TinkerFund: Kick-start Caltech Crowdfunding

William KoCalifornia Institute of Technology

1200 E. California Blvd.Pasadena, California 91125, USA

wko@caltech.edu

ABSTRACTCrowdfunding has rapidly become a mainstream methodused by individuals and groups to raise money for vari-ous projects and ventures. Increasingly, organizations thatchiefly raise monies for charitable purposes have also beenturning to crowdfunding as an additional funding source.Multiple higher-education institutions have done this by in-tegrating crowdfunding as a staple of their fundraising ef-forts.

TinkerFund is a crowdfunding platform created and designedto help fill funding gaps for student, club, organization andcommunity projects and proposals at Caltech. It is currentlyactive at https://tinkerfund.com and allows users to donatemonies to support campaigns run by a number of Caltechstudent and community organizations. The platform pro-vides basic donor-analytics for currently running campaignsand has the ability to streamline project submissions forfuture campaigns. It also seeks to provide the infrastruc-ture to increase the efficiency of future Caltech-Developmentfundraising efforts through data acquisition and analysis ofdonor social-networks.

The TinkerFund platform launched with three affiliate orga-nizations: the Caltech Y, Engineers Without Borders (Cal-tech Chapter), and the Interaxon club. All three organi-zations submitted at least one project for consideration forinclusion on the crowdfunding platform. TinkerFund hadfive fundraising campaigns active at launch.

Categories and Subject DescriptorsH.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Groupand Organization Interfaces—Computer-supported coopera-tive work, Web-based interaction

KeywordsCrowdfunding, Fundraising, Platform markets, Network ef-fects

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work forpersonal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies arenot made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copiesbear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, torepublish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specificpermission and/or a fee.Caltech CS Dept. Undergrad Poster Session 2015; Pasadena, CA USACopyright 2015 California Institute of Technology .

1. INTRODUCTIONNew ideas, proposals, and projects are sometimes vacatedby students at the California Institute of Technology (Cal-tech) due to a lack of resources, generally financing, for theseventures to proceed. There are many preexisting sources ofmonies on campus for student groups and projects, whichinclude: the Associated Students of the California Insti-tute of Technology (ASCIT), the Graduate Student Coun-cil (GSC), undergraduate-student house funds, the HousnerStudent Discovery Fund, the Moore-Hufstedler Fund, aca-demic department discretionary funds, the Caltech Y, andthe Student Investment Fund. However, even with all ofthese funding sources, creators, those individuals or orga-nizations who seek resources, may not have their fundingneeds met due to specific limitations in applying for andreceiving funding.

1.1 Funding Gaps at CaltechThere are multiple, key funding-gaps for student and or-ganization ideas and projects at Caltech. These gaps weredetermined over the course of the project by meeting withall of the existing funding sources to discuss their fundingscope and applications process. During these discussions,it became clear that although significant amounts of monieswere available to students and organizations around Caltech,there were many types of projects that would struggle to getadequate resources.

Firstly, projects that require large single-expenditures thatdo not have institute-wide scope. This includes clubs or or-ganizations inviting well-known speakers to campus or otherlarger purchases, like expensive equipment, that do not af-fect the entire Caltech community. Secondly, those orga-nizations that have high per-capita needs. This generallyoccurs when there are high fixed-costs for the organization,but low membership numbers. This might also include sit-uations where a particular group may want to plan an ex-travagant function or activity. The third major funding gapis in covering recurring expenses. It is very difficult for indi-viduals, clubs, or organizations to get funding for activitiesthat they will hold annually, unless it already fits withintheir base budget. And lastly, very little funding exists forindividual or small-group “pet” projects that have no aca-demic focus and are enjoyed by small subsets of the Caltechcommunity.

Currently, the funding gap for pet projects is generally fi-nanced through word-of-mouth by alumni friends who have

entered the workforce and can afford to provide financialsupport. This particular funding method, alumni charitablegifts, could be used to address many of the previously men-tioned funding gaps, as well. However, many creators havelimited access to this type of funding. Current Caltech stu-dents tend to have small alumni-social-networks and havelittle ability to move outside their network to get financialsupport. Ideally, any Caltech-affiliated creator could gainaccess to alumni gifts, if needed.

