Lee Schneider, founder of Digital Fundraising School, and Rodrigo Davies of MIT's Center for Civic Media will discuss success strategies and best practices for crowdfunding your civic project, education project, or non-profit. They'll be joined by Jase Wilson, CEO of neighbor.ly, and also by other special guests from popular crowdfunding platforms.
We will cover what platform to choose for your project, be it citizinvestor.com, neighbor.ly, donorschoose.com or razoo, how to connect with your community of potential donors, how to run a successful civic crowdfunding campaign and how to capitalize on the social capital you've generated.
Rodrigo Davies of the MIT Center for Civic Media is an expert in online crowdfunding for civic and non-profit projects. He is a civic technologist, researcher and problem solver whose work focuses on designing, building and analyzing tools to help communities and governments collaborate for social good.
As a Research Assistant at MIT’s Center for Civic Media, Rodrigo founded the Civic Crowdfunding Research Project, a platform for social research on crowdfunding, and leads the development of Call to Action, a web-based tool to enable community groups to design and deploy voice-based services. He has served as an adviser, product manager and practitioner on civic projects with the Mayoral offices of San Francisco and Boston, the United Nations Development Program and Gateway House, a Mumbai-based foreign policy think tank.
Rodrigo has been invited to speak about civic technology, design and engagement by SXSW Interactive (Austin, TX), Personal Democracy Forum (NYC), the Library of Congress, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Kansas City Community Capital Fund and Boston Civic Expo.
Lee Schneider is a film and television producer with nearly 30 years experience in creative media making. He founded Digital Fundraising School to help artists, creatives, and social change makers become better crowdfunders.
Jase Wilson is CEO of Neighbor.ly, a fundraising toolkit for communities. He earned a Masters in City Planning from the Massachusetts Instituted of Technology and speaks about new models of civic fundraising. Previous talks include SXSW, Smart Cities World Expo, CityAge, Collaborative Economy Summit, ICMA and TEDx.
Anna Doherty is Director of Donor Engagement at donorschoose.org. Anna builds relationships with citizen philanthropists, and inspires them to support teachers and students through DonorsChoose.org year after year. Previously, she managed grassroots campaigns (from Mustaches for Kids to Celebrations) and social media. Prior to joining the team in 2010, Anna worked in Development and Special Events at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based at the Bronx Zoo. She grew up in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg public school system and has a B.A. in Art History from the University of North Carolina.