It was about time for a new KWestions talk, and what better way to start into 2012 than with one of my key issues this year: crowd-funding and its opportunities for education.
As some of you might have noticed, we have started a new series around crowd-funding in education just a few weeks ago, and you can watch the first episodes over at EDUKWEST.

I feel honored that I now had the chance to ask Slava Rubin, co-founder of crowd-funding platform IndieGoGo, a few questions.

This Interview is sponsored by Einztein – The Social Learning Network Einztein is the social learning network for higher education and lifelong learners. Einztein brings the power of social networking to learning and enables anyone to create an online learning community for resource sharing, collaboration and discussion.

Besides talking about his motivation to found a crowd-funding platform and what he saw in it, we then discuss what might be the reasons that this particular way to fund projects or raise money for products has become so popular in the past 18 months.

I then asked Slava for some hands-on advice what I need to do and what steps to take in order to set up a successful campaign for an educational product/project on IndieGogo, and what differentiates the most successful campaigns from the not so successful ones.

Having an international audience, I think IndieGoGo is probably the most beneficial platform as they accept international projects and also people without a US bank account can pledge money. With 4% IndieGoGo’s transaction fee is also lower compared with other crowd-funding platforms.

The third and last point is that you can also get the money from your campaign even if you didn’t meet your initial goal.