakeholders across the country. NCFA Canada provides education, research, leadership, support and networking opportunities to over 1300+ members and works closely with industry, government, academia, community and eco-system partners and affiliates to create a strong and vibrant crowdfunding industry in Canada. Learn more About Us or visit ncfacanada.org.
Kick-start your business idea with tips from a crowdfunding veteran
The Globe and Mail by Harvey Schachter | October 25, 2015
New ideas need to find financing and a market of buyers. Both hang out on crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter. It’s a chance to test your concept, find potential buyers and raise capital from those customers, in advance.
But few of us know how to do it. We might feel as confident undertaking a trek in the Amazon jungle as plunging into the wilds of Kickstarter.
That’s why Jamey Stegmaier is a good fellow to listen to. He has crowdfunded seven projects – including three board games and a game accessory of his own – raising more than $1-million (U.S.). That’s chump change when we consider big company initial public offerings (IPOs), but for the smaller companies he is involved in, the fundraising was golden. He has learned what works and what doesn’t, which he shares in his new book, A Crowdfunder’s Strategy Guide: Build a Better Business by Building Community.
“I love the idea that anybody can create anything if others support it. It’s a good way to gauge demand,” he said in an interview.
The basics are simple: You start a project page, sharing your idea with the Kickstarter world. Ideally, that page will have a catchy explanation of the project, with sufficient detail to attract support. You name an amount that people must pledge to be a part of the effort and what their reward will be for their funding. For a board game, a pledge amount might be $40 and the reward a copy of the game delivered to their home.
Related: 2,000 Global Crowdfunding Sites to Choose from by 2016: Top 5 Growth Indicators
If the project doesn’t raise the full funding you are seeking, the pledges fall by the wayside and no money (or rewards) are exchanged. The site takes a processing fee.
But it’s not magic. You can’t throw just anything on the crowdfunding platform – there are others besides Kickstarter, notably GoFundMe – and expect it to succeed. You need to build a community that will welcome the idea. That probably starts, as with most new businesses and products, by talking to friends and relatives and encouraging their support. But beyond that, you want to seek out people who might be interested in the new offering, which in his case included folks who hang out on gaming sites.
Well before the launch, he advises seeding those locations with information about what’s ahead, building buzz, so when it launches there will be a big initial buy-in.
Related: Why Crowdfunding Campaigns Fail (And What Can Be Done)
“Momentum is really important. If you are 15 days into the campaign and only have 10 per cent of your target, you probably won’t succeed,” he pointed out.
The longest campaign Kickstarter allows is 60 days. But he recommends on your first effort, when you will encounter teething problems, to take 28 days to 35 days. After that, aim for 21 days to 28 days.
To prepare your strategy, he recommends getting involved in supporting other Kickstarter campaigns – pledges can be as low as $1 – to see how the system operates.
“See what excites you and what dismays you –what things lead you to distrust a project. You can then emulate the better practices and apply them to your own project,” Mr. Stegmaier said.
They biggest mistake creators make is not having a visually appealing page. So invest in your own – it’s a crucial element in your marketing campaign – by hiring a top-flight artist and graphic designer.
If you just throw the page together, people will also assume you are just throwing together the product you want them to fund.
Another big mistake is to underestimate the costs involved in manufacturing the product. So before you launch, think carefully about what is required to get to market and check out the actual costs involved. He has seen too many projects fail at this point, despite raising the desired amount.
View:
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Crowdfunding Strategy: How To Decide On Your Funding Goal Read
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Crowdsourcing – A Powerful Marketing Tool for Startups
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Crowdfunding has changed, but these three things you should know to succeed haven’t
Kickstarter insists that if you don’t deliver, you must return the money, so it’s not a situation you want to find yourself in. He said a few class-action suits have arisen, deciding in favour of the funders, and with punitive damages on top some creators have found themselves required to pay back triple what they raised.
Kickstarter seems like a preorder system. But with most preordering, such as a book, the product exists and purchasers are just waiting for the publication date. Here, the product doesn’t exist. At one level, Mr. Stegmaier believes that’s delightful. He tries to get his games only 95-per-cent mapped out before launching a Kickstarter campaign, because by interacting with the supporters, he will be able to learn what else the game could benefit from and what might be ditched.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Secrets of a Crowdfunding Master
ProfitGuide.com | Robert Gold | Oct 30, 2014
Want to know what will make people support your venture? Ask the guy who's raised more than 2,000% of his goal?
Crowdfunding gets a lot of buzz, and for good reason: when done right, it can be a great way to test a product and to drum up cash for development. But for every wildly successful effort to raise money there are countless failed bids.
