Even if you’ve never heard of crowdfunding, you’ve almost certainly seen an example on social media. Crowdfunding is obtaining finances for a project or cause from many people online. Individuals and small businesses can use it to acquire early-stage project funding. Best Crowdsourcing Platforms of 2023.
Rewards crowdsourcing, debt crowdfunding, and equity crowdfunding are the three most common types of crowdfunding. With reward crowdfunding, you generate cash by reaching out to supporters who receive a little gift or a product sample in exchange for pledging a set amount. In debt crowdfunding, you acquire a loan and must repay it within a specified time. Some people prefer this to a bank loan because it is usually considerably quicker. Finally, equity crowdfunding entails giving a share of your company’s ownership to those who help you raise funds.
When looking for a fundraising site, look for costs and see if it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. Many platforms will deduct processing fees from each contributing transaction and a portion of your overall earnings, while a few sites use an all-or-nothing approach, meaning you only get paid if you meet your target. We’ll walk you through some of the top crowdfunding sites on the web below.
What Is Crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding is a popular method of fundraising that has been used for several purposes, including social justice campaigns, startup enterprises, medical needs, and real estate projects. Crowdfunding is soliciting money online from many individuals to fund a project. Crowdfunding allows businesses and individuals to raise funds.
How Does Crowdfunding Work?
Crowdfunding is a group of people donating a small sum to a project, a new business, or a charitable cause. The “crowd” in crowdfunding refers to a vast group of people who may or may not know each other. Instead of a few investors backing the venture, crowdfunding allows many people to contribute a small amount of money.
Crowdfunding can be divided into three categories:
- If donors donate a specific amount, you can reward them with a product sample or a gift.
- Debt crowdfunding: Rather than taking out a bank loan, you take out a loan through crowdfunding and then pay it back.
- You provide your donor’s shares in the company in exchange for money through equity crowdfunding.
How Much Do Crowdfunding Sites Charge?
Various crowdfunding sites have multiple fees. Before signing up, be sure you understand all of the site’s prices. Depending on the site, payment processing fees might range from 3% to 5% per transaction or a proportion of monthly money earned. Some areas may need a minimum amount to be raised, or the contributors’ money will be returned, so make sure you’ll be able to meet your goal.
Are Crowdfunding Sites Worth the Cost?
Crowdfunding sites might help you raise a considerable sum of money in a short amount of time. However, because the costs might pile up, you should be sure that using the site is worthwhile. It may be easier to justify the price if you have a popular product or cause, a viral piece of content, or a solid social media following. Remember that you must promote awareness of your crowdfunding campaign for people to donate.
How We Chose the Best Crowdfunding Sites
To come up with our best selections, we studied and examined the most popular crowdfunding platforms. We chose the finest crowdfunding sites based on their features, track records, number of users, types of crowdsourcing they provide, costs, and other factors.
12 Best Crowdsourcing Platforms of 2022
- Kickstarter
- Indiegogo
- Patreon
- GoFundMe
- CircleUp
- Innocentive
- Openideo
- Amazon Mechanical Turk
- uTest
- Upwork
- 99Designs
- Cad Crowd
Kickstarter
Kickstarter is one of the most well-known crowdfunding platforms for assisting tech and creative entrepreneurs in funding their ideas before seeking a loan or soliciting funds for venture capital. Since its start in 2009, the company has raised about $6.5 billion. From arts and movies to publishing, potential investors can peruse a variety of verticals.
It’s also simple to utilize for fundraising. Begin by deciding on a goal and a deadline for achieving it. Please note that Kickstarter must authorize your campaign before it can go live. You provide your donor a modest gift or a unique experience for each level of money raised per person.
Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing platform, meaning you won’t get paid unless you finish your campaign. It also implies that the credit card of the funder will not be debited unless you reach your campaign objective. The fee is 5% on top of the processing fee (3–5%) for each transaction. There is a 14-day waiting period for funds if you raise enough money.
Indiegogo
Most Indiegogo campaigns are for technological advances, creative works, and community projects. The crowdfunding platform functions similarly to Kickstarter, except it does not use an all-or-nothing fundraising strategy.
