Humanitarian crowdfunding is an emerging, donation-based crowdfunding vertical recognized by the humanitarian community.Crowdfunding for Emergencies , by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian AffairsLooking Beyond the Crisis, by the Future of Humanitarian Financing InitiativeCrowdfunding's Potential for the Developing World, by the World Bank It is classified as child category, nested under the generic term "charitable giving".

Defining characteristics

Humanitarian stakeholders are working together to define humanitarian crowdfunding and establish reporting guidelines for humanitarian crowdfunding campaigns, bringing professional standards, proper aid activity reporting, transparency and accountability down to the crowdfunding level.

Presently, humanitarian crowdfunding campaigns are expected to be initiated by aid agencies and raise support for activities falling within the scope of humanitarian and development activities classified by OECD DAC-CRSPurpose Codes: sector classification, oecd.org purpose codes and supplementary activity codesactivity codes, aiddata.org established by AidData. Campaigns and activities are also expected to adhere to common principles and universal minimum standards for humanitarian response outlined by the Sphere Project.Defining Humanitarian Crowdfunding, Beehive Open Source Initiative

Challenges

In practice, crowdfunding platforms like Crowdrise, Fundly, Generosity, GoFundMe, GlobalGiving, Indiegogo, Mightycause, Kickstarter, Whydonate, StartSomeGood and YouCaring treat humanitarian activities differently. They use inconsistent terms to refer to humanitarian activities and aggregate humanitarian and non-humanitarian activities together, based on how Humanitarian Aid is defined. YouCaring for example loosely lists 21 subcategories under the term "humanitarian causes", including categories like Pets, Tuition, Neighbors and Sports.YouCaring website GIVEasia claims to be "Asia's Leading Humanitarian Crowdfunding Platform" while hosting a similar broad range of appeals.

+ Different terms used to classify humanitarian crowdfunding campaigns: Crowdfunder Category Crowdrise Disaster Relief, Refugee Relief Fundly Nonprofits and Charity Generosity Emergencies Global Giving Humanitarian Aid, (multiple categories) GoFundme Emergencies Indiegogo Community, Health Rally Emergencies and Relief Razoo Humanitarian Aid, Emergencies StartSomeGood Disaster Response YouCaring Emergencies www.PrajaArogya.org Public Healthcare

Future

Humanitarian crowdfunding is seen as an evolving vertical, adapting to humanitarian needs and input provided by humanitarian organizations. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian AffairsUnited Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, unocha.org and Beehive, a nonprofit, open source initiative improving humanitarian crowdfunding, see humanitarian crowdfunding heading toward a distributed-goal frameworkCrowdfunding for Emergencies , by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs allowing data sourced from the humanitarian community to inform giving in real-time supporting humanitarian and development aid activities.

Innovation

Linking IATI (International Aid Transparency Initiative) and crowdfunding is seen as a way of innovating humanitarian crowdfunding and making data on aid activities, transactions and results visible across different crowdfunding platforms.

Classification systems and crowdfunding

NTEE is a classification system used principally to classify non-humanitarian activities whereas DAC-CRS is a classification system maintained by the OECD DAC Secretariat used to classify humanitarian and development activities. OECD DAC-CRS codes are incorporated into International Aid Transparency Initiative's (IATI) open data sharing standard and framework for aid activity reporting, used by hundreds of humanitarian and development organizations, to classify aid activities by sector. Beehive is the first and only humanitarian crowdfunding initiative enabling humanitarian and development organizations to launch crowdfunding campaigns with their IATI activity files, linking aid activity reporting, DAC-CRS codes and crowd-fundraising.

See also Crowdfunding

References