FundRacer

Inspiration

Crowdfunding has completely upturned the world of fundraising; platforms like GoFundMe and Indiegogo can reach individuals around the globe, connecting fundraisers and donors on campaigns where they are most needed.

While crowdfunding has exploded in popularity in the past decade, we believe that current crowdfunding platforms have turned stale in this day and age; literally every crowdfunding campaign is the same these days: a wall of text interspersed with a few images (and maybe a video, if you're lucky). Therefore, we see incredible opportunity to harness the power and creativity of modern media technologies and turn crowdfunding into a dynamic, modern, and engaging act.

Out of this vision came FundRacer, the next generation of crowdfunding.

What it does

At its heart, FundRacer is a live-stream crowdfunding platform with an integrated donation system, instantly and smoothly connecting fundraisers and donors. Fundraisers can host live-streamed fundraising events from anything with a camera — even a phone! With that power, fundraisers can share about whatever, whenever they want. Imagine a high school band hosting a fundraiser concert, with viewers able to easily contribute to the organization through the same site. Or a survivor of a natural disaster being able to instantaneously share scenes of the aftermath, with viewers able to instantaneously provide financial support to those who need it the most.

In short, FundRacer offers users infinite creativity to provide live content that fuels their fundraising efforts. For viewers, FundRacer offers a frictionless and instantaneous way to support the causes they feel most passionate about. We believe that crowdfunding has a unique capability to directly and positively impact lives; FundRacer unlocks that capabality and brings it to new heights.

Challenges we ran into

Learning how to use new APIs and of course, lots of bugs :/

Accomplishments that we're proud of

For the majority of our team, this was our first ever in-person hackathon, and it was a great experience!

What's next for FundRacer

In the future, we will make FundRacer available to people on all platforms.

Ethics statement

Background:

Defined by Wikipedia as the “practice of funding a project or venture by raising money from a large number of people, typically via the internet,” crowdfunding offers individuals and organizations the opportunity to tap directly into populations and markets previously unreachable. Since the first known instance of online crowdfunding in 1997, crowdfunding has rapidly evolved into a $17.2 billion/year industry and is projected to be worth $43 billion/year by 2028. Over the course of Treehacks 2023, we created FundRacer to usher in the next generation of crowdfunding. While FundRacer can be used for crowdfunding for any conceivable cause (charity, product launches, personal projects, nonprofit fundraising, etc.), we will focus on the ethics of the use of crowdfunding for personal basic expenses such as rent or medical bills.

An interesting use case of personal crowdfunding is its imitation of a secondary social net. Indeed, many Americans have recently turned to crowdfunding as a last resort for paying rent, medical bills, and other basic needs. A 2022 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that since 2016, the number of medically-related GoFundMe campaigns created has steadily increased each year, from 37,824 in 2016 up to 196,955 in 2020. Even more sobering is the fact that only 12% of those medical GoFundMe campaigns were fully funded over that time period (Kenworthy 2022). This stark rise in medically-related crowdfunding campaigns paints a grim picture of healthcare financing in the United States, as well as warrants a deeper conversation about the ethics of crowdfunding.

Perhaps not surprisingly, medical crowdfunding has also been shown to perpetuate patterns of social inequality in America. In a 2020 study of GoFundMe medical campaigns, researchers found that people of color, and black women in particular, were under-represented in these medical campaigns, as well as that “marginalized race and gender groups were associated with poorer fundraising outcomes” (Kenworthy 2020).

It appears impossible to dispute the notion that medical crowdfunding is not only an inequitable practice but is also a symptom of a failing U.S. healthcare system. However, it can also be true that crowdfunding represents a way to work within a failing social system and offers many people opportunities for funding that they never would have received otherwise. Indeed, our healthcare system would still be flawed if GoFundMe didn’t exist; GoFundMe has simply found a way, albeit imperfect, to help fill the gap left by the system. And we can see many of the positive effects that platforms like GoFundMe have had on people around the world. In 2022, 28 million people sent or received help just on GoFundMe. Despite its various flaws, it does seem that crowdfunding offers some tangible benefit to both donors and recipients. For example, in 2022 over 400 thousand donations were made to LGBTQ+ causes and $108 million was raised to help people rebuild after natural disasters (GoFundMe 2022).

