Hi! I hope all is well in your part of the world.

Recently I did a mini crowdfunding project for my former sponsored child, Aura to secure her last three semesters of university tuition in Guatemala City, Guatemala as well as a little extra for graduation costs.

Since I retired aurashouse.com back in May after 11 successful years raising over $100K for needy children, I did do one special project via the site but went with Youcaring.com as the main crowdfunding platform. The main reason I started using other crowdfunding platforms at all for some of the later Aura’s House projects is because they provide real-time feedback for donors as well as some nice social media sharing tools.

Normally I recommend Indiegogo.com, but this time around I tried Youcaring because they don’t charge any processing or “service” fees which means every penny donated would go to Aura. I also liked that I had three choices as to how to collect online payments. Because I live outside the US, I went with Paypal. Finally, the biggest reason I chose Youcaring is because they allow you to enter in offline donations received which means you can update the totals with real figures earned which then helps the momentum of the overall project.

All in all, the project was easy to set up and because I took my own advice (in my Crowdfunding Confidential course as well as in my book by the same name) I went OVER the $800 goal in just four days.

My only complaint about Youcaring.com is their image gallery tool. For some reason it resizes images and it’s almost impossible to get images to be crisp and high quality even when you follow their image guidelines. You also don’t get the dimensions of your original photo so I had to sit and fuss with images for almost a day before I could even look at them without vomiting. If you couldn’t tell, I’m still not 100% happy with them, but they do the job.

So, if you’d like to see the final project, it can be found here: https://www.youcaring.com/aura-yesenia-solis-hernandez-478913/update/412089https://www.youcaring.com/aura-yesenia-solis-hernandez-478913/update/412089

If you’d like to talk about your own experience with a crowdfunding platform, pros and cons and all the rest, please start a new discussion in the comments. Your review will help all of us make the best choice for our next crowdfunding project!

Best wishes and thanks for reading.

Kristen