 |
The Grant Writing And Crowdfunding Guide |
Much as with grant writing, you will need to step out of your comfortable researcher mindset if you wish to pursue crowdfunding. You will need to learn another set of skills: marketing.
Crowdfunding is a lot more liberating than grant writing. There are no rules you need to play by, no formats you need to adhere to, and no abstracts or methodologies. While this freedom sounds agreeable, it is surprisingly not your ally. Without a structure to guide you, it is easy to lose yourself in the blank canvas of your inexperience.
It is a misconception that crowdfunding is easy. Asking a crowd for money is easy. It’s as simple as writing a short statement and putting it online. Getting money from that crowd, however, is a whole other matter. Have you done basic market research? What is your value proposition? What platforms are you including in your social media strategy? Have you scheduled posts? What does your public interaction timeline look like? Do you understand the italic words in the last five sentences? As with all new experiences, your first crowdfunding campaign will be a challenge. Are you feeling that the challenge is not worth the reward? You shouldn’t. Even if your first attempt fails, the concepts and skills you will pick up along this journey are the foundations of effective communication skills.
We won’t go into the full details of how to set up, write for, and maintain interest in your crowdfunded project - entire books and guides have been written on the subject. We will, however, give you a quick overview of the key steps you should take, some best practices, and an idea of what exactly is required of you. This will allow you to determine if crowdfunding is an avenue you wish to pur sue or not.
For ease of reading, we will break down the crowdfunding process into three major stages: the precampaign tasks you need to complete before launching your funding call, the activities to be completed during the campaign itself, and the post-campaign follow-up.
STAGE 1: Pre-Campaign
Step 1: Title
Compared to a scientific paper, a grant title should contain less scientific jargon. For the purposes of crowdfunding, this rule is taken to its extreme: no jargon is allowed whatsoever. An easy way to judge the appropriateness of a crowd- funding title is to imagine it within the pages of a magazine. Two titles seen on Experiment.com: “Sydney Harbouring unknown coral treasures” and “Mathematical model to reduce maternal and infant mortality in Southeast Asia” are appropriate titles. “Sublethal effects of radioactive surface contaminated objects (SCOs) on mammals and ecological interactions” is less so. As with grant titles, try to encapsulate your main research question as concisely as possible.
Step 2: Abstract
A good crowdfunding abstract is extremely short, to the order of 4–7 sentences. It should follow the following simple structure:
Establish the background/problem (1–2 sentences)
Research question (1 sentence)
Objective(s) (1–2 sentences)
Significance (1–2 sentences)
Remember, a crowdfunding campaign is generally geared at generating preliminary data on a minimal budget for a larger project. If you find that you have too many research questions or objectives to fit into one sentence, you are possibly over-promising, and should consider reducing the scope of your project.
Exercise
Here are four versions of a crowdfunding abstract. Which one is more likely to open your purse and why?
Version 1
2016 may be the year of virtual reality (VR), with four major headsets coming out from Sony, HTC, Oculus, and Samsung. But while technical limitations are quickly being addressed, no one is looking at the potential psychological side effects of VR use. Does VR addiction exist, and if so, is it a prevalent problem, or a minor one? We aim to qualify VR addiction by surveying young gaming users, classifying their experiences under the four stages of addiction, and looking for any trends in the data.
A better understanding of the potential psychological effects of VR would allow for regulatory policies or preemptive action steps to prevent psychological dependencies, especially in younger consumers. (114 words)
Version 2
2016 may be the year of virtual reality (VR), with four major headsets coming out from Sony, HTC, Oculus, and Samsung. Today’s headsets are better designed, and social media and computer game heavyweights are promoting VR actively. As VR games are readied for mass market, a few psychologists have drawn attention to its addictive nature. Will VR games increase the number of game- addicted children? Will it turn normal entertainment into immersive addictive experiences? Will it ultimately influence the way we see reality?