1.2 Development and Institute RelationsCaltech Development and Institute Relations (DIR) is thedepartment of Caltech that is responsible for fundraising ef-forts across the Institute. DIR is responsible for securingannual, capital, planned and endowed gifts from alumni andthe greater Caltech community in order to match financialresources with Institute aspirations [1]. In order to do this,DIR is always actively looking for ways to improve opera-tional efficiency and address outstanding issues.

One such issue relates to the alumni charitable gifts usedfor pet projects, mentioned before, that are normally givendirectly to creators. These contributions are generally madeoutside of the normal gifting process that DIR has estab-lished for donor use. One problem this causes is the loss oftax deductibility for the donor. Another problem is Caltechbeing unaware of alumni contributions toward improvingstudent life. More importantly, Caltech misses the opportu-nity to count the alumni gift in DIR statistics. Regardlessof the size of a gift, as long as alumni give the gift directlyto Caltech they are considered an active donor for the yearand count toward donor participation metrics. These donorstatistics are used to fundraise and solicit the large gifts thatare critical to meeting budgetary needs at Caltech. There-fore, it is essential that every alumni contribution be madethrough some official, Caltech platform.

In addition to basic, donor-participation statistics, DIR wouldlike to have other more advanced metrics to evaluate and im-prove their fundraising efforts. These could help to increaseefficiency in donor targeting, the method or approach usedto engage a donor, and donor conversion, getting a non-donor to make a gift. A platform that could integrate anyof these features would be valuable to DIR fundraising.

1.3 CrowdfundingOne way to address the funding gaps at Caltech, and uti-lize alumni charitable-gifts, is through a novel fundraisingmethod that has recently gained popularity called crowd-funding. Crowdfunding finances projects and ventures bycollecting a large number of small contributions from manydifferent entities through an online platform. Due to thelow cost-of-entry, many people who would otherwise be un-willing or unable to provide larger monetary contributionsare able to show their support for a given project. Thisprocess tends to utilize social media heavily in order lever-age the organic social networks of supporters, people whocontribute resources to campaigns, to maximize fundraisingefforts. These supporters are able to collectively meet thefunding goals of a fundraising campaign that might other-wise struggle to get financing from normal sources on Cal-tech campus.

1.3.1 Models of CrowdfundingThere are primarily two models for crowdfunding platforms:donation-based and investment. These platforms cater todifferent market demands through various incentive struc-tures with donation-based funding generally giving perks,products, or rewards and investment-based funding gener-ally giving an equity stake in a project or venture. Thereare two subcategories within donation-based crowdfundingaptly named charitable and non-charitable giving.

Non-charitable, donation-based crowdfunding is the modelthat has received the most media-coverage and is the onepeople are most familiar with. Examples of this type ofplatform includes sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Thesesites have campaigns that tend to focus on developing andproducing new products or services and almost always in-clude material perks and rewards for donors.

Although better known as a means to jump-start a startupor fund a new product-line, crowdfunding has also becomeimportant for maximizing charitable giving for many organi-zations. Charitable, donation-based crowdfunding is a morerecent innovation that has gotten less attention due to thegeneral lack of tangible, material benefits given in exchangefor financial contributions. More often than not, supportersreceive nothing but a thank-you email in return for theircontribution, and sometimes not even that. GoFundMe isa site that specializes in charitable crowdfunding. Manyof the campaigns on GoFundMe are individuals or familieslooking to raise money for college scholarships, medical bills,or other large/unexpected expenses [3].

1.3.2 Higher-education CrowdfundingBased on the successes of various charitable crowdfundingsites, higher-education institutions have started to evalu-ate the benefits and viability of using crowdfunding to meetfundraising needs [5]. There have been a number of institu-tions that have attempted to create crowdfunding platformsfor student and institute use. The first were the Universityof Utah (UUT), University of Vermont (UVM), and Uni-versity of Virginia (UVA) in 2012 [8, 2]. UUT and UVAdecided to leverage preexisting platforms to fund projectsusing RocketHub, a donation-based crowdfunding platform,and USEED, a whitelabel crowdfunding platform service,respectively, while UVM attempted to create their own plat-form, UVM Start. As more universities embrace crowdfund-ing, there is a trend toward platform creation instead of uti-lizing whitelabel services, though this does not seem to becorrelated with crowdfunding success for the school. Mostimportantly, a university must make sure that their crowd-funding platform is tackling a specific need in order to besuccessful [6].

