Crunching the numbers on university crowdfunding donors

This post is filled with stats we’ve put together about donors who contribute to student crowdfunding projects.

Looking at the numbers across all Hubbub’s university crowdfunding platforms over the past year, we’ve analyzed exactly who donates to these projects, who asks to be contacted about a regular gift and whether there is a difference between people donating on branded platforms versus unbranded platforms.

Who is donating to University Crowdfunding Projects?

All Hubbub white label crowdfunding platforms (from institutions such as the University of York & University of Exeter) have projects on them, run by the university’s students. After someone has sponsored a project, we ask them what their relationship to the project is.

Donors are able to pick more than one reason for giving. These percentages represent the number of times that relationship was chosen.

All charts are made on: http://charts.livegap.com/

We’ve found that of the people who fill in this questionnaire (around 80% of donors), most choose Family or Friend of the project creator.

Other interesting numbers include that 7.9% have chosen that they are a graduate of the university and a large 19.1% have an interest in the projects subject.

Who asks to be contacted about regular giving?

We provide a box for all donors to tick to say they would be interested in hearing more about regular giving from the university.

We thought it would be interesting to see how this correlated to what relationship the donor had said they had to the project:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the greatest correlation exists between graduates and wanting to hear about regular giving.

Interestingly, there is also a correlation between those who ticked ‘Local Community Interest’ and ‘Subject Interest’ and wanting to hear more about regular giving.  This may be important for the tone and content of ongoing stewardship of these groups.  

Those least interested in hearing more about regular giving were those who clicked ‘Friend/Family’ or ‘Other’.

Below is a chart showing the % of people who clicked each of those relationship statements who also clicked regular giving.

Do own-branded platforms get a better response?

In short, yes. When we looked at the average donation across our branded white label platforms and our own hubbub.org, our free crowdfunding platform, we found that donations were 34% higher on branded platforms than the average donation on  hubbub.org.

That’s an awful lot higher!

We hope you find this information as interesting and useful as we did; it should certainly help you when considering who to send your crowdfunding campaigns to!