You can put Ben Webster’s efforts firmly in the first category. Webster is co-founder and CEO of Toronto-based sound system producer Mass Fidelity, which holds the honour of running the most successful Canadian Indiegogo campaign to date. As of publishing time, its efforts to fund development of The Core wireless speaker system has raised $940,297—nearly 2,000% higher than the company’s goal of $48,000.
Related: See Mass Fidelity at the 2015 Canadian Crowdfunding Summit
In this week’s BusinessCast, Webster reveals why he thinks his firm’s campaign has been such a hit, and offers advice for others vying to do the same:
1. Use it to validate your offering
From the outset, Webster decided to approach his Indiegogo campaign as a giant focus group. If people responded, great; if not, it’d be time to retool. “We look at crowdfunding as a proving ground for the product and the technology,” he says. This is especially useful when you’re dealing with discerning customers: “It is a great way to gauge market interest in a very tough segment, which in our case is early adopters.”
Check Out:
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Equity Crowdfunding, Noise or Music to your Ears (incl slide decks)
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Podcast: Crowdfunding, Novelty or Resource?
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Crowdfunding Best Practices (from the post library)
2. Offer something that won’t bore your target audience
That said, Webster had no interest in putting forward a half-baked product. The early-adopter audiophiles Mass Fidelity is after are a smart group: they spend lots of time on online discussion forums debating the relative merits of different offerings. “They’re usually well-educated about the technologies being offered, so they’re not easy to please,” Webster says. “On the whole, the have a very good BS detectors.” That’s why he was diligent in making sure what Mass Fidelity had to offer was truly unique and novel before putting out a call for cash. “We learned that there wasn’t a product that you could compare directly to ours,” he explains. “That got the community very excited.”
3. Don’t get greedy
In crowdfunding, nothing looks worse than setting a sky-high target—then falling massively short of it. Mass Fidelity’s Indiegogo goal—$48,000—might appear to be modest, but that was a strategic decision, says Webster. “That number was directly related to production costs and cash flow,” he explains. “We already had a relatively successful product in the market before this. We wanted to increase production volume on The Core because after doing a bunch of demos for various sales channel partners, we were fairly confident that demand would far surpass supply. So that $48,000 number was directly related to us trying to meet what we saw as the guaranteed supply of the existing sales channel.” Any money that came in beyond that? Gravy.
Listen to a 14mins 9sec interview w/ Mass Fidelity, Founder, Ben Webster
Tackling The Crowdfunding Credibility Gap: A Q&A With Dropkicker
Techvibes by Natasha Lomas | October 30, 2014
As crowdfunding has scaled up so too have some of the problems inherent with firing unconditional cash at people whose main selling point might just be their madcap idea. The big names of the category, the Kickstarters and Indiegogos, would argue that’s the beauty of crowdfunding. People donating unconditional cash to someone else’s dream, however incredible (or otherwise) it may be.
But when it comes to crowdfunding technical projects the category functions more as an extended marketing channel playing to an early adopter community of gadget enthusiasts — so there’s understandably more of an expectation of a tangible, functional device at the end of the day. Which makes separating credible hardware projects from incredible fantasies more of an imperative. A potato salad is a potato salad is a potato salad. But a personal teleportation device remains science fiction (for now).
Related: Kickstarter fraud: Washington files first consumer protection lawsuit involving crowdfunding
The risk of out-and-out scammers looking to make a fast buck from crowdfunding communities is an inevitable consequence of the rising profile of the category and its flagship hardware successes. Several of the highest funded crowdfunding projects to date have been hardware projects, including the Pebble smartwatch (which raised $10.3M) and Ouya console ($8.6M). Other multimillion dollar crowdfunding raises in recent times have included the Form1 3D printer and 3Doodler 3D printing pen, both now shipped. But there have also been problematic high profile campaigns too — such as the device we dubbed the “impossible” projection watch. Or Healbe’s miraculous calorie-counting wristband. Despite some incredible claims these fantastical gizmos still pulled in big bucks.
Crowdfunding certainly has a credibility problem, and arguably a growing one (Kickstarter used to vet projects before they could be posted but ditched that check and balance earlier this year). But attempting to plug that credibility gap, or at least sprinkle some welcome scepticism on proceedings, is a two-man blog, called Dropkicker. It’s been doing technical investigation of crowdfunding projects — acting as a sort of unofficial consumer watchdog for crowdfunding — for about a year.
I came across their work while parsing the comments on the Ampy hardware project on Kickstarter— and asked them to answer a few questions about their own initiative. “Dropkicker has exploded over the past year,” says co-founder Michael Ciuffo. “There are a lot of people out there looking for some skeptical expert advice, and we’re trying to do our best to provide it.”
Who are the founders and writers of Dropkicker? And what’s your technical background?