We want to survey young users to identify whether they run such risks. To avoid future unwanted family and societal issues, we need to find out the human cost of VR, today. (115 words)
Version 3
2016 has seen a marked rise in the prevalence of VR, backed by the production of four headsets from major players Sony, HTC, Oculus, and Samsung. Because the early technical limitations and lack of accessories that prevented wide adoption and prolonged use have been addressed, user feedback now indicates that improvement in the 3D visual immersive experience have significantly increased the readiness of nongamers to engage in VR gaming. However, potential psychological side effects of VR use in games, including addiction, have not yet been investigated. Comparative analysis of similar games with and without VR is necessary to assess whether VR triggers addictive comportment and distorts the perception of real life. Using a scale validated by the NCPS, we intend to quantify the addictive and psychological effects of VR on young gamers. A better understanding of VR’s potential psychological effects would allow for regulatory policies or preemptive action steps to prevent psychological dependencies, especially in younger consumers. (159 words)
Version 4
2016 was the year of virtual reality launched by Sony, Samsung, HTC and Oculus. In 2017, Microsoft, Acer, Acus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo will each have their own VR headset. Their immersive quality is exceptional. They will be on each child’s wish list. VR games will be the next big thing. A few lonely voices, mostly from psychologists dealing with game addiction problems in young people, are raising the alarm. Will VR turn normal entertainment into immersive addictive experiences? We want to survey young game users to see whether VR increases addiction risks. If it does, it is still time to modify VR games before they put our real families to the virtual sword of addiction. (114 words)
Readability will impact support. If you are appealing to parents, version 1 or 2 is more likely to reach your target audience.
Step 3: Duration
The campaign duration is the period during which the pledges are collected. It seems logical to set this duration to the maximum allowed, elongating the funding window, but this logic is flawed. The campaign duration is a fund- raising period for the researcher - a period during which you are constantly active, answering public queries, shar- ing your campaign online, networking with groups offline, and other such outreach activities. It entails a heavy work- load, but one that is tied to the success of your campaign. Therefore, set this period to a realistically sustainable amount of time. The majority of researchers choose 30 days.
Step 4: Budget/Funding goal
Write down the major steps of your project step by step to identify cost items, and add a small percentage to each budget item to cover the crowdfunding platform’s pro- cessing fees. Don’t worry - if you are unsuccessful in meeting your funding target, no fees will be charged (although if you choose to use a funding platform outside of the three previously mentioned - experiment, Walacea, and Consano, you should check just in case).
As previously mentioned, crowdfunding campaigns are more often successfully funded when the funding goal is around or under $5k, so keep your project simple. At these levels, there is very little equipment purchasing possible, and certainly no expensive hires.
Once you have determined the total amount, write a short paragraph justifying your expenses: Explain why you require certain objects, or how they will be used. For example, you may wish to justify the amount needed for participant remuneration, or qualify what lab supplies are needed to conduct the experiment.
Optionally, spend a little time thinking about writing what you would do with funding in excess of your target. This shows positivity, but more importantly, enables accountability and motivation for funders who may oth- erwise find no reason to support you once the initial goal is met.
Step 5: Project context
This section most closely resembles the introductory para- graph of a grant. It allows you to flesh out the background and scientific context surrounding your research project. You should link your research idea to existing literature, and can do so casually using hyperlinks - there is no need to follow any referencing system. Remember that your audience is not necessarily a scientific one, so this section, like all others, must either remain jargon-free or have the jargon explained immediately and simply. Aim to remain under 150 words, with the shorter the better.
Step 6: Project significance
Helpful tips for writing a significance statement are cov- ered in the chapter on significance, page ---.
Step 7: Project goals
In this section, take the steps you’ve listed out to deter- mine the budget and write them in paragraph form. Another way to think about it is to complete the following sentence: To accomplish my goal, I first need to __, then__, and finally__ This section most closely mirrors the specific aims of a proper grant abstract.
Step 8: Imagery and video
Although it departs from the familiar territory of writing, incorporating a visual element in the campaign is essential to its success. You will first need to prepare a banner image that arrests the viewer’s eye as they scroll through the list of fundable projects. Ideally, this image should be original content created by you - a photograph, diagram, etc. If you cannot think of a suitable image, you may also use an image from the Internet, as long as it is licensed under one of the creative commons schemes83 (most require you to accredit the original author). The best tool to help you find such images is located at http://search.creativecommons. org. It is a search engine that allows you to quickly look through images tagged under the creative commons in Google, and image repositories such as Flickr.
Aside from the banner image, we highly recommend the inclusion of a short video in your campaign. Statistics gathered from the two largest general crowdfunding sites show that projects with short videos (2–3 min) have a 60% higher chance of being successfully funded, and are twice as often shared by participants. Knowing that you are active researchers and not marketers, no audi- ence is expecting a highly polished, high-production value video. The least you should aim for is a simple narrated image slideshow with a few video segments of yourself (or your team) talking about the project. Of course, if you included layman-level graphs or showed the experimental setup and equipment, you would fur- ther engage the audience. With a low complexity video, free software such as iMovie (mac) and Windows Movie Maker (Windows) should be sufficient. Should you have something more polished in mind, you may choose to acquire easy to use and medium-priced (between 50 and 200 dollars) screen capturing and video editing software to create your video (for example, Screenflow for Macintosh, or Camtasia for Windows). You also have cross-platform software such as Snagit, or Movavi screen capture studio.
