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Introduction

Crowdfunding lets your supporters raise money on your behalf. Rather than only giving themselves, a supporter creates their own page for one of your appeals, sets a goal, and asks their friends, family and colleagues to donate towards it — a sponsored challenge, a birthday, a personal milestone. Those donations flow into the same appeal as any other gift.

Any campaign can have a crowdfunding side. It lives under /fundraising (alongside /donate for direct giving), and the individual pages supporters create are called crowdfunders.

Why run your own crowdfunding​

Most charities crowdfund through a separate, third-party website. With your N3O website the crowdfunding is your own — part of your own site, taking donations straight to you, with every supporter and every donation yours from the moment it happens. That brings many advantages, including:

  • No platform fees. Every pound raised is yours; there is no third party taking a cut of each donation.
  • One experience, entirely yours. The pages sit on your own website, in your own branding — supporters give without ever being handed off to an unfamiliar site.
  • Your supporters and donations, straight away. Everything lands in your own system the moment it happens — nothing to export from a third party, import, or wait for someone else to process and hand back.
  • You decide exactly what each page raises for. A crowdfunder's goal specifies precisely what the money is for, so there is no guessing — and no reading a supporter's own wording — to work out where it should go, as there often is on a third-party platform.
  • Real-time reporting, and communications that raise more. You see accurate figures as donations come in, and can trigger your own tailored messages — a thank-you, a milestone reached, a gentle nudge — at the moments that turn a supporter's page into more donations.

The words to know​

  • Crowdfunder — one supporter's own fundraising page, beneath one of your campaigns. (Its default name is "{Supporter}'s Fundraising Page".)
  • Goal — the amount a crowdfunder is aiming to raise. A crowdfunder starts with a single goal, tied to one of the campaign's offerings; the supporter can change the amount while the page is live.
  • Supporter — the person who creates and runs a crowdfunder.

What the crowdfunding page adds​

/fundraising is the home for raising money, just as /donate is the home for giving. It introduces crowdfunding, says why to take part, and lists the campaigns currently open for it.

A crowdfunding campaign page (/fundraising/<campaign>) looks much like the campaign page for the same cause, with three additions that make it a rallying point for the cause:

  • a progress thermometer — how much has been raised against a goal, and how many supporters;
  • a Start Crowdfunder button — how a supporter creates their own page;
  • a Donors panel listing recent donations, and, unique to this page, a Fundraisers tab listing the crowdfunders raising money for the cause.
MockupA crowdfunding campaign page: the same cause as the campaign page, plus a progress thermometer, a Start Crowdfunder button, and a Donors panel whose Fundraisers tab lists the crowdfunders raising money for it.
note

Unlike campaign and offering pages, crowdfunding and crowdfunder pages are not in your site's sitemap, so search engines do not index them. They are pages you share — from the /fundraising home, or in an email to supporters — rather than pages a donor finds through search.

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