Crowdfunding SJSU

Thank you very much for your interest in crowdfunding at San Jose State. SJSU’s crowdfunding program is designed to provide the campus community (faculty and staff members and students) with the opportunity to use a university platform (go.sjsu.edu/crowdfundingSJSU) to engage their networks to raise money for initiatives specific to their group and stakeholders.

A crowdfunding project requires daily, active commitment in three phases: quiet phase, active phase, and stewardship phase.

• Quiet Phase: put team together, put together email lists, set goal, create content.
• Active Phase: personal e-mails to your networks, advertising via blogs, social media and affinity organizations.
• Stewardship Phase: Thank You Update, perk fulfillment (if applicable), impact updates (thee to six months after, nine months to one year after). 

The process for launching a crowdfunding campaign  is as follows:

• Submit a crowdfunding project application to the Office of Annual Giving.
• Upon receiving the application the SJSU Campus Crowdfunding Committee will vet the project application based on a number of criteria, including suitability of the project to the crowdfunding platform, ability of project owners to create the required campaign content and population size of perspective audience, etc.
• After application approval, the project owner will be notified and our annual giving officer will begin working with them on the campaign including reviewing best practices for crowdfunding and a developing a list of staged campaign content and deliverable dates leading up to the project going live.

View the crowdfunding project application.

Note: The typical crowdfunding project requires three to four weeks of planning and three to four weeks of active campaigning, so please keep this in mind when deciding if crowdfunding is right for your organization. Additionally, qualified projects must demonstrate that the funds raised will clearly and directly benefit SJSU students or community members. This excludes raising funds to donate to external charities. Lastly, participating campus partners will be responsible for identifying their own list of potential donors and reaching out to them via email, social media, or other communication channels to promote the campaign. 

Not sure if you’re ready to apply to start a crowdfunding project just yet, but would like to discuss the possibility and get more information? Please contact Priti Singh, Assistant Director for Digital Philanthropy.