You may now be wondering what kind of content to include in your video. Experiment.com has an excellent template that you can choose to follow at https://goo. gl/1uLz6i.
Their approach is to format your video through the answers to five questions.
1) What are your opening sentences?
Remember, the video will be your first point of contact with the audience. They will watch it after seeing your banner image and title, but before reading any project details, or even your abstract. What then should you begin the video with? It is tempting to fall into old writ- ing habits and start with the background, but videos follow different rules of engagement. Through years of writing scientific papers, we have come to adopt the mindset that background always comes first. Unfortunately, we often transfer this mindset to our scientific presentations (and make no mistake, this crowdfunding video is a scientific presentation). Instead, the crowdfunding video is more akin to telling a story (thus the template being called a storyboard). People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care, and by extension, why they should care. Deliver this message upfront as early as possible, and in as simple relatable language as you can. If you can tie it in with current events, even better. Move on to the next point, the project background, only once people are hooked.
2) What are the project background and context?
Recapture the essential background from the text you’ve written earlier in Step 5 above - project con- text. Remember that they will watch the video before reading the text. You might feel that there is a large amount of redundancy, but presenting the message in two parallel tracks (video and text) helps reinforce your key message. While the content is mostly the same, try to vary the tone so that the video message sounds casual, as if you were dialoguing with an acquaintance, or being interviewed on the radio. If you write, write for the ears, not for the eyes. Writing for the ear uses a different part of your brain, more relational, less abstract.
3) What is challenging in your plan?
As in a traditional grant, highlight the challenge. Identifying the problem area shows your audience you are aware of potential difficulties and plan to address them. If there’s nothing challenging, why should some- one give you money to do it? No risk, no reward.
4) Why are you excited about the results?
Notice that the phrasing of the question includes the word “you”. This part of the video shouldn’t focus solely on the difficulty of the scientific issue - that has been established earlier in the background and challenge statements. This part is to emphasize your personal passion/interest in pursuing this research. Confidence and excitement are contagious. If you really want to conduct an experiment, your enthusiasm will make the viewer want to share that journey with you.
5) Call the backers to action
Asking a person for their time can be daunting; asking a stranger for their time, more so. And asking a stranger for money is one of the most uncomfortable positions you can find yourself in. It may feel that asking for donations is an evolved form of begging for money. And yet, in the video, you are required to look into the camera and ask for support. So, step away from your own mindset and try to perceive crowdfunding as the donor, not as the organizer. Backers of scientific pro- jects see your campaign as an opportunity to fund meaningful, worthwhile research. For many, this might be the first time they contribute money to scientific pursuit. When you ask for support, you are inviting them to join you, to co-create research that both you and they are passionate about. Therefore, don’t be intimidated about asking, but imagine yourself sharing an opportunity - your enthusiasm and positivity will impact your delivery.
Step 9: You: The researcher(s)
In a typical grant, you have to put in a lot of effort to prove that you’re worthy of receiving funding and that you have a dream team. In crowdfunding, these requirements remain, but to a lesser extent. Your audience will still want reassurance that you will complete the project, but given your smaller objective, failing to accomplish your stated aims is unlikely. Your research institute, your experience, or your mentor should be enough to satisfy most donors. After dedicating one or two sentences reassuring the audi- ence of your ability to deliver, use the rest of this space to put a human face on your science. Introduce yourself, but also why you’re interested in tackling this particular prob- lem, and what it means to you to be able to do this experiment. Take the following example.
(1) I am a 3rd-year doctoral student in the Data Science Program at the University of North Carolina. My mentors are Drs. Janice Sulemy and Grant Jacobs. (2) After I lost a catastrophic amount of data due to the failure of my brand new hard drive, I decided to investigate how disk surface could show wear and tear during early read-write cycles. Among all the hard drives out there, I am particularly interested in the flaws on the drives with a gel-coated surface, like my hard drive. (3) I believe my research will help drive manufacturers detect disk wear conditions much earlier than they do now, and avoid problems for us all, their consumers. If all goes well, I’ll never need to go through the trauma of losing data on a brand-new drive ever again, and neither will you.
(1) Credibility-building; (2) Story of personal interest
(3) Why this research is important to me.
If you’ve followed all 9 steps, congratulations, your cam- paign is nearly ready to go live. But first...
STAGE 2: During the Campaign
You could put your campaign online and then wait for donations, but to do so would be to misunderstand how crowdfunding works. Following a “build it and they will come” mentality yields poor results. Unlike mainstream crowdfunding sites Kickstarter or Indiegogo, scientific crowdsourcing sites remain a niche area. Despite their best efforts, science crowdfunding sites do not typically draw large crowds. It is therefore up to you to promote your project.
