The wisdom of crowds

After making sure it had the right project to offer, the University of Ballarat is celebrating a successful venture into crowdfunding. By Dallas Bastian. A crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for a researcher’s computer program has had a successful outcome. In a University of Ballarat initiative, run on the website Pozible, the general public donated more than $25,000 to Grant Meredith’s Scenari-Aid project. Meredith said the campaign was an experiment for a small country university to establish whether crowdfunding was a viable pathway to secure financial support. Janette Corcoran, emeritus professor at the University of Ballarat, said that the objective of using crowdfunding to secure equity wasn’t entirely about the money; it was also about the public engagement that came with it. “The next big thing that’s coming through in the tertiary sector is about impact,” she said. “What we see is that crowdfunding gives people the opportunity to fund research they care about.” Securing financial backing was not the only benefit involved for researchers. Corcoran said it also “helps researchers talk about impact in a different way and actually puts it at the beginning of the process rather than at the end. It was difficult for universities to gain funding from non-traditional sources, but crowdfunding provided a way for the public to get behind a project they were interested in. By using the system, Corcoran said the university hoped to avoid having to introduce a range of new authorities and approval processes. “We had to work with Pozible to ensure the money that was coming in could count as research income, that it could mesh well with the processes that universities have to use.” The success of the campaign was put down to the fact that the project was easily understood, showed that funding it would make a positive social impact and that it had established organisational backing. Corcoran said the success could also be attributed to the university’s having an open attitude to trying a new way of securing funding, plus the fact that Meredith already had an established following and a worldwide user base – one of the reasons Scenari-Aid was chosen for the project. “One of the key criteria for selecting a crowdfunding project is that you have to care more about your following or your crowd than about the money that they might give you,” Corcoron said. She said this would result in the tenacity needed to undertake the activities that would make the campaign successful. Scenari-Aid is a web-based simulator in which recorded social scenes are played out. It aims to help people who stutter gain social confidence by practicing speaking in public settings. The program can also help those who suffer from a social phobia, stroke sufferers, people from non-English-speaking backgrounds and people with developmental problems. Contributors can give a tax-deductible donation or receive something in return for certain amounts paid. Corcoran said one of the biggest challenges was to work out what a research project could return to donors, and staff from other faculties were asked to help brainstorm ideas. Some of the incentives were hand-written thank you letters, inscriptions on a virtual wall as a long-term supporter of the project and the chance to nominate a scenario for use in the program. By adding the research category to its website, Pozible has allowed other universities to take advantage of the technology. The website’s pilot project, a partnership with Deakin University, resulted in six of eight postgraduate research projects gaining funding, with more than $68,000 generated. Meredith said the university would use the method again, adding that it was important to pick the right project. He said it was important that the project be easily understood and that its merit be properly established. “I think it comes with doing your homework about what crowdfunding platform to use, picking the right research to highlight,” he said. Crowdfunding is just the beginning of a series of experiments the university is looking at engaging in.