Jason Haensly (Occam’s Chainsaw) – I’m a software engineer with 4 years of product development experience. I currently work at i1 Biometrics, a wearable tech startup whose launch product is a mouthguard that measures the severity of head impacts. Before that, I worked with Ciuffo at Synapse.
Michael Ciuffo (ch00f) – I got my degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 2011 and have three years of experience in product development specializing in small, consumer electronics. I worked for Numark Industries (now InMusic Brands) for a year before moving to Synapse Product Development in Seattle.
When did you launch Dropkicker?
Michael: Dropkicker started in the fall of 2013. We just passed our one year anniversary.
What was the trigger for setting it up?
Michael: During the summer of 2013, I found that one of my personal electronics projects (published on a personal blog) had been copied and used to launch a Kickstarter campaign. While I was mildly upset that my name wasn’t mentioned in the campaign (despite the creators emailing me and asking for details a few months prior), I was more upset at their abysmally low funding goal. Having personally built the product in question myself, I knew that they couldn’t deliver with the funding they were requesting.
Ultimately, they changed a fundamental feature of their product in a sort of bait-and-switch cost-savings effort, and delivered a few months late. The delivered product worked well enough to appease the backers, so I’m not going to mention their name specifically. Still, watching this all unfold was a very frustrating process, and it left me wanting a platform where I could explain in full the kind of challenges facing similar projects that many backers may not know about. I ran it by Jason who had some prior writing experience, and Dropkicker was born.
Related: NCFA Canada Launches Crowdfunding Standards Initiative
How are you funded? Presumably you still have day-jobs so this is a side project?
Michael: We are funded primarily by our day-jobs, and Dropkicker remains very much a side project. We have managed to get a few hundred dollars in donations and advertising revenue (which we try to be very up-front about), but when spread over the number of hours spent on the site, we’re not even approaching minimum wage.
Do you think crowdfunding is becoming more of a target for scammers?
Jason: Sadly, yes, though I’m not sure they all involve malicious intent. With more and more of the traditional funding sources (e.g. VCs) demanding a successful crowdfunding campaign to demonstrate market viability, we’re seeing an increase in the number of projects with no resources and hopelessly unrealistic goals. Whether they’re a scam or just naive and optimistic comes down to intent, which we can’t possibly judge.
I expect this to only get worse as the pool of potential backers – and their money – continues to grow.
Related:
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Kickstarter Backer Allegedly Scams Over One Hundred Projects
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In Crowdfunding, Who is Responsible for Preventing Fraud?
Should crowdfunding sites be offering more checks and balances themselves, in your view?
Jason: The fundamental issue is a lack of accountability. If a project raises some money but fails to deliver, it’s the responsibility of a scattered mix of backers to organize and fight, which is both difficult (since it’s a process that will require both time and money) and often fruitless (since the project creators have likely burned through most of their resources).
Of course, more could be done to prevent questionable projects from getting funded in the first place. Currently, backers really only have access to the marketing materials provided by the project, and the comment section is typically a tangled mess – there are definitely tweaks the sites could make that would improve things a bit. More responsible tech journalism would help too.
Michael: As Jason pointed out before, a lot of the “scams” that we’ve found on crowdfunding sites are really the result of inexperienced people hopelessly overestimating their abilities (look up the Dunning Kruger effect for more detail). This is something that is really impossible to filter out. After all, one of the founding principles of the crowdfunding movement is giving power to the “little guy” who may not have the experience or accolades to get attention from traditional funding sources. So when a project raises over a million dollars for a half-baked idea, can you really blame them for being unable to follow through? They’re supposed to be allowed to fail, but when tens of thousands of people get excited about the project, every false step starts to look like intentional deceit.
One of the biggest contributing factors to this is the enormous amount of pressure from overly enthusiastic tech journalists encouraging backers to flock to these projects without first taking a critical or skeptical view. This adds a false sense of credibility to a lot of these otherwise fledgling projects that they really don’t deserve, and backers get upset when their unrealistically high expectations are broken.
As far as the actual scams go, I am happy to to report that Kickstarter at least has been stepping in lately for some of the more obvious ones. iFind, Scribble Pen, The Rock smartwatch, and Luci have all been shut down by Kickstarter after it became obvious that these projects were illegitimate. We would have rather they step in sooner than the final days of the campaigns, but at least they stopped money from changing hands.
Doing a full in-depth feasibility study for every technical project submitted to Kickstarter or Indiegogo is too large of a task for any company to reasonably offer without substantial compensation, so I recognize that these sites will probably never offer these kinds of services. That being said, there is a huge amount of brain power in the community that could be used to validate projects if they only had access to good information. Many project creators are very tight-lipped when it comes to project details either because they’re hiding something or simply because they’re busy and understaffed. Often requests for more detail or a product demonstration are ignored.
