Gaining research funds is always tough, but some people are having it tougher than usual at the moment. In late 2024, the New Zealand government cut all Humanities and Social Science funding from the Marsden Fund, their main research funding program. Since coming to office in the United States, Donald Trump has cut funding in a swathe of different programs. In addition, due to instability in the USA economy, some philanthropic funders have had to cut their programs dramatically. If you have had your funding cut recently, my heart goes out to you. With changes to USA funding, people have had funding stopped for projects that were already underway. As a result, people have lost – or are going to lose – their jobs. Labs of animals and greenhouses of plants may need to be euthanised. Interventions and other action research programs may need to cease. It is very tough for everyone involved. In response, those involved are scrambling to work out what they can do. Some may have accumulated funds that they can use. Some universities may be providing bridging finance. But for the most part people are looking for new funds, and they need them quickly. That’s difficult – most standard funding programs move slowly. It’s not uncommon for funds to flow to successful grantees a year after they submitted their application. That doesn’t help keep people employed and research on track in the meantime. During times of crisis, people need quick responses. Crowdfunding can provide a quick response. Most crowdfunding campaigns last six – eight weeks, with some even shorter than that. Given that most campaigns need about two pages of text and a one-line budget, it means that a successful crowdfunding campaign can bring in funds within two months. That sounds good.

BUT

It’s not as simple as that. Crowdfunding isn’t difficult to do, but it is hard work. The work for a research crowdfunding campaign consists of three main parts:

1. Asking your university for permission.
2. Setting up the campaign.
3. Asking to your friends, your family, your colleagues and the world for money.

Each of those steps is hard work, for different reasons.

Talking to your university

You could set up your crowdfunding campaign in your own name. You could do that right now. But that would mean that you are, in effect, setting yourself up as an independent researcher. The funds would come to your personal bank account. That has tax implications – the funds will add to your taxable income in most jurisdictions. It has insurance implications – you may find yourself personally liable for anything that happens during the research. And you probably won’t be able to use the university systems to hire people, to buy stuff, to organise travel to run your research project. If you can, organise for the funds to come to your university’s bank account. That way, the research is part of your ongoing career with the university. Suddenly, the university is auditing the money. The research is covered by the university’s insurance. You can run your research as you normally would. If your university already has experience in supporting crowdfunding campaigns, that shouldn’t be hard. Unfortunately, a lot of universities have no experience with crowdfunding. If that is the case, you will need to do a lot of talking. You’ll need to get your Head of School or Department on board. That shouldn’t be hard, as they will have a clear understanding of your situation. You will need to talk to your finance person, as you need the correct bank details, and want to make sure that the funds are allocated to you when they arrive at the university. If finance don’t understand what you are trying to do, ask if they have ever provided bank details for a donor to deposit funds to the university. It is similar to that. On the other hand, they may understand what you are trying to do, but you need to listen hard and understand what they need you to do as well. There may be different steps that you have to go through before the university will just hand over their bank details. It is possible that someone will say ‘Legal should check this’. That means talking to the university legal department. They could decide that there are no legal risks, but there is a risk to the reputation of the university if the campaign goes wrong or it fails. If that happens, you need your Head of School or Department to counter that argument, probably by saying that the risk of the research not proceeding outweighs the risk of the crowdfunding campaign. You also want to talk to the Media and Communications people at your university. They will generally have a lot of good suggestions for how you can talk to people about your crowdfunding campaign. They can help you understand what different channels are available and how they work. They can also explain the rules about whether you can use your university logo on your campaign, as there are sometimes strict rules about that.

Setting up the campaign

This is the bit that most people think about as ‘preparing for crowdfunding’. In some ways it is the simplest part of the process but it requires you to make some difficult decisions. Crowdfunding is a “flipped funding model” (Verhoeven and Palmer, 2015, p.6). You need to flip a lot of the assumptions you have about research funding. For a start, you need to decide what is the smallest amount of funding that will be useful. You might get more than that but you need to understand that you almost certainly won’t get as much as your grant. Each person that supports your research will donate an amount. That might be $10, $20, $50, $100. Most won’t contribute much more than that (unless they are your family). So here is an exercise for you.

1. Divide the amount you are asking for by 50. If people give $50 on average, then that is how many people you need to donate to your project to get that amount of money. If you ask for $100, then you only need two donations. If you ask for $1,000, then you need 20 donations. If you ask for $10,000 then you need (on average) 200 donations.
2. Now multiply the number of donations by 100. That’s the number of people you need to come to your donor page to reach your target. About 1% of people who hear about your campaign will donate. If you ask for $100, then you need two hundred people to hear about your campaign. If you ask for $1,000, then you need 2,000 people to know about it. If you ask for $10,000, then you need (on average) 20,000 people to know about it.

You also need to flip how you talk about your research. You care a lot about the details of your project, the methods, and the specific results you might find. But other people (even people in your discipline) need to understand where this sits within a wider milieu. What is the big picture for your area, and where does your research fit into that? To some extent, your research acts as both a signifier for a bigger problem and as a small, direct action to address that problem. Sometimes, the problem is concrete, like a social problem or an issue in the natural world. Other times, it will be more abstract, such as a theoretical problem or an area that you feel passionate about. That passion that you feel? That’s important to communicate as well! People need to be able to believe in you and the best way to help them to believe is to show your passion for your project. You will need to think about ‘rewards’. In crowdfunding, rewards are the different ways you can thank people for donating. These act as ways to help people think about how much they want to donate. If you don’t have rewards, people won’t put much thought into what they donate. If you have rewards, you are asking them to take a moment and think about how much to donate. Pozible, a crowdfunding platform in Australia, says that the best rewards are ‘priceless and worthless’. That is, they are things that don’t cost you anything, but are precious to those who receive them. For all your rewards, think about the time involved in giving them to your donors. If you plan to provide physical objects as rewards, think about how much both production and delivery will cost. Don’t go broke giving out your rewards. Finally, make a video. Campaigns with videos routinely do better than campaigns without videos. Keep it short: 60 – 90 seconds if you can. Just one clear message, spoken from the heart. Make it with your phone – it doesn’t need to be Hollywood. A video, even just you speaking to the camera, will take your message to places that your written words won’t reach.

Asking for money

This is THE work of your crowdfunding campaign and it is hard. Over the course of your campaign, you need to get the attention of those hundreds of people who might consider donating, and convince one percent of them (or more) to donate. In research crowdfunding, there is no ‘crowd’. You start with the people you know, and work outwards from there. Contact your friends, family, and colleagues and ask them to do two things:

• Donate to the crowdfunding campaign.
• Talk to two other people about the campaign.

Asking your friends and family for money is really, really, really hard. But that is where your campaign starts. It starts with the people that you know, and spreads out from there. During your campaign, you are trying to spread the word as far as you can. Most academics don’t have a ready-made community around their work, so you need to build yours during your campaign. You may reach out via social media (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, BlueSky, Instagram) or traditional media (like radio, TV, and newspapers). You are mentioning it in every meeting you go to, every conversation you have, every email you send. You are going to run out of ideas for how to talk about it, so you are going to enlist your cats or #FakePenguinFacts. When I talked to academics about crowdfunding, asking for money was the hardest thing for most people. They love their research. They love talking about their research. They need money for their research. But actually asking for money is hard. If you decide to crowdfund your research, good luck! Most people I have talked to say that it was well worth doing but they wouldn’t do it again. They appreciated the generosity of the donors and the lessons that they learned along the way. They felt, for the most part, that the amount of money wasn’t worth the work. Still, they didn’t regret taking the crowdfunding path!