Prestigious Academy seeks Crowdfunding Platform

Culver Academy in northern Indiana is the country’s only boarding school and summer camp offering an intentional and differentiated leadership program. Students who attend the school are provided a complete education including life-experience learning, global citizenship, and character. The school relies heavily on contributions to provide its high standard of education with the help of Engage by Cell's mobile crowdfunding platforms.

“For us, it was an opportunity to combine crowdfunding with mobile giving to do more, at less cost than before,” said Thomas Mayo, the academy’s Director of Development.

Culver now runs 13 active crowdfunding campaigns for causes ranging from campus expansion projects, athletics, art exhibitions, snow removal equipment, and music band instruments.

The educational institution switched from another crowdfunding platform that didn’t offer the same variety of mobile giving options including donating by text message (SMS), mobile-friendly donation pages, and screencast fundraising thermometers for giving at events.

Other crowdfunding platforms did not offer the ability to diversify campaigns the way mobile technology does. “The ability to empower students, alumni and other individuals to fundraise on the academy’s behalf should expand its reach into a much larger pool of donors,” Mayo said. “We will be able to use sub-accounts for classes or individual fundraisers to have their own pages,” Mayo continues. “Being able to drill down to the individual fundraiser is a real competitive advantage.”

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