If there’s anything crowdfunding sites could do to improve project credibility, it would be to require creator responses to pertinent backer questions. In a recent case, Kickstarter gave the Scribble Pen project 24 hours to produce a video demonstrating the current functionality of their prototype. Claiming that the request was unreasonable, Scribble left the site for Tilt. Tilt ultimately shut them down when their “product demonstration” was shown to be a fake done in post production. This is exactly the way we see that it should work. If your product doesn’t work yet, be up front about it.
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The National Crowdfunding Association of Canada (NCFA Canada) is a cross-Canada crowdfunding hub providing education, advocacy and networking opportunities in the rapidly evolving crowdfunding industry. NCFA Canada is a community-based, membership-driven entity that was formed at the grass roots level to fill a national need in the market place. Join our growing network of industry stakeholders, fundraisers and investors. Learn more About Us | Support Canadian Crowdfunding.
Ever wonder how cutting edge technology and scientific breakthroughs happen?
NCFA Canada (About Us) | Gabe Nasr | August 14, 2014
Research projects at universities worldwide are the breeding ground for innovation and transformation, and they are tapping into a community of online contributors to break new ground.
Crowdfunding helps develop these communities by not only making fundraising more efficient and seamless, but also bringing global experts together to collaborate and advise these projects. Crowdfunding presents an opportunity for synergy within a research project or topic, allowing more experimental or risky pursuits to be funded, which can lead to novel scientific or technological breakthroughs.
On our panel for this video discussion:
We'd like to thank the following video panel participants for supporting the development of the Canadian Crowdfunding industry and NCFA Canada:
Ryan Davies
Ryan Davies is the director of advancement communication at Carleton University in Ottawa, where he oversees all aspects of fundraising and alumni relations. He helped start FutureFunder.ca, which is a crowdfunding platform for research and other projects happening at Carleton (he's also a participant in the NCFA Ambassadors Program). It has seen great success, raising over $500k total thus far, in what he calls a “Platform for donors, at the request of donors”. He sees crowdfunding as building a philanthropic community at Carleton, allowing outsiders to be actively involved with projects on the cutting edge of technology and science.
Nick Dragojlovic
Nick Dragojlovic is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at UBC, working on cancer and other rare disease research. Nick sees crowdfunding as a perfect answer to many different funding problems research projects face when getting off the ground. In our video chat with him, Nick describes crowdfunding as “Accelerating innovation” by presenting university donors with novel, creative and experimental research projects that they can directly support. Another great upshot Nick points out is the impact on the communities around certain research projects. When a research campaign goes live, it publicizes the goal, and brings other experts in that field together, creating a global ecosystem around the project through collaboration and networking.
Ever wonder how cutting edge technology and scientific breakthroughs happen?
Category : Crowdfunding
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This video is a panel discussion with Ryan Davies and Nick Dragojlovic on Crowdfunding for University Research, held by the NCFA Canada
Research projects at universities worldwide are the breeding ground for innovation and transformation, and they are tapping into a community of online contributors to break new ground. Crowdfunding helps develop these communities by not only making fundraising more efficient and seamless, but also bringing global experts together to collaborate and advise these projects. Crowdfunding presents an opportunity for synergy within a research project or topic, allowing more experimental or risky pursuits to be funded, which can lead to novel scientific or technological breakthroughs.
Crowdfunding helps develop these communities by not only making fundraising more efficient and seamless, but also bringing global experts together to collaborate and advise these projects. Crowdfunding presents an opportunity for synergy within a research project or topic, allowing more experimental or risky pursuits to be funded, which can lead to novel scientific or technological breakthroughs.
Learn more:
https://ncfacanada.org/
http://www.futurefunder.carleton.ca/
http://www.pharmacy.ubc.ca/
See more NCFA Canada sponsored videos:
Global crowdfunding with Dr. Richard Swart
Why These Cause, Product and Community-based Crowdfunding Campaigns are Successful
Equity Crowdfunding for Real Estate in Canada
Can Bitcoin coexist with Crowdfunding?
The National Crowdfunding Association of Canada (NCFA Canada) is a cross-Canada crowdfunding hub providing education, advocacy and networking opportunities in the rapidly evolving crowdfunding industry. NCFA Canada is a community-based, membership-driven entity that was formed at the grass roots level to fill a national need in the market place. Join our growing network of industry stakeholders, fundraisers and investors. Increase your organization’s profile and gain access to a dynamic group of industry front runners. Learn more About Us | About Crowdfunding or contact us at casano@ncfacanada.org.