Users can select between fixed and flexible funding options. Elastic is excellent for campaigns where you’ll profit from any financing, while limited is best for fundraisers when your project requires money. If you choose flexible funding, you will receive your funds regardless of whether you reach your goal; if you prefer fixed allocation, all funds will be returned to your donors if you do not get your campaign goal.
Campaigners who do not accomplish their objective incur no fixed funding fees, but flexible and fixed funds that meet their targets incur a 5% fee. A processing fee of 2.9 percent and $0.30 per transaction are also charged. For both types of fundraisers, the minimum target is $500.
Patreon
YouTubers, podcasters, and bloggers are among the digital creatives who use Patreon. You have a subscription model where patrons give a predetermined amount of money every month or creation rather than collecting one-time campaign donations.
Artists can build relationships with their followers on the site, and creators can even offer unique content to Patreon subscribers as an incentive to keep paying them. This service works best if you share work on your platform regularly. If producers do not provide content, pledgers have the option to terminate their subscription.
Patreon has three different plan options that take a percentage of your monthly income: Lite (5%), Pro (8%), and Premium (10%). (12 percent ). Payment processing fees vary depending on which plan tier you select and the payment method used by a patron.
Over 8 million active customers and 250,000 creators use the site. One disadvantage of Patreon is that it does not promote creators as much as sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, which have entire verticals and pages dedicated to their projects for potential funders to peruse.
GoFundMe
You’ve certainly seen a few GoFundMe fundraisers for emergencies and good causes on social media at some time, but businesses can also use it. Every payment is subject to a 2.9 percent processing fee and a $0.30 donation fee. You keep all you raise because it’s not an all-or-nothing fundraising site. Furthermore, people in the United States pay no personal campaign funding fees.
The Las Vegas Victims Fund ($11.8 million) and the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund ($24.2 million) are two successful GoFundMe initiatives. If your campaign is for a service-based cause, such as medical needs or emergency relief, this site is a suitable choice.
There are some limitations: Traditional businesses may not be able to raise as much money on GoFundMe, and it’s crucial to remember that only one out of every ten campaigns is fully financed.
CircleUp
CircleUp is worth considering if you’re creating a consumer brand. It provides equity and credit financing and a networking platform for specialists, retailers, and entrepreneurs. You can also connect with authorized investors with a net worth of at least $1 million and a $200,000 annual income.
Among the other benefits access to specific lines of credit and market insights utilizing Helio, CircleUp’s unique machine-based learning engine for developing firm strategies. Entrepreneurs that want to scale rather than build their concepts can benefit from the company. The selection procedure is competitive, and to be listed on their site, you must typically have a revenue of at least $1 million.
Innocentive
By allowing anybody to become involved and improve lives, InnoCentive has helped global enterprises, governments, public sector organizations, and charities harness the power of a crowd.
Governments and companies strive to tackle critical problems due to innovation coming from challenges. This is where collective human intelligence and bright minds come together to find solutions to challenging tasks.
InnoCentive has become the market-leading organization for placing challenges online and letting others access expertise from across the world, with over 500,000 problem-solvers around the globe.
Openideo
OpenIDEO is a platform that allows individuals worldwide to collaborate and exchange fresh ideas for solving complicated problems in their communities. Anyone with an Internet connection can use this platform to access tools like IDEO’s Toolkit and participate in challenges from anywhere around the globe.
We all know that design thinking can be used to solve various problems, but learning and practicing it is not easy for everyone. There are many steps in design thinking, which means many places where things might go wrong. This is especially true when using the strategy outside your own company.
This is made easier using OpenIDEO.
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is an excellent service for performing microtasks. Over the years, the site has grown its marketplace to encompass everything from microtasks to simple data categorization tasks, collection requests, and even more substantial labor requiring product development.
Mechanical Turk is a massive marketplace where firms and developers advertise minor tasks and projects known as “HITs,” or Human Intelligence Tasks, for sale. Workers then browse the available HITs, pick the ones they want to finish, and get paid using Amazon’s MTurk crowdsourcing platform.
One of the most appealing features of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is that it may be used as a starting point for outsourcing jobs that require more focused, high-quality attention before moving on to other possibilities.