In light of this information, perhaps we can evaluate crowdfunding in a somewhat neutral light; despite its equity issues, crowdfunding does provide critical help to a lot of people around the world, many times help that they never would have received otherwise. This takeaway is what motivated our creation of FundRacer; how can we create a platform that leverages the communal power of crowdfunding while mitigating the harmful equity impacts traditionally associated with the practice?

Creating FundRacer:

When creating FundRacer, we wanted to focus on highlighting the life-changing benefits of crowdfunding, while acknowledging and mitigating its potential negative impacts. While in an ideal society personal crowdfunding might not be necessary, in today’s world we believe that crowdfunding has the unique ability to directly and positively change lives, efficiently putting resources in the hands of those that need it most. This north star informed our development of FundRacer, and we hope that we have effectively created a tool for the benefit of all. As such, here’s a summary of the design decisions we made during the ideation and creation process while trying to prioritize making the tool a force for good.

First, it’s worth noting that FundRacer fundamentally revolves around video, specifically live video. We mentioned earlier that traditional crowdfunding is inherently unfair; socially-connected and well-spoken individuals will always hold an advantage in raising money. It’s unlikely that FundRacer will completely eliminate that inequity, but we think that our live-streaming format will help relieve some of those issues. Why? Traditional crowdfunding favors those who can write eloquently and persuasively, specifically in English. FundRacer helps remove the need for moving penmanship and instead centers stories: visual experiences reduce the literary gap that may disadvantage many in seeking crowdfunding. Imagine victims of natural disasters in a non-English-speaking country being able to directly show wreckage to viewers, bypassing the language barrier and directly communicating to donors.

As for addressing the underrepresentation of people of color, especially black women, in crowdfunding campaigns, we hope that the ease of use of FundRacer will remove barriers of access and democratize the act of crowdfunding. This reason is also why we chose not to restrict users to fundraising for pre-approved nonprofits; while vetting funding recipients would lead to higher integrity of donation utilization, we wanted to direct impact, which is a beautiful benefit of crowdfunding. As such, using FundRacer to crowdfund is as simple as opening a link and streaming with your phone camera. Similarly, we also focused on making the user experience for donors exceedingly simple: decrease friction, increase impact.

As we created FundRacer, we also did our best to consider the moral tensions that fundraisers face when crowdfunding. There is a strong dilemma that fundraisers face regarding sharing; undershare and you risk potential donors passing on your fundraiser, overshare and you have to put your personal life on show to the public. The balance between these two options is delicate and it’s often an impossible decision for fundraisers to make. We hope that FundRacer’s live-streaming functionality offers users some creative methods of navigating the fine line between offering verifiable information and oversharing private details. For example, we imagine users being able to stream from a hospital without ever showing their face; viewers are still able to see that the fundraiser is presumably for a valid, worthy cause, and the fundraiser’s identity is not needlessly exposed.

Ultimately, there are a lot of moral quandaries surrounding crowdfunding that are near-impossible to completely resolve, but we hope that FundRacer’s novel video-streaming platform offers fundraisers an alternative, creative method of crowdfunding that can alleviate some of the equity issues involved with traditional crowdfunding platforms.

Bibliography:

GoFundMe. “GoFundMe 2022 Year in Help.” GoFundMe, 9 Dec. 2022, www.gofundme.com/c/gofundme-2022-year-in-help.

Kenworthy, Nora, et al. “A Cross-sectional Study of Social Inequities in Medical Crowdfunding Campaigns in the United States.” PLOS ONE, edited by Jichang Zhao, vol. 15, no. 3, Public Library of Science (PLoS), Mar. 2020, p. e0229760. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0229760.

Kenworthy, Nora, and Mark Igra. “Medical Crowdfunding and Disparities in Health Care Access in the United States, 2016‒2020.” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 112, no. 3, American Public Health Association, Mar. 2022, pp. 491–98. https://doi.org/10.2105/ajph.2021.306617.