When we’ve got a smartphone in our pocket all the time, we have a way to fund anything at any time via crowdfunding.
Until now, crowdfunding has mostly been an occasional, desktop sort of experience. Sure, we might back a new gadget launch or a charity a few times a year, but it’s not an everyday thing. That’s about to change. With smartphones in our pockets, we not only have access to crowdfunding platforms whenever we want, but to the crowd that comprises the various social circles of our lives — from family to school, work, and the region we live in.
And with the same ease-of-use, immediacy, and frequency of everything else on our phones, crowdfunding will increasingly be the way people turn their ideas — large and small — into reality. It will be how we flex our collective financial muscle.
With a tap on your phone you can help support a political campaign, assemble a school picnic, fund your honeymoon, or help pay for the surgery of a pet. In the last year alone, Snoop Dogg used crowd-funding to raise money to buy helmets and equipment for football-playing kids in Des Moines; Conan O’Brien used it to raise money for the Children’s Defense Fund by selling wooden emojis; neighborhoods rallied behind local retailers hitting hard times. And those are just a few examples.
Crowdfunding is going somewhere it never has — into the mainstream. That, in turn, will change all sorts of other things.
— Jeff Jordan