Step 1: Give your campaign an initial boost
A little-known statistic is that most projects that fail crowdfunding campaigns fail by a large amount. That hardly seems encouraging until you consider the opposite: according to Kickstarter data, 78% of projects that surpass 20% of their funding goal are successfully funded. A certain amount of that success is owed to the endowed progress effect, first described in a 2006 study published in the Journal for Consumer Research.84 In a nutshell, it is difficult to convince a consumer to take action when it looks like they’re starting from scratch - the inertia is difficult to overcome. But if it looks like a foundation is already laid out, if “you’ve got the ball rolling”, the consumer finds it much easier to commit.
Exercise
Imagine you are given funds to allocate to a crowdfunded project. After searching through the available options, you find two, which are equally valuable and comparable in every aspect except for one. Both projects have only been live for three days. One project is currently 2% funded, the other 25% funded. Which would you back? Why?
All other variables being controlled for, most of you would have picked the 25% funded project. Let’s look at why. As the fund allocator, you want to see a return on your investment. Since the 2% project looks far from completion, you fear that it may not be able to achieve its goal. Although the crowdfunding format guarantees the money will ultimately be returned to you if the project fails, you still end up wasting time and forego the opportunity to benefit from the other project. Conversely, the 25% funded project clearly has built up some momentum. If it was able to collect 25% of its goal in only three days, a quick mental extrapolation into the future gives the optimistic picture that it will successfully be funded. Psychologically, we feel more secure about putting our eggs in the basket others have already chosen. Successful crowdfunding follows a wavy hyperbolic tangent funding pattern rather than a linear one.
Now that you’re aware of the psychology governing dona- tions, how can you use this knowledge? Organize pre- pledges. Before you even launch the campaign, approach friends, colleagues, other researchers in your field or on the topic, and convince them to each pledge a small amount when the campaign eventually goes live. In this way, you can very quickly build up the initial 20% and help make the act of donating easier for others.
Another critical reason to pursue this prepledge strategy is that it allows you to craft sound bites such as “Successfully funded 20% within the first day” which help motivate readers and, more importantly, blogs and media which may pick up on the project.
A quick side note: don’t worry too much if your campaign quickly gathers funds the first few days and then flags off towards the middle. In crowdfunding, money typically is generated in the first few days (the initial flurry) and in the last few days (the last push). That doesn’t mean that you should relax, however! Your goal is to build on the momentum generated in the first few days and to slowly push that percentage up to a number that motivates new audiences for the final push.
Step 2: Find interest groups
We mentioned in the last section that “blogs and media” might carry the story of your research and help promote it.
Unfortunately, they are unlikely to find you, meaning that it is your role to actively seek them out. To identify your audience, think about who your research would impact in some way. This audience should consist of both scientists and non-scientists. The impact can be direct (they benefit from the research data you’re creating) or indirect (they have an interest in your topic/they might benefit later/the data might have educational value to them).
To identify blogs, simply search through Google with the formula <[your keyword] +blog>. Pitch them your research in a short email explaining what you’re doing, and why you think it would be of interest to their audience.
To identify magazine or news sites is a little more challenging. An excellent place to start contacting the media in a familiar setting is by reaching out to the press office of your old university. Beyond that, try approaching local news sites. They are more likely to pick up your story due to its local human-interest angle. For other online news sites, go to the website and search for (non-scientific) keywords related to your project. If there are articles published in the last year or multiple articles on the topic, identify the author of the most recent one. Searching for their names is often enough to turn up a twitter account or email address where you can pitch your research. In your email, mention that you’ve read their latest article on [topic] and that you’re working on the same thing. Don’t worry too much if you don’t get a response, and don’t feel like you’re intruding. Pitching a good story to a journalist is making their job easier, and you will hear back from them if it’s a good fit. It’s only intruding if your message is jargon- heavy or very long. Master the art of concise, clear writing for the media.
Identify Facebook groups interested in science topics. These groups are powerful vectors for your message, as they already contain your targeted audience and can help disseminate beyond your initial online circles.
Although a little more obscure than Facebook and Twitter, Reddit is another promising channel.
