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How it works

A project, a host, a crowd — and enough time for the funding to happen.

The model

A project borrows a crowd

Crowdfunding works when a project already has an audience. Crowdasaurus supplied the audience, by pairing the project with an organization that had one.

Step one

A project

Someone brings an idea and a funding goal, and puts it on the platform.

Step two

A host

A corporation, a nonprofit or an institution with a community around it takes the project on.

Step three

A crowd

The host puts the project in front of that community. Funding follows attention.

Why it was different

Two halves of one platform

Most crowdfunding sites are a marketplace: projects on one side, strangers on the other, and nothing in between. Crowdasaurus put a third party in the middle — an organization whose endorsement meant something to its own community.

  • For the project — reach it could not buy, and a partner with a reason to promote it.
  • For the host — traffic, revenue, SEO and engagement, around a project it chose.
  • For the nonprofit — a way to fundraise with community partners instead of at them.
The platform was built in a co-working space, and designed to be run regionally.
White-label crowdfunding communities, so projects show up where they can best be seen.
How Tech.co described the product, December 2013

The shape of it

Four things it did differently

Regional first

Built for one city’s institutions before it was built for everyone’s. Pittsburgh was the test.

White-label

A host ran the campaign as its own community project, not as a link away to somebody else’s site.

Longer windows

Projects stayed open longer than the thirty-day norm, so ideas that took time to catch could still fund.

Supported, not solo

The host’s marketing people helped shape a campaign that a project creator could not have shaped alone.

The film

The explainer video is gone

The home page embedded a Vimeo film, vimeo.com/75040645. It no longer plays: Vimeo answers that the video isn’t available and the owner has been notified. Nothing on this rebuild pretends otherwise.

Why this page has no video. The company made one film, and it is the only film it made. Replacing it with stock footage would have put a different company’s pictures where its own used to be.

Get going

Think your organization could host a project?

The platform was built to be run by companies, institutions and nonprofits, on their own community, in their own region.

Crowdasaurus

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