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Experiment.com falls into an awkward area for my fundraising efforts for longevity science projects. The community I raise from has been funding a few n*$10k sc

Experiment.com falls into an awkward area for my fundraising efforts for longevity science projects. The community I raise from has been funding a few n*$10k scientific projects every year or so for a decade now, and the yearly fundraiser I cheerlead brought in $150k last year, and will hopefully do as well this year (halfway there). We're growing slowly in reach, but would greatly benefit from a Kickstarter-like thing that helps us pull in a larger audience and new faces. That doesn't seem to be experiment.com yet, or indeed any of the organizations trying to crack the same nut of how you make crowdfunding work for research projects. We wouldn't do any better with them than we do with our own hacked-together infrastructure and communication channels. We need the existence of a large successful science crowdfunding community before it is worth our trying to surf on that science crowdfunding community, and I'm sure we're not the only people with that chicken and egg situation. Some folk in the community have had luck with indiegogo.com for scientific research projects, such as mouse gene therapy or immune transfer treatments in European labs at a few tens of thousands of dollars, but even there I think it is a case that you are buying infrastructure for the audience you bring to the table, not buying fresh faces and new listeners to persuade to your point of view. I'm vaguely hopeful that among the competitors in this space someone will come up with something that works and scales and pulls in the crowds, the halo of attention. There are some quite different styles of approach floating around, such as labcures.com that implements a "back a team" strategy, or lifespan.io that'll be launching sometime soon. Perhaps one of them will gain more traction. Experimentation is key.

dluan 11y ago
Eh, I guess I don't mind. Our lever on the chicken-egg problem is that we'll always go out to find the best and most impactful science, and this type of science will always be funded because this type of science is always growing. We'd rather have 1000 $1k projects than 1 $1M project. The halo of small groups is what will bring meaningful scientific results. Caveat to all of this is that there is one project right now that's so far raised $1.55M (http://experiment.com/curebatten http://experiment.com/curebatten) for orphan disease research. Researchers who use Indiegogo are only using it because 1) they are locked-in by their institutions (a small number of universities coerce their faculty like this) or 2) they can't yet use Experiment because they are outside of the US.
ambicapter 11y ago
Come to think of it, I don't really think kickstarter or indiegogo provide any sort of broadening of possible audience, as you put it. I mean, I don't think people scan kickstarter's front page looking for things to throw their money at, its generally up to the project managers to publicize, and then kickstarter provides the communication infrastructure once you have that audience pulled in.

dluan 11y ago

Eh, I guess I don't mind. Our lever on the chicken-egg problem is that we'll always go out to find the best and most impactful science, and this type of science will always be funded because this type of science is always growing. We'd rather have 1000 $1k projects than 1 $1M project. The halo of small groups is what will bring meaningful scientific results. Caveat to all of this is that there is one project right now that's so far raised $1.55M (http://experiment.com/curebatten http://experiment.com/curebatten) for orphan disease research. Researchers who use Indiegogo are only using it because 1) they are locked-in by their institutions (a small number of universities coerce their faculty like this) or 2) they can't yet use Experiment because they are outside of the US.

ambicapter 11y ago

Come to think of it, I don't really think kickstarter or indiegogo provide any sort of broadening of possible audience, as you put it. I mean, I don't think people scan kickstarter's front page looking for things to throw their money at, its generally up to the project managers to publicize, and then kickstarter provides the communication infrastructure once you have that audience pulled in.