New Media, Entrepreneurship Essay

Group 2

Gofundme.com

New Media, Entrepreneurship & Innovation 1ZM80

Consultant Perspective

Contents

1. Introduction 3

2. Current new media tools 4

3. New media opportunities 5

3.1 Video sharing 5

3.2 QR Codes 6

3.3 Payment Methods 6

3.4 Phone Applications 7

4. New Media Priority 8

5. Conclusion 9

Bibliography 10

Appendix 1: List of possibilities to share your project 12

1. Introduction

For the course New Media, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation (1ZM80) we were asked to solve a case assignment. We decided to analyse a case that is occurring in the present and approach it like business consultants. The objective of the case is to develop a comprehensive strategy for a company or organisation. Next to that, social media becomes dominant in the business setting and will therefore be discussed extensively in this paper (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). We decided to go for the organization Gofundme.com.

Gofundme.com is an online crowd funding platform that wants to help people to raise money for a variety of events. Brad Damphousse and Andrew Ballester founded the company in May 2010 and it can thus be considered as a start-up company. Their slogan is ‘get money, get going’. The purpose of Gofundme.com might resemblance non-profit organisations. However, it is a profit organisation; the company deducts a 5% transaction fee from each donation a client receives. Nevertheless, if the client does not receive any donations, then no charge is made. The target group where Gofundme.com focuses on is very broad. This is because people can ask donations for events like graduations, marathons or weddings, but also tough situations like accidents and illnesses. Hence, everybody who wants to organise something, but needs some outside help in form of donations to achieve it, can join the platform.

One of the main strategies of Gofundme.com is crowdsourcing. According to Kleemann et al. (2008) crowd sourcing is “the international...