Step 3: Reach out to your personal network
Reaching out begins with your immediate network of family, friends, and colleagues. The key here is to promote your research without coming across as a salesman. That means no mass emails or mailing lists and no daily shares on social sites. Instead of sending out a single email to a mailing list, look through that list and gauge each person’s potential level of interest in supporting you or your project. Craft a generic email, but leave a section near the top where you can customize it to the intended recipient - the bare minimum would be to include their name, but the more customized, the better. Although it is your end goal, asking for monetary support may come across poorly. Instead, reach out to your network and ask for help, or for ideas that could help you. This indirect way of asking is easier for you, and easier for them to respond to. If they like your project, they will themselves volunteer to donate, money perhaps, but also in time, effort, network, or thought. For those who respond with enthusiasm, invite them to spread your message and share your campaign on their own social networks at the two most important points: the beginning and end.
We advised not to spam social networks. Do not repeatedly post links to your campaign page with the words “please support!” Instead, aim for two updates a week, but accompany these updates with new content: a brief interview with a collaborator, some images of the study location, a layman explanation of the methodologies, any milestones in funding reached, etc. Posts with an image attached are generally more engaged with, so keep your message relatively short on text and high in visuals. Remember who your audience is - what might seem like an everyday boring task to you might be an exciting insight into the world of research for others.
STAGE 3: Post-Campaign
Congratulations! If you’ve made it this far, you’ve success- fully been crowdfunded. You’ve accomplished the bulk of the work. Unlike grants, you will receive all of the pledged money upfront. The following may depend on which crowdfunding platform you choose, but generally, there is no slow release of funds, no quarterly evaluations, no yearly reports or legal accountability to external parties, beyond delivering the promised perks to funders. Of course, there remains a large difference between what you can do, and what you should do. Crowdfunding science is more than a funding channel; it is an ongoing, shared research project. So, while you have little legal obligation to share research progress with your audience, you have a moral and scientific one. Funders of scientific projects sup- port projects primarily for the advancement of science - perks are the optional bonus, not the deliverable. The deliverable is your ongoing research, in the form of your thoughts, achievements, challenges, and results. So, aim to share, and share often (at least once a month). Fortunately, progress updates can be easily shared with your funders through the crowdsourcing website, and your updates do not need to follow any specified format.
Limitations of Crowdfunding
All crowdfunding platforms will perform a preliminary check to eliminate low-quality projects from their plat- forms. Unfortunately, they do not possess the vast resources and networks of well-established journals to conduct in-depth peer reviews. Some concerns about crowdfunding continue to exist, and it is up to you, the researcher, to make sure you do not fall into any of the fol- lowing sticky situations.
Dangerous or Unethical Research
As you will not need to submit your proposal to an ethics committee before or during your campaign, it is solely up to you to make sure that you are not violating any ethical rules of conduct. While any researcher would be able to clearly avoid dangerous scenarios, there are less cut-and-dry situations, such as psychological research, which may place willing subjects in stressful situations. Although not strictly under the purview of your research institute or university, your study design could still benefit from an internal review. Justification of the crowdfunding campaign as a preliminary data generator should be sufficient to enlist the help of your supervisor or other interested scientists.
Lack of Accountability
The freedom of not having to write reports also uncovers a slightly less desirable aspect to crowdfunding. Freedom from accountability makes things easier, but we must remember that many bureaucratic guidelines were put in place for a reason. Accountability to crowdfunders may be straightforward when the result is a tangible product, but what if it is only a scientific progress report? How can funders be sure that the money was well spent? Besides accountability to funders, is there accountability to science? Was the data collected without bias? Are the results statistically significant? Is the study design or idea valid? As most crowd- funders are not in research, they may not be able to correctly assess scientific results and conclusions without proper guidance from the project creator. A high-profile case of such an instance was the Immunity Project, which raised over $400k in 2014, but lacked any real HIV expertise - and was in fact criticized by HIV experts for its poor approach. It is at best a misguided campaign, but at worst, may have diverted funds from other worthier projects.
Fortunately for science, to be accepted by peers, conduct- ing an experiment is not enough. Results produced from a crowdfunding platform still have to undergo rigorous peer-review processes to be published in a reputable journal.
Sensationalism versus Importance of Funded Ideas
Grant funding suffers from several biases, including a slant towards favoring seniority and applied research. While crowdfunding manages to bypass these, it suffers from a few biases of its own. For example, two highly funded scientific studies have been on the topic of psychoactive drugs, LSD and DMT. Of course, these projects have a legitimate scientific purpose and future therapeutic utility, but it would be naive to believe that these campaigns were so successful because of their potential value instead of their attractive nature. That is not to say that unfashionable science is not fundable: with amounts as small as $3–5k, a scientific problem does not require worldwide attention to be successful. It does, however, require extra effort on the researcher’s part to either frame niche prob- lems in an attractive way, or find the audience that will benefit most from its completion.
Source: The Grant Writing and Crowdfunding Guide for Young Investigators in Science
