Over the course of the last three years we have seen many websites come and go within the crowd funding space (wikipedia link). It seems weekly we have been approached by upstarts claiming to be “just like Kick starter” or “a free version of Indiegogo“. We do our very best to visit, research and review as many of these sites as humanly possible (and we appreciate every business that reaches out and hope they continue to do so). We believe the best is yet to come and want to be among the first to bring it to our readers when it arrives.

Here is our #1 tip for future crowd funding platform developers:
The top thing  that many of these sites fail to do is remember to keep it simple and work for their sites to be intuitive. The majority of individuals looking to raise funds are NOT web developers, marketing wizards or even business owners for that matter.  Your future customers (the campaign creators) are your parents, neighbor, or children raising money for a school event. Make sure that creating an account, accepting payments and sharing campaigns are as easy as possible.

Why would the leading paragraph of a post entitles “Top Crowd Funding Site for 2015” offer advice to website developers. Simple, the top pick for 2015 (as they were for 2013 and 2014) does the best job of what we see as the most important aspect in the Crowd Fund industry.

Don’t get me wrong there are other aspects of crowd sourcing finance where other features are perhaps more important. If you are raising funds for your business in exchange for equity you want to be sure that available features include a space for financials and of course a video to lead off your presentation. These features are vital to providing the information needed for potential investors. For investment crowd funding we would refer you to (our review found ). This is an area of crowd sourcing that will be among the most exciting and innovative if/when the SEC decides that we are capable of investing our own money. Unless your a millionaire in which case you’re responsible enough today… UGH!! Don’t get me started on that.

For the purpose of this post we are focused on raising funds for medical, personal and charity fundraising events.

So who provides the very best platform for the features we described……

(Our full review)

Although many impressive sites offer solutions for personal and charity events (some of our runners up are GoGetFunding, GiveForward , CrowdRise and Tilt) we continue to believe that none of the ease of use, sharing features and consistent website visitors of our top pick.
If you are looking for a simple, easy to use solution to raise money for your cause GoFundMe is the way to go. They have a great track record of helping folks raise money from a basic medical emergency to a world shaking news event. Our family has personally used the site to raise money for a family friend who passed leaving two young children behind. Reaching out to friends and family using the tools provided by the site, over $12,000 was raised. These funds couldn’t have been more needed as these young boys tried to cope and settle in to their new home with their uncle.
When domestic or global tragedies have struck the tools provided by gofundme have proven to be incredibly powerful. One of our favorite successes are the money that was raised after the recent riots in Ferguson where 41 campaigns have raised over $610,000!! This incredible outpouring of support was documented on CNBC. This is just the most recent example of the social media, funding phenomenon at work.
Congratulations to the team at GoFundMe and all the sites listed as top performers for 2015.
If you would like your campaign featured on the homepage of Crowdfunding Website Reviews you are always welcome to place a FREE AD HERE. We are also happy to share your project with our 4,000+ twitter followers. Just reach out through our “Contact Us” page. Although we may chose not to approve or share if your campaign can be viewed as offensive or obscene. We are not easily offended but who needs the headache 🙂