Launch UMD, a campus-based crowdfunding site, helped 75 percent of its 43 completed campaigns meet their fundraising goals during its first year of operation, new donor strategies manager Nora Pittmann said.
Although the site has met or surpassed fundraising goals for the majority of its first-year campaigns, some of the groups that fell short gave mixed reviews regarding the Launch UMD campaign experience.
Recently, a March campaign to raise money to get LGBT activist Judy Shepard to speak at this university was one of the least successful Launch UMD campaigns. It raised $625 – 9 percent of its $6,500 goal.
Despite the outcome, Tim Tormoen, an Alumni Association assistant executive director who helped lead the Shepard fundraiser, stayed positive. He said the money raised helped to offset funds for the preplanned event and that the biggest impact of the fundraiser was raising awareness.
“If we had not made a penny off the thing, just the fact [that] we had 220 people attend our program — that in itself was the biggest win of all,” Tormoen said. “We didn’t technically meet our goal … but it was more about chartering that awareness.”
The success of a project is based on a number of factors, Pittmann said. Successful campaigns usually include large teams with consistent fundraising efforts, while smaller teams with less drive often don’t reach their goals, she said.
“All the project teams work hard; it’s just that some of them are maybe not as well-prepared or don’t have as many people working,” Pittmann said. “I think sometimes there are not enough people committed to make the project successful.”
Such was the case when the American Chemical Society began a crowdfunding campaign to pay for at least 10 of its members to go to the ACS National Meeting and Exposition in Boston, ACS President Christopher Ma said. The group raised 64 percent of its $5,000 goal and can now only afford to send three to four members.
“The reason why we weren’t successful was because no one really had the passion or motivation to fundraise,” the sophomore biochemistry major said. “I feel like people didn’t really try, so we didn’t reach our goal.”
Ma said he offered to send those who raised the most money to the conference and feared the incentive made raising the money too competitive among the society’s members. Even though Launch UMD officials gave him advice and networking opportunities, Ma said he is unsure if he would use the site again.
Ma isn’t alone in his uncertainty. When Matthew Aruch, the College Park Scholars’ Science, Technology and Society program assistant director, began to create a Launch UMD page to garner support for robotics-based STEM programs for Prince George’s County public schools, he said he felt unprepared for the task.
“When you have a full-time job and lots of other things going on — creating a video, writing donation letters — those things are outside the general scope of what I do,” he said. “I didn’t have the expertise to make my launch page more successful.”
The group’s October launch raised 60 percent of its $8,000 target. While this will allow them to fund the robotics program for 2015, they will need to depend on other forms of outreach to help fund it for 2016, Aruch said, noting Launch UMD might just not have been the best fit for their task.
Ultimately, Pittmann said the Launch UMD experience is meant to help educate users on how to properly execute fundraising efforts.
“It’s natural that not every project will be completely successful,” Pittmann said. “It’s a good learning experience for us and a good learning experience for the project teams to see what it is like to fundraise.”
