September 29, 2014
* Corresponding author: Fay-Wei Li fay.wei.li@duke.edu
Department of Biology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 27708, USA
GigaScience 2014, 3:16 doi:10.1186/2047-217X-3-16
Main text
Our Azolla crowdfunding campaign
The ultimate goal of crowdfunding is to garner sufficient interest and enthusiasm from a large enough group of people over the Internet, so that they feel compelled to provide some measure of funding toward your project. Reaching out and convincing a total stranger more than 6,000 miles away to pitch in sounds like a daunting task, and indeed it was. We struggled and learned a lot as we went along.
For the past five years, people have been using websites, such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo, to crowdfund their creative arts, tech or gaming projects. We chose a relatively new platform, Experiment.com, because it is completely science oriented. One potential drawback is that Experiment has a much narrower audience compared to those of the large and hyper-diverse Kickstarter or Indiegogo platforms; therefore, one’s project could have less visibility to potential backers from outside of science. At Experiment, we set our campaign duration to 40 days and our funding goal to $15,000, with an objective to be able to draft an Azolla genome with 100X coverage [12].
Within our first naïve moments of launching the campaign, we seriously thought we could just kick off our shoes, sit back and watch the cash flow in. Well, we were completely mistaken. It was the start of a constant marathon of social media networking through email, Twitter, Facebook, and other resources we had never heard of before. Based on our experience, there are at least three major social network layers that one needs to penetrate. The first layer comprises immediate families, friends and colleagues; happily they were also among the first to donate (thanks Mom!). We asked them to tell their friends, families and colleagues so that we could extend our reach to the second layer—acquaintances. By repeating and extending this cycle, eventually our message reached the most important third layer, consisting of complete outsiders.
Into the second week of our crowdfunding campaign, we discovered the power of Reddit, an online news hub and discussion forum with enormous visitor traffic. We did a Reddit Science AMA (Ask Me Anything), where anyone could ask us any question in one afternoon about Azolla, ferns, plants—even career advice! We answered more than 200 questions that afternoon and got over 3,000 “upvotes”. The number of visitors to our crowdfunding website spiked during that afternoon and the following two days. To reach out and directly communicate with a broad and diverse audience, a Reddit AMA is something we highly recommend.
Obviously, not everyone surfs Reddit, or keeps up with the latest trends on social networks. We therefore also reached out using a more traditional news medium: newspapers. At the urging of Duke University’s Office of News & Communications, the junior author wrote an op-ed stressing the importance of Azolla research. It was immediately picked up by Canada’s highest-circulating newspaper, The Toronto Globe and Mail, as well as the Contra Costa Times of the San Francisco Bay area [13]. A fair number of our backers were from Canada, which we believe can be attributed to the op-ed in The Globe and Mail.
As this momentum began to build, we were also fortunate enough to get serious attention from the “big guys”—The Economist, USA Today and Scientific American [13]—who all reported on our efforts. Such coverage, without a doubt, gave us a tremendous push.
⓿ The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/content/3/1/16
image source: http://www.gigasciencejournal.com/content/3/1/16
