Pitt enters world of crowd-funding

Encouraged by the success of several pilot crowd-funding projects last fall, the University of Pittsburgh has launched its own crowd-funding website — engage.pitt.edu.

Crowd-funding, soliciting friends, family and supporters to underwrite specific projects via Internet fundraising platforms like Experiment.com, GoFundMe, Indiegogo and Kickstarter, gained traction several years ago among students seeking to fund everything from scientific research to independent film production and charitable endeavors.

Now, some universities are lending their brands to such efforts.

With the launch of engage.pitt.edu, the Oakland research school joins about 50 universities across the nation that have taken a cue from the successes of net-savvy students who tapped the Internet to underwrite projects.

Earlier this month, Jordan Durham, Jaz McKibben and Blaise Kepple, a trio of Point Park University students seeking to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter to produce a documentary film in South Africa on shark finning — the practice of slicing fins from sharks, then throwing them into the ocean to die — surprised themselves and others when their online plea, complete with video, exceeded their goal.

“It was really crazy ambitious,” Durham said.

But it worked, and the students, who are underwriting their own travel costs, will head south for a different kind of adventure this spring.

Stories like theirs have lured universities to the concept.

Brian Sowards, founder and chief executive officer of USEED, a crowd-funding platform that works with 15 universities including Penn State, said such platforms are going mainstream in higher education.

“It's becoming essential. I think most institutions are looking for innovative ways to build their relationships with donors who aren‘t responding to more traditional fundraisers like calling people at dinner or sending them mail,” he said.

That was a key concern at Pitt, which started out with several small pilot projects on engage.pitt.edu last fall.

Dhanalakshmi Thiyagarajan, a Pitt senior majoring in bioengineering and president of Pitt's Society of Women Engineers, said her group, which participated in the pilot project, was thrilled when supporters kicked in $2,351 to take the group over its $2,000 goal.

The money will be used for outreach projects the group hosts each year to encourage youngsters to go into engineering.

“We were very excited to be part of this. We love doing outreach events, but we weren't able to expand them as much as we wanted to. We used to do five each year. Now we'll be able to do five each semester and expand the number of students we can reach,” she said.

Thiyagarajan said most of the contributors were Pitt graduates and parents whose children had participated in the outreach events.

Albert J. Novak, vice chancellor of Pitt's Office of Institutional Advancement, said the university wanted to be able to exploit crowd-funding to help students and researchers fund their endeavors and to reach out to alumni. Pitt eventually settled on a platform developed by researchers at UCLA and later commercialized by RuffaloCody, a leader in fundraising and enrollment management software and services.

“There are a number of platforms out there, but we wanted to find something we would be comfortable with. One of the reasons we wanted our own platform is we don't have fees associated with it for our students,” he said.

Moreover, Pitt's program will allow those using the crowd-funding site to keep whatever they raise, even if they fail to reach their goals — something some independent crowd-funding sites do not permit.

“And, we wanted to know who our donors were,” Novak added. “(With) a lot of the platforms, you don't know who is giving. We wanted to be able to steward our donors.”

Novak said engage.pitt.edu, which will mount online campaigns lasting four to eight weeks, will take applications for projects both in Oakland and at the school's regional campuses and will work with groups to craft their messages.

“What crowd funding does is allow people to reach out to their social network, their families and their friends and engage them in their priorities. What this will do is give our recent graduates an opportunity to really stay engaged with us philanthropically and underwrite things they care about. It's going to give us an opportunity to engage with them in ways they care about,” he said.

Debra Erdley is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. She can be reached at 412-320-7996 or derdley@tribweb.com