Crowdfundraiser announced on Wednesday the release of its new crowdfunding platform focused on high school sports fundraising. As a new entrant into the growing crowdfund market, the crowdfunding portal hopes to upend some of the legacy areas of fundraising by providing a much more efficient service at a much lower price point.
Traditional fundraising for high school sports teams typically cost between 20% and 50% of the total capital raised for the team in any given year. Doug Durrant of Crowdfundraiser, who has been providing fundraising for high school sports for over 20 years, sees a market that is ready to be disrupted by crowdfunding.
Mr. Durrant stated, “We’re talking about not only providing a service at 5% of funds raised by also raising the funds with about 10% of the required effort typically expended from the teams, students and their families. In the past, we did our afternoon blitz where we would solicit neighborhoods and get people in the community to buy everything from cookie dough to discount cards for local restaurants. Now, we can provide the same products, but we do it through a highly targeted crowdfund campaign shared on all the social channels, including Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.”
Because of the company’s deep roots in the traditional fundraising market, they’re able to deliver the experienced results needed for financing high school and junior college sport teams, but now they’re able to do it faster, cheaper and with more efficiency. In addition, the company has deep experience and relationships with some of the best products providers in the fundraising industry for things like shirts, sweatshirts, hats, shoes, gift cards, discounts and other rewards perfect for making a high school sports crowdfunding campaign a success.
“Since our initial launch we have tested our system on several key clients with very rapid success,” Durrant explained. “We were able to raise in two days what typically took us three weeks to do. In addition, we saved the school over $2,000 in fundraising fees.”
With the company’s existing relationships in this market they hope to expand to over 100 high schools, providing crowdfunding for everything from football to soccer and lacrosse. Durrant noted, “We recognize that we’re somewhat killing our children with our cheaper model. But based on the demand we’re already seeing we’re hoping to make up for it very quickly in the volume of existing and new clients we have coming on board to use our service.”
While other opportunities exist in crowdfunding, the company hopes to stay very focused on its target niche where the owners have existing relationships to assist in the initial growth of the business.