Musings about crowdsourcing your dissertation research - Next Lab Note will include a project update and data

So today I completed all 43 thank you notes to backers and endorsers of my dissertation research crowdsourcing adventure (thank you all!). I then went back to experiment.com to look at the data and try to understand how I was able to fund my dissertation research and if I was going to do it again what would I do differently. In total, it took 43 backers over a course of 26 days to raise over $3,000 which is an average of about $80/backer. There were 23 friends, 13 colleagues, 4 family members, and 3 people who I did not know that all contributed to BE HEARD!

So this is what I have learned from the process:

1. It takes a lot of people to raise money. I did not think that $3,000 sounded like a lot of $$ originally and honestly I kept the budget very lean, but getting to $3,000 was harder than I imagined and $80/person is a lot of money.

2. Posting about your project and giving people updates really helps. Everytime I posted a project update, there would be an uptick in the contributions.

3. Some people do not want to give online even in an established crowdsourcing site. I had several people who wanted to write personal checks to me instead of paying online and I worked with the staff at experiment.com to make sure these funds were captured in the overall total and that these people were appropriately acknowledged.

4. There were so many people that contributed unexpectedly. I had long-time family friends who knew me as a little girl and then some new work colleagues that were all so generous.

5. People want to stay in touch to see what you are doing with your research. Even after the project was fully funded, there have been a number of backers that want to be kept up to date about the project and this is cool because it means that the research ideas are being shared more broadly.

And finally, I have been asked many times if I would use crowdsourcing again for my research and I have to say unequivocally YES. I chose to fund my project at experiment.com because my graduate school had budget issues and temporarily froze dissertation grant funding and after applying unsuccessfully to several other scholarships/awards, I either had to delay my dissertation research, fund it myself, or figure out another way. Using crowdsourcing was not my first choice, but in the end, it proved to be a really good exercise of learning how to sell and manage my dissertation project. The downside of course is that the crowdsourcing site usually takes a % of the contributions (experiment.com is 8%) and if you don't raise the total funds in the timeframe that you established upfront, you don't get anything. So its all or nothing. But if I had not made the efforts to use experiment.com back in October 2017, I never would have gotten my dissertation research off the ground...and after being 6 years into my PhD, moving forward was well worth the 8%.

And a special thanks to Ester Shapiro who initially gave me the crowdsourcing idea and the other members of my dissertation committee who supported this out of the box funding mechanism.

https://policyrox.blogspot.com/2018/02/post-8-on-dissertation-trek-learning.html