TinkerFund: Kick-start Caltech Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding has rapidly become a mainstream method used by individuals and groups to raise money for various projects and ventures. Increasingly, organizations that chiefly raise monies for charitable purposes have also been turning to crowdfunding as an additional funding source. Multiple higher-education institutions have done this by integrating crowdfunding as a staple of their fundraising efforts. TinkerFund is a crowdfunding platform created and designed to help fill funding gaps for student, club, organization and community projects and proposals at Caltech. It is currently active at https://tinkerfund.com and allows users to donate monies to support campaigns run by a number of Caltech student and community organizations. The platform provides basic donor-analytics for currently running campaigns and has the ability to streamline project submissions for future campaigns. It also seeks to provide the infrastructure to increase the efficiency of future Caltech-Development fundraising efforts through data acquisition and analysis of donor social-networks. The TinkerFund platform launched with three affiliate organizations: the Caltech Y, Engineers Without Borders (Caltech Chapter), and the Interaxon club. All three organizations submitted at least one project for consideration for inclusion on the crowdfunding platform. TinkerFund had five fundraising campaigns active at launch.