A medium for one purpose, or is there more ?

Typically crowd sourcing your product or initiative to a large market that want to buy your product and are willing to pay to back it into production is what crowd sourcing is predominately used for, but can it do more?. Whilst my motives here are purely selfish and for my own gain I was interested in seeing the results. A year ago, during a tough spot it was made apparent to me that I need to have a website of my work and musing up on the www to help with my future prospects. At the end of the day its great to give someone a business card, but its even better to give them a business card with a website on it that they can get a preview of your work before you start working with them.

At the time I did not have any expendable cash to launch or host a website and in the interest of an "experiment" I thought I would give crowd sourcing a go via social media, particularly Facebook. Now hosting was only going to come to $120 so this was not an outrageous amount of money to crowd source and my Facebook is securely only for my immediate family and friends, so I was interested to see how long it would take to fund. Turns out it only took 2 hours, with many donors giving $5 to $10, but the target was reached in the blink of an eye.

Now whilst this practise of crowd sourcing things you want and having other people pay for them has no real return for the donator, in this case the object was something that would help me with my career versus a new car or a luxury holiday people were more than happy to help. Was I surprised that it got funded ?, no. Was I looking to see who donated and who didn't out of my friends list ?, no. For me it was a to see how the whole thing worked and maybe even give me a few ideas for future crowd sourcing for potential clients in the charity field. Return to the Home page
By Steve Bott.