Host: This webinar is hosted by Network for Good

Presenter: Allen Wolff (http://www.crowdrise.com/supportcityyear/fundraiser/awolff) at Crowdrise (http://www.crowdrise.com/)

Theme: The power of the crowd is real and lots of small donations really can add up and have a monumental impact. We just made that up. Really.

Their slogan is “If you don’t give back nobody will like you.”

Less importantly, CrowdRise is an online fundraising platform that leverages the most modern tools, game mechanics, incentives and promotions to turn your participants and supporters into incredibly effective fundraisers. Our goal is to make fundraising fun, turn donors into fundraisers, and raise more money for your cause. The way we talk about it internally is that if Facebook is the place that defines you by your friends and Twitter is the platform you use to say what you’re doing right now then CrowdRise is the site for you to show how you give back.

Content: This webinar takes you on a practical use tour through the site. The point of the site is to drive donors to your site that has lots of functionality, appeal, ease of campaign creation and trusted location. Match campaigns are easy to set up.

This site creates the potential to raise alot of money from small donations for campaigns of all sizes. Centralization, ease of access, sharability, and trustworthiness as a centralized site create a fundraising tool that bypasses alot of expensive and time consuming fundraising costs and trustworthiness issues.  

Building your social narrative is a vital part of building your site.

Costs: No cost to get started. Crowdrise charges a transaction fee per donation. The percentage of the fee depends on the size of the donation. You can upgrade as you need.

Followup: The site provides built in Thankyou tools for you.

Takeaways: This is a self serve fundraising site. It works like change.org that allows you to create your own peition and collect signatures on their site. You build your profile and event pages on Crowdrise, people donate on that site. The innovative part of Crowdrise is that donors get Rewards for their contribution.

This site is built to motivate your donors by building consistent messaging through this turnkey system. The Rewards system is the frosting on the cake of many incentives to get people to participate.