If you’re interested in outsourcing as a blogger, here’s a list of the top 5 things to outsource, so MTurk could be an excellent place to start. On MTurk, you can even hire people to undertake validation on other people’s work.
uTest
uTest has a community of over 500,000 testers looking for freelance work and new challenges to advance their careers. To give the most satisfactory software testing experience, they also have a staff of community managers who link testers with clients regularly. When people join uTest, they will be connected with high-quality freelance software testing opportunities that match their skills and interests.
If you’re searching for a community platform to help you improve your user testing skills, uTest is one of the most excellent crowdsourcing services to look into. With the rise of no-code development platforms in 2021, a crowdsourcing platform like uTest provides a clear value to those who participate.
Upwork
Upwork allows you to hire hundreds of freelancers to complete a task, whether writing an article or coding software.
Their user interface makes it simple for anyone unfamiliar with crowdsourcing platforms to use them and complete tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible – you can even use templates to speed up the process.
You specify what kind of work is needed, and a list of freelancers will be offered to you when you publish your assignment or crowdsourced project online, either by mobile app or desktop browser window. Once you’ve been chosen, you can communicate with them and arrange a pay rate through the platform.
Upwork has saved thousands of hours that would have otherwise been spent looking for and hiring freelancers. If you’re on the other end of the scale, you may also use Upwork to find the most excellent freelance writing and proofreading jobs in 2021.
99Designs
99Designs is a crowdsourcing service where you may hold a graphic design competition for a company logo, website, or packaging. You’ll get dozens of designs from outstanding graphic designers worldwide who submit their work depending on your specifications.
You can select the most delicate graphic design and then purchase the design’s rights. This is ideal for companies who want skilled graphic designers to create their identity and logo but lack the time or ability required to do so themselves. This crowdsourcing platform begins with a competition where designers compete to submit their graphic designs as soon as feasible. This is far more efficient than utilizing graphic design software to make it yourself. After these invention challenges are over, you can pick your favorite design from the pool of submissions, pay for the design’s rights, and utilize it immediately.
This is possibly one of the most effective business strategies available, particularly when achieving results from crowdsourced work. It’s a marketplace where freelancers are dependable, trustworthy, and dedicated to their work.
Cad Crowd
Cad Crowd is a creative community of 3D modelers and designers who use various CAD tools to work on creative projects for clients worldwide.
They’re more than just another graphic design marketplace; they’re a platform to uncover and develop the following big ideas. For your ideas, 3D printing, or any product project, their website connects you with hundreds of CAD modelers, designers, and drafting contractors.
You can pick from freelancers with varying experience in some of the most critical sectors. The most excellent part about hiring their services is that you don’t have to commit to anything long-term; all you have to do is submit your project and wait for responses.
Conclusion
The possibilities are infinite, with crowdsourcing platforms available in all industries.
The best part about this industry is that it is constantly changing, so new opportunities will always be for you to participate.
Choose one of the finest Crowdsourcing Platforms for 2021 from the list below:
- Innocentive
- Openideo
- Amazon Mechanical Turk
- uTest
- Upwork
- 99Designs
- Cad Crowd
These crowdsourcing platforms are fantastic tools for bringing people and resources together, making them a powerful way to get support for a project and see it through to completion.
People Also Asked
What is a crowdsourcing example, and what services do they provide?
People with the best innovative ideas can come together to build online communities using a crowdsourcing website. This provides quality control across various crowdsourcing platforms, which benefits everyone involved.
Many firms find answers to technical issues that small businesses cannot solve independently.
Work done by a big group of people with specialized expertise is known as creative crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is an excellent illustration of how a single initiative may spawn many other ideas.
Because of the collective brainpower that can deal with product design issues, crowdsourcing can occasionally allow products and services to be developed at a low cost.
Is it necessary to have particular expertise in crowdsourcing?
Specific skills are ideally suited to excel in this field due to the nature of the topic.
But what’s more crucial is getting something from concept to production in the most efficient way possible.
When people put their heads together and brainstorm, some of the best small company ideas emerge. This is where crowdsourcing’s true power is realized.
What is social media crowdsourcing?
Crowdsourcing businesses use social media as an online tool to collect a wide range of content, services, and contributions from many people. Using crowdsourcing notions, crowdsourced labour can take various forms. Social media sites allow users to publish their information, facts, arguments, etc freely. If you want to take your social media game to the next level, we recommend checking out our list of the finest social media management tools.
