Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Postgraduate Studentships - Search for funding opportunities.
Back in 2014 Emily-Rose Eastop was the first student to fully crowdfund a masters course. She raised £26,500 to cover the course fees and living costs for an MSc in Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University. She shared her experiences with us.
Crowdfunding is a means of raising money that, at its best, elicits a large number of small donations (rather than a small number of large ones). These are offered in exchange for non-monetary rewards. I’m not really sure how I heard about it; I just knew that it existed. I chose Hubbub as a platform since their official focus is on education.
Having not been successful in securing a HEFCE grant, and not wanting to take on more debt than I had already accrued as an undergraduate, crowdfunding represented the only remaining avenue to explore. I really resonate with the philosophy behind it. I also love how it enables practically anyone to become a philanthropist. Its a privilege normally only accessible to the wealthy.
They advised me to offer several evenly-distributed reward tiers, in order to attract donations from people spanning the full economic spectrum. I set my reward boundaries at £1, £20, £50, £100, £250 and £500. Hubbub suggested I set a “minimum needed” target in order for any money to actually change hands. Donors appreciate the money is working. Since there was no way I could accept Oxford’s offer without proving I had £14,000 in the bank to pay the fees, it seemed obvious to make that my minimum target.
The first stage in how to crowdfund your masters course is setting up your profile and pitch. Why are you worth supporting? Where are you headed? Who are you? Although not mandatory, including a video increases your chances, statistically-speaking, of success. So, after writing my pitch, I set to work on making a video using a basic freeware video editor. My first attempt came across as too serious, so I discarded it and tried again. Next time I smiled more, and editing in a bunch of silly clips. It took persistence to get right, but was definitely worth it.
The hardest aspect of creating my project was thinking up rewards. I considered offering recordings of my singing, or artwork, but Hubbub recommended something more relevant to my project. My degree is an exclusive blog. With the minimum donation of £1, donors access my content. I’ll be posting summaries of the essays I write and discussing ideas and debates relating to my course. For £250, donors won the opportunity to promote their own project (whatever that might be) in a post on my science and scepticism page (facebook.com/hatepseudoscience). This is approaching 90K “likers”. £500 donations meant receiving a professionally-bound copy of my dissertation at the end of the year, plus all the other rewards.
All this preparation took about a week. I needed to provide financial declaration in 5 weeks’ time, so I set my deadline accordingly. I then emailed all my contacts and wrote a number of hand-written letters. Generic correspondence is easy to spot, and it was important to me to appeal to people on a sincere and personal level. I tried to communicate how much I valued the part they had played in my life, and discuss my project in a way that was relevant to them individually. My mum also put a lot of her time in, sending messages to her friends.
I’d say that around two thirds of the money I raised was from people whom I knew personally in some capacity. I had around 500 sponsors altogether, including 71 who donated £1, and 82 who donated £5. The science page produced around £3,000 in donations, but whether our readers class as complete strangers, I’m not sure. I was advised that it might be worth going to the press, so I contacted my local newspaper, who ran a story a couple of weeks before the project deadline. This was then picked up by the tabloids and resulted in some rather hostile press and nastiness from online commenters. I guess that's why people want to know how to crowdfund your masters course.
As poetic justice would have it, however, it was actually at this stage that I started to receive significant donations from strangers – people who wanted to show solidarity and make a stand against the insult-hurling. It was quite a phenomenon – the project earned about £8,000 as a direct result of the publicity.
From any comments donors made, what ultimately helped persuade them to give the money? People contacted me to say that they were fascinated and inspired by my area of study and my drive. I impressed them with my diverse set of skills and interests, and that they felt the work I did to promote reason and science was valuable. I also had a lot of people express excitement at the prospect of being able to follow my progress.
These are both scientists who have inspired me in profound ways. I wrote them long emails discussing my ideas, relaying a few anecdotes, and basically telling them how much I adored them. (I used rhetorical skill in order to avoid sounding creepy or sycophantic.) Steve met me briefly at a book-signing, so this was a good inroad. I’d never met Doug before though. But if you read enough of someone’s writing, you start to feel you know them.
Having a large network of contacts is the crucial bit and I think that for the time being, people without this resource would find it immensely difficult to crowdfund successfully.
Yes. Currently, people tend to give nepotistically – to people in whose lives they already have some sort of stake. So how can crowdfunding cater for people who not only don’t have any money, but also lack a network to tap? Over the next 10-15 years, I see the potential of crowdfunding because it increases awareness and attitudes change. My own experience of crowdfunding has inspired me enormously and I’ve contributed to a number of projects since running mine. I plan to do so for the rest of my life.
The prospect of following these people’s progress genuinely excites me, and if enough people felt the same way then we, The People, could fund anyone and anything. People tip restaurants that they’ll never go to again. Why? Because they feel that doing so is part of their social identity. That’s the kind of niche I think crowdfunding needs to carve for itself. Anyone interested in subscribing to my blog can still do so, by donating to a science-based project of their choice. See the “updates” section of my hubbub page for more information.
