5 Tips for Launching a Non-Profit Campaign on Kickstarter

By Laura Entis, entrepreneur.com

Kickstarter may be best known for launching flashy tech and home gadgets, but the platform can also be an effective place to raise money and awareness for nonprofits, says Isabel Sheinman.

She should know. In 2013, Sheinman was hired by Library for All, a cloud-based library accessed by students in Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to run the nonprofit’s Kickstarter campaign. At the time, Library for All was still an idea; in order to progress beyond that, the small founding team needed funds for a research trip to Haiti that would inform the layout for the initial version of the digital library. At $100,000, the Kickstarter goal was ambitious, but crowdfunding allowed the nascent project “to build a community while also raising funding,” says Sheinman.

The work was hard and there was more of it than she had anticipated. Library for All exceeded its campaign goal by nearly $10,000, but getting to that final figure required non-stop perspiration. The effort paid off, though. Today, Library for All has raised more than $500,000 and its cloud-based library contains more than 1,700 titles.

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