Higher education institutions require a different approachto crowdfunding than the generic donation-based platformsdue to the additional intricacies of being associated with anacademic name-brand. Generally, these universities requiregreater oversight of projects and wish to have complete con-trol over both the green-lighting and funding process [5].The types of projects funded by universities are almost ex-clusively donation-based and seek to address a broad rangeof student and institute needs. These include: student-groupfundraising, class projects, art/student-project installations,

scholarships, core research, and many others [7, 9, 8, 4].

Another key difference in higher-education crowdfunding isthe average background of the supporters who help to fundvarious projects. At donation-based sites like Kickstarter,Indiegogo, and GoFundMe, the supporters are very diverseand the projects they fund span a wide range of interestsand goals. At investment-based Crowdfunder and AngelList,supporters look to make investments in companies in returnfor an equity stake in the venture. Nothing specific tiesthese supporters together other than the inherent interest ina particular product, idea, or business that they collectivelyfinance. However, higher-education crowdfunding is able totap into a preselected, predisposed network of supporters:institute alumni.

This network of alumni serve as the core audience for anyinstitution-affiliated fundraising. Alumni are more likely tofinancially support student and university needs, based ontheir school affiliation, than almost any random individualwho happens to find a project or idea interesting. Therefore,determining a way to consistently tap into this vast, pres-elected audience would be greatly beneficial to any crowd-funding effort.

1.3.3 Caltech’s NeedLike other higher-education institutions, Caltech is also in-terested in evaluating crowdfunding as an additional meansof fundraising. Though the Institute might be inclined tofocus on its overall Development goals, this type of platformwould also address general funding gaps for student and or-ganization projects. More importantly, the platform wouldalso serve to generate important donor data for DIR use,especially if many alumni choose to support projects on theplatform. This data might include updated address infor-mation for alumni that forget to inform Caltech of a moveor include information about alumni gifting preferences inrelation to project-type interests and funding amounts. Thedata generated by such a platform might be much more valu-able than the funds raised by the platform itself if it couldsignificantly increase the efficiency of DIR fundraising ef-forts. For all of these reason, there is a demonstrated needfor a crowdfunding platform at Caltech.

2. THE CROWDFUNDING PLATFORMThe development of the Caltech crowdfunding platform hadtwo, distinct sets of implementation action-items. The firstdealt with the actual web-development of the platform itself.The second focused on the administrative tasks necessary tolaunch this type of project at a higher-education institution.Before any web-development could occur, significant designdecisions, based on administrative input, would need to bemade.

2.1 Initial DIR Administrative MeetingsThe Caltech Fund, a part of Caltech Development and In-stitute Relations, is responsible for raising support from“alumni, students, parents, and friends” in order to help sup-plement the costs of running the Institute. They are alwayslooking to increase charitable giving for Caltech and relyon their fundraising metrics in order to campaign for largerdonations.

There were multiple contacts within the DIR office, and theCaltech Fund in particular, that were instrumental in de-termining the correct scope and timeline for the platform.Important information pertaining to Caltech’s fundraisingpractices and approaches helped to drive design decisionsregarding the platform.

Caltech has generally lagged behind its peer institutions(eg Harvard, MIT, Yale, Stanford) in charitable alumni-giving. Young-alumni engagement (ie giving rates) at Cal-tech have also been particularly low. The crowdfunding plat-form should have design elements that help to address theselow metrics.

With this in mind, the platform will easily provide a payment-processing method to increase the alumni giving rate atCaltech by making each contribution count toward donorparticipation numbers. This is done by having paymentsprocessed directly by Caltech. Assuming that contributionson the platform primarily come from alumni, this approachshould help to bolster metrics. Additionally, by allowing an-nual projects to be listed on the platform, donors would beincentivized to give every year to the same projects, whichwould increase donor retention numbers, another importantfundraising metric. The platform would also naturally ad-dress the issue of young-alumni engagement, since thosedonors most likely to gift on a crowdfunding website arelikely younger alumni who are comfortable with social me-dia and these types of platforms.

2.2 Crowdfunding Task-forceFortunately, this project coincided with the final meeting ofa crowdfunding task-force that was convened by Caltech toexplore how crowdfunding would benefit the Institute andthe barriers and costs to implementing such a platform. Dur-ing discussions, a primary concerns for Caltech was controlover the entire funding process. Ideally, Caltech would liketo have a student, professor, and stewardship advisor eval-uate each funding proposal and oversee the campaign cre-ation process. This would guarantee that the various inter-ests of the Institute were represented on the committee andwould ensure that only those projects that had reasonablecommunity-wide scope would move forward.

After a campaign had been vetted and created on the plat-form, there were questions regarding stewardship. The In-stitute was apprehensive of the ability for such an onlineplatform to address stewardship in an effective manner. Cal-tech prides itself on proper stewardship of gifts and resourcesand attempts to embody that ethic with visible and memo-rable action beginning with the charitable donation and onthrough the life of the donation. This ethic required thatonce a campaign was fully funded there had to be a trans-parent means of updating donors on the current progress ofthe project throughout its lifetime.

2.3 Design DecisionsAfter examining the funding needs of the Caltech commu-nity, the Development needs of DIR, and the discussionsfrom the crowdfunding task-force, a list of features wereidentified for a prototype crowdfunding platform at Caltech.These features are listed in Table 1. This table breaks thefeatures apart into those that are basic and required for plat-

Table 1: Caltech Crowdfunding Platform: FeaturesBasic Features

Web-based platformGeneral information about platform and legaleseInformational pages for campaigns and creators

Ability to fund campaigns

Additional Features

User profiles with optional detailed infoAdministrative review of campaign proposalsSocial media integration to share campaigns

Campaign and donor metricsMailing list or other contact methods for stewardship

Allow for perks or rewards based on gift amountUser interface design and aesthetics

form functionality and those that would extend platform us-ability and ergonomics.

The platform was to be web-based, instead of a smartphoneapp, in order to maximize creator and supporter accessibil-ity. There were only two core functions needed. The firstwas to be able to display campaign details so supporterswould know what type of project they were funding. And thesecond was the ability to accept and process payments. Allother features were deemed to be secondary, non-essentialfeatures. These additional features would address the moreinteresting aspects of the platform in the form of rich donor-data generation and advanced donor-metrics, but would onlybe implemented after core functionality of the platform wasachieved.

2.4 Main Administrative TasksBefore beginning any of the web-development, it was impor-tant to establish if there were any launch-worthy projects tofund that would be easy to vet and easy to advertise forsupport. Without this, there would be no reason to developthe platform. Secondly, it was important to establish howfunds would be processed and disbursed for both donor andwebsite safety. Lastly, legal counsel had to be consulted andretained in order to address all legal questions regarding sen-sitive personal information during user sign-up and paymentprocessing.

The first task involved contacting all of the major studentclubs and organizations on Caltech campus. This resulted ina number of organizations who were potentially interested inhaving a campaign on the crowdfunding platform. Althoughthese organizations seemed very interested at first, abouthalf of them failed to maintain contact throughout platformdevelopment and were not included as affiliates during plat-form launch.

The second task required numerous meetings with variousCaltech Student Affairs, Advancement, and Information Man-agement Systems and Services (IMSS) personnel. The mainstumbling block involved obtaining accounts that could beused to collect and disburse funds. Payment processing

Figure 1: The logo for TinkerFund, the Caltechcrowdfunding platform.

could be handled by a third-party systems without requir-ing the crowdfunding platform to ever store sensitive, donorcredit-card information. The IMSS department required asecurity audit of the finalized website if any Caltech accountsor information were to be used in conjunction with the plat-form.

The legal issues surrounding the collection of personal in-formation and the ability to pass on collected informationback to Caltech became complex enough that an executivedecision was made to only use collected data for internalplatform analytics and donor-network analysis. This drasti-cally reduced the amount of clauses required to be presentin the Terms of Use (ToU) and Privacy Policy (PP) for theplatform. The PP details what personal information theplatform collects and what kinds of things that data wouldbe used for. The ToU discusses all aspects of user interactionwith the platform and generally indemnifies the operators ofthe platform from most legal action. The ToU also addressescopyright issues and possible Digital Millennium CopyrightAct takedown notices if copyrighted content were to appearon the platform without the rights holder’s consent. Theprocess to get these legal documents in a workable condi-tion required almost the entire project lifetime.

Although initial meetings and work on these tasks com-menced early on in the project, many additional meetingswere required in order to fully address the administrativetasks mentioned. The legal and website security componentstook especially long to get completed.

2.5 Beginning Web-DevelopmentThe crowdfunding platform had to be implemented usingtools that would easy-to-use and extensible for future needs.There were two platforms that were considered: Ruby-on-rails (RoR) with a PostgreSQL database backend and Joomla,a content management system, with a standard Linux, Apache,MySQL, PHP (LAMP) backend. Based on all of the feed-back received from experienced web-developers, RoR talliedthe most support. Although the RoR was more complicatedto get setup and running correctly at first, it was supposedto provide a significantly better website deployment experi-ence in the long run.

Unfortunately, the open-source RoR crowdfunding packagethat was to serve as the template turned out to be incrediblybuggy and riddled with security holes. Without the techni-cal ability to quickly fix these issues, the RoR method hadto be abandoned in favor of the Joomla setup. The poorRoR experience turned out to be for the best as the Joomlaopen-source crowdfunding template was significantly easierto understand, get running, and do basic customization.

2.6 Branding the PlatformOne of the most difficult aspects of the project was brand-ing the platform with a name and logo. Generating a rea-sonable and catchy name and designing a good logo tooka long time. The platform name was particularly difficultto come up with and was eventually inspired by the threenicknames of the founding fathers of Caltech: astronomerGeorge Ellery Hale, physicist Robert Andrews Millikan, andchemist Arthur Amos Noyes. These three were given thenicknames “Tinker, Thinker, Stinker.” After trying a num-ber of permutations and polling friends, TinkerFund wonout.

The logo, shown in Figure 1, was the winner from a largenumber of color and design incarnations.

3. THE TINKERFUND PLATFORMTinkerFund launched on May 29, 2015, with the platformaccessible at https://tinkerfund.com. The Caltech Y servedas a primary launch affiliate, while Engineers Without Bor-ders (Caltech Chapter) and the Interaxon Club also servedas launch affiliates. The campaigns on TinkerFund at launchare summarized in Table 2. The projects are quite variedand should interest a wide-range of different people.

3.1 AestheticsThe platform uses the Twitter Bootstrap framework to or-ganize and place elements on the webpage. It has a respon-sive design in order to accommodate various screen sizes,from mobile phones to desktop monitors. The platform usessearch-engine friendly (SEF) URLs and search-engine opti-mized (SEO) text snippets and keywords in order to opti-mize search engine rankings and provide user readable tabnames. SEO optimizations were targeted at the primarylanding pages of the website.

3.2 NavigationOn the main homepage, a summary of multiple campaignswill appear on desktop devices (Figure 2), up to three cam-paigns per row, or a single campaign at a time on mobilephone devices (Figure 6). After clicking on a campaign, theuser will be brought to the details page for the selected cam-paign (Figure 3).

The homepage also has drop-down menus for easy accessto individual campaigns or the details page for campaigncreators. There is also a link to the FAQ for answers to mostquestions regarding the TinkerFund crowdfunding platform.

The TinkerFund Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and CookiePolicy links are located at the bottom of every page.

3.3 Campaign DetailsThe details page for a campaign starts with the campaigntitle and an image or video to visually grab a donor’s atten-tion.

3.3.1 Campaign SummaryOn the left side of the campaign details, possibly in the cen-ter of your screen depending on screen size and orientation,there is a campaign progress box in gray. This box summa-rizes the campaign’s fundraising efforts so far. This includes

Figure 2: The TinkerFund crowdfunding homepageviewed on a desktop computer.

Figure 3: The details page for a campaign onthe TinkerFund crowdfunding platform viewed ona desktop computer.

Table 2: TinkerFund Launch CampaignsOrganization Campaign Name Funding GoalCaltech Y Social Activism Speaker Series $3,500Caltech Y Rise Tutoring Program $2,000Caltech Y Wilderness First Aid $5,000Engineers Without Borders Clean Water for Ilam, Nepal $2,000Interaxon Club Brain Bee $2,000

Figure 4: Step 1 in funding a campaign on Tinker-Fund. Choose your donation amount and reