Excerpt from: NPR (click for full article)
Patti's comment: Very interesting concept.
Surely you've heard of crowd funding sites like Kickstarter that have helped thousands of filmmakers, musicians and painters leverage Facebook and Twitter to raise money for creative projects.
But crowd funding isn't just for hipsters anymore; it's moving into all kinds of other spheres, from startups to research to personal causes. And increasingly, people felled by illness or injury are using these sites to raise money for their health care.
One site that's capitalized on personal-cause crowd funding is GoFundMe. CEO Brad Damphousse says in 2012 alone, the site's users have raised more than $6 million for medical causes, and Medical, Illness & Healing is the site's most popular category, attracting 17 percent of the site's total donations.
Damphousse says most users raise funds through people they know and their friends because the site makes it easy for them to broadcast their cause on Facebook and Twitter. And the bigger the social network, the easier it is to reach the goal. But not everyone succeeds. People with small social networks tend to have more trouble meeting their fundraising goals, he says. When Shots reviewed the site, it appeared that the people who are closest to their goals have at least 200 Facebook friends.
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