Crowd Funding: What is it and Should You Do it?

Stacy Davis
The Paw Print

With the ever-rising costs of higher education tuition, many students are left wondering how they are going to pay for the piece of paper stating they have a Degree when their College and University years are over. Students Loans, Scholarships, and Grant money can only go so far and only apply to so many education hungry students; so what about the rest? Well, for the rest here is some food for thought.
The topic of Crowd Funding has recently hit the news. So the first issue to address is, what is crowd funding? Crowd funding takes place when someone, such as you, takes action to fund a mission or venture, such as going to school, by raising minor amounts of money from major amounts of people. Students can essentially raise their entire College tuition by asking for small contributions from several people or businesses. However, crowd funding requires more than simply asking for money. In a typical setting, the funder creates a short “profile.” This can consist of an introduction, video, list of rewards, and images; anything to make themselves seem memorable to the “donor.”
This profile is then presented by the funder, and people and businesses can chose to support the cause or not. Simple! Right? Maybe. So what are some of the benefits of crowd funding? One of the biggest attractions to crowd funding is the fact that big boss corporate businesses are not doing the funding, the general public is. For this reason, there are a few main benefits to crowd funding in relation to the donor. The funder is able to bond with the funded through their imaginative profile, the rewards they may offer, and through the sense of stock in the funded’s greater purpose.
Then there is, of course, the student; he or she who is being funded. Crowd funding offers several benefits for the student, as you may have guessed. First, the student will be able to take this money at no risk and attempt to get through College debt free.
While students may promise some type of “reward” for donors, they are still not obligated to pay the money back and certainly not obligated to pay it back with an outrageous interest rate.
Next, the student will have a chance to truly examine why they want to go to college, who they are, and what they want to do with their life. This may sound cliché, but it is very true. By taking the time to build a creative, fun, and endearing profile to present to potential donors, a person will learn a lot about themselves, even if they don’t mean to. The student then, with new or old found confidence, must present this profile to possible clients, all the while giving them even more confidence: especially when a successful presentation takes place.
Overall, while crowd funding may seem as though it is the adults version of selling cookie dough and popcorn to support something, in reality it is so much more. It is selling the belief that you can accomplish something great with your life—because you can!