Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A marine biologist raises 18,000 USD on Experiment.com for a 6-month coastal sampling campaign.
- Is an instance
A university launches a crowdfunding platform that has funded 45 small research projects in three years.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A multi-million-dollar NIH R01 is not crowdfunded.
- Not an instance
Industry-sponsored research is not crowdfunding.
Editorial commentary
Crowdfunded research is research funded by aggregated small contributions from many individuals, typically solicited through online platforms (Experiment, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, institutional giving sites) rather than from traditional grant-making bodies. It has emerged as a complement to grant funding, especially for high-public-engagement topics, niche or unconventional research, and projects too small to justify a major grant application.
What makes a campaign succeed
Successful campaigns combine a clear, communicable research question, professional-quality video and written communication, accessible reward structures for backers, and active social-media outreach sustained across the campaign period rather than concentrated only at launch. Because the funding mechanism is itself a public-facing communication exercise, a crowdfunded project’s campaign is, in effect, a form of public engagement from the outset — the same skills (clear framing, genuine two-way interaction with backers, following up on outcomes) that make a PE effort credible also make a campaign credible.
Governance and ethics questions it raises
Crowdfunded research raises governance questions that a standard grant relationship does not surface in the same way: backer transparency about how funds are spent, conflict of interest where a researcher personally benefits from the campaign’s reward structure, ownership of any resulting IP, and institutional oversight of a funding relationship that bypasses the usual grants-office review pathway. Some institutions have published dedicated crowdfunded-research policies addressing exactly this gap — requiring institutional sign-off before a campaign launches under the institution’s name, for example.
What this means for research administration
Route a proposed crowdfunding campaign through the same institutional-approval and conflict-of-interest checks as any other external funding relationship before it launches publicly, not after, since a live campaign is much harder to unwind than an application that hasn’t yet gone out.
References
- Experiment.com case studies.
- Nature, 2014 commentary on crowdfunded science.
Also known as
Crowdsourced funding · Crowdfunding (research)
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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