Counties ask ‘the crowd’ to fund local needs

No contribution was too small to help the Catawba County, N.C. library reach its crowdfunding goal to create a community garden behind its main branch.

One “teeny, tiny little girl” — maybe 3 or 4 years old — chipped in $1, said Suzanne White, library director. “She was so excited about helping the library with the com­munity garden.” The largest single donation during the online campaign was about $2,000.

Catawba County raised another $2,499 for the garden to meet its goal. The garden is designed to “encourage learning opportunities, both in the library and out in the garden, and provide the produce to community citizens in need,” White said.

Counties from the Carolinas to Florida to Michigan have had varying degrees of success in raising money through online portals for programs and infrastructure projects.

Scouring civic crowdfunding sites, you can find county-related campaigns that raised anywhere from $2,700 to more than $10,000. Globally, all forms of crowdfund­ing raised $2.7 billion and funded more than 1 million campaigns in 2012, according to Massolution’s Crowdfunding Industry Report.

Public sector online campaigns often supplement offline communi­ty-based fundraising or attract other dollars from grants or philanthropies. Such was the case in Catawba and in Ottawa County, Mich.

Ottawa County’s Planning Com­mission recently raised nearly $25,000 to fund a bike lane expan­sion. The county had set a goal of closing the gap between the $120,000 raised from public and private pledges and the estimated $175,000 cost of the project, according to Aaron Bodbyl-Mast, a county plan­ner. Final bids for the project came in lower, making the amount raised sufficient.

Crowdfunding is something his department director had been researching for a while, Bodbyl- Mast said. The Lakeshore Bike Lane seemed like a good candidate because the path would be used by the competitive, touring and com­muter cycling communities. That broadened the pool of potential funders.

“We knew that the user base for the bike lane wasn’t just local, that the benefits were for the region as well,” he explained. “So using a tool that could reach people and do fundraising regionally — it really was a good fit — because the people that are using it come from all over.”

Infrastructure isn’t the only thing counties are funding through “the crowd.” Hillsborough County, Fla. mounted a successful campaign two years ago to pay $2,700 in prizes for its first App-a-thon. The event invited the area’s tech geeks to create smartphone apps using county data.

When considering crowdfund­ing, White and Bodbyl-Mast both say it’s a good idea to start small. “The idea was to make it doable,” White said. “Sure, you could say $20,000 and think of lots of things to do, but we really wanted to be successful right off the bat.”

That’s a lesson that Frederick County, Md. learned the hard way. Its parks department sought to raise $120,000 to remodel an existing play­ground into an inclusive, “bound­less” playground, one accessible to children with physical limitations.

The campaign, which began in mid-March raised only $216 from eight investors. In hindsight, the bar was set too high, said Paul Dial, the county’s parks director. He explored crowdfunding the project because of tight county budgets. Had the campaign been successful, the work could have been expedited, he said, and completed within about two years. The alternative, including it in the parks department’s capital program, could have taken up to six years to complete the project.

“If we could have accelerated it with this program, then that would have been wonderful,” Dial said, “but if not, we still anticipate that we could move a project forward for consideration.”

The experience hasn’t soured Dial on crowdfunding. He would “definitely” try it again, but with a smaller project and one that has more appeal to potential donors outside the county.

Catawba County’s garden project received some pledges from out of state, White said. She, too, advises beginning with a pilot project and “coming up with a really serious PR campaign.”

Bodbyl-Mast would certainly take the plunge again. “It’s definitely now a new tool in our toolbox, and it’s something that we’ll definitely look seriously at utilizing when we have the appropriate project,” he said.

“I think overall it really was cru­cial in reaching our goal. So without it we might have been stuck.”