Crowdfunding Platform Development for American Fundraisers

Laying the groundwork

Since the customer didn’t yet have any technical specifications for the crowdfunding website development, Iflexion’s team started out with business analysis. Our senior business analyst summarized the customer’s vision of the crowdfunding website and prepared a detailed list of requirements, which were further reviewed by our .NET developers, who contributed with their technical recommendations. 

At this stage, Iflexion’s team also created a functional map of the solution and helped the customer elaborate a suitable monetization mechanism for it.

Bringing fundraisers and investors together

The solution implemented by Iflexion is an online platform enriched with social networking features. It connects people with innovative ideas or urgent needs to investors ready to sponsor them. Users can register and create personal profiles, launch their own fundraising campaigns or look for projects they might be interested in sponsoring.

The platform supports three user groups:

• Users who raise funds for innovative projects
• Users who raise funds for personal needs
• Investors

The platform is designed so that users are free to run both commercial and individual fundraising campaigns at a time. The service also features campaign promotion tools through project descriptions, images, and videos. 

To differentiate themselves from similar crowdfunding solutions and to stimulate users to determine realistic goals, the customer decided to stick to the all-or-nothing monetization principle: Users can only get the donations if they manage to hit their initial goal. If not, the investors get their donations back.

Iflexion’s team also implemented a range of value-adding features:

Featured investors. The most active and generous donors get listed in the Featured Investors section where they can share their stories.

Location-based fundraising. To connect fundraisers and donors from the same area, Iflexion’s web developers integrated the solution with Google Maps. This feature visualizes all active users within a selected area, shows their status (as a fundraiser or an investor), and provides links to their full profiles.

Social media integration. To help fundraisers hit their goals more easily by spreading the word about their campaigns, Iflexion integrated the website with the most popular social media, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The integration facilitates the registration as users can sign up to the website using their social profiles. At the same time, users can share their campaigns across the social media to attract a larger audience, thus expanding their promotional reach. 

In-platform communication. While at the crowdfunding platform development, Iflexion also implemented advanced communication features to support an open dialog between the website users: 

• Instant messaging between fundraisers and their investors
• Commenting available to all users    

Online payment processing. In order to provide the customer with secure online payment processing, Iflexion’s team integrated the website with PayPal. Using their personal profiles, fundraisers can track their progress in real time, while investors can check the history of their payments and reimbursements.

User-friendly content management. We made the website interface as attractive and easy to use as possible. Regardless of their technical proficiency, users can easily add media content, upload files (including videos), leave comments, and reply to them.

Taking it to mobile devices

In order to make it easier for fundraisers to stay in touch with their audience and manage their campaigns on the go, Iflexion’s mobile developers created native iOS and Android applications with all the features identical to the web solution.