Vampire bats, angels and crowdfunding

Harry Carter is pretty good at raising funds for his research on vampire bats. At least with regard to small grants, such as the Sigma Xi or the Cosmos Club Foundation. However, money is very difficult to find. “I even took an academic leave to conduct field studies, as I didn’t want to pay for education at the institute, ”he shares his problems. When Carter heard about the new website www.petridish.org organizing fundraising from Internet users, he decided to try ...

He recorded a video for three and a half minuteswith a story about his project to study vampire bats. When one of the mice returns from a successful hunt, the rest surrounds it, and the mouse shares its prey, belching the eaten blood, which the others drink from her mouth. In his story, Carter explains that he would like to explore a system of bilateral altruism, according to which bats share with each other, and it does not matter if they are relatives or not. Carter's goal was to raise $ 4,500 to pay employees to look after a new bat colony in their University of Maryland lab and do DNA analysis. He had two summer months for everything about everything.

“On our site, fundraising is done on an all-or-nothing basis,” says Matt Salzberg, co-founder of the Petridish website (“Petri dish”). This means that if the project has not reached its goal by the deadline, not a single credit card will suffer. ” This is a typical crowdfunding model. The inventor, film director or scientist places his idea on the site, conducts some marketing through social networks and hopes that his project will inspire people to donate. In turn, donors can get some kind of positive result. For a donation of $ 600, for example, Carter offered the right to name one of the bats; those who donate $ 1000 will be mentioned in a scientific article, and a laboratory tour will be arranged for them.
The idea of ​​crowdfunding research has taken root. Over the six-month history of Petridish.org, 80% of projects have achieved their fundraising goals, Salzberg says. On average, people donate $ 70, but some particularly generous benefactors have contributed thousands of dollars. Petridisch charges 5% of the collected funds, but only if the project reaches its financial goal.

Here are examples of other successful projects from the Petridish website:
- DNA mapping of wolves on an island on Lake Superior (Ontario), for which researchers raised more than $ 10,000
- A group from Yale raised more than $ 7,000 to test the surrounding wells and ponds for economic reagents, such as powders or medicines.
- One astronomer raised more than 12,000 dollars (2,000 more than the goal of the project) - to study the moons outside the solar system.

Several more sites have joined Petridish.org in crowdfunding research projects. Sites like scifundchallenge.org , theopensourcescienceproject.com and fundageek.com, similar to Petridish.org, but each has its own peculiarity. The website “Sponsor Geek” (Fundageek), for example, allows researchers to keep the funds they raised, even if the target amount is not reached. “We already have a number of successful projects,” says Daniel Gutierez, founder and CEO of Fundageek. “There are not very many of them yet, but everyone is worth being proud of.” According to Gutierez, crowdfunding is especially useful for student summer projects, as they usually do not require a lot of money. By the way, commercial projects on fundageek.com, unlike non-commercial ones, are subject to the principle of "all-or-nothing."

Unlike other types of group investment, project owners in the case of crowdfunding retain all rights to intellectual property or profits received from the funded project, which makes crowdfunding more like charity than investment.

Gutierez believes that by law he does not have the right to offer philanthropists a share in the profits of a sponsored project, at least for the moment. But the Jobs Act (Jumpstart Our Business Startups), which Barack Obama signed this year, will allow US companies to raise up to $ 1 million through crowdfunding and give donors a chance to make a profit on their investments. Brad Webb, a partner with biological companies in Claremont Creek Ventures, sees crowdfunding as helping businesses start up. In his field, startups often receive first money from the so-called “investor angels,” wealthy individuals, or several people in a group who add up and invest together. And as the company grows, “... it begins to follow in the footsteps of the angels. So crowdfunding

In June 2012, Carter was successful and raised the required amount for a project with bats - vampires, even $ 200 more than declared. "I was shocked. In the first week, someone from the Internet, whom I don’t know at all, donated about $ 1000, ”he shares his impressions.

This experience showed him that sometimes people can act as altruistically as bats.