This is part 1 of what will be a multi-part series, and will be the basis of a much larger in-depth article I am writing. My hope is that the article will get picked up by a large news publication, but that is a topic for later discussion.
We have all seen the popularity of Crowdfunding sites (i.e. KickStarter) and donation sites (i.e. GoFundMe) sky-rocket in recent past. Essentially, these sites are based on relative strangers donating money to fund a worthy cause or a great idea. But they also are based on trusting that the money will be used for the purpose described by the requester.
The website Quora has also seen something of a meteoric rise in popularity over the past couple years. If you’re not familiar with it, it is basically a question-and-answer site, where users can interact with each other and share expertise on a topic or just provide entertaining answers. However, the questions are limited to a headline and 300 characters of description.
So my experiment is this: Would the kind of person who might support a Crowdfunding or GoFundMe campaign be willing to donate money to someone on Quora? This would be more of an exercise in trust and generosity, since there is no detailed “great idea” or “tragedy” with the limited question space and relative anonymity of Quora.
I have posed this question on Quora (see here), and will be tracking the results here in the blog. For those who have seen the question on Quora, you see that I am also requesting people who say “yes” to prove it! So I will be accepting donations through my Paypal account (there should be a link on this page) for people who wish to participate.
I don’t want to give any more information here, since that would eliminate the “less-is-more” mentality behind this experiment in the first place. But I will restate that all donations I receive will be donated to a charity, and all details will be documented and verifiable. But the donor must trust me enough in the first place to make the donation, even given that disclaimer! The purpose of this is for someone to see a short-worded donation request on Quora and determine whether they would act in the same way as if they were contributing to a more formal Crowdfunding or GoFundMe campaign.
So we’ll see what happens! Stay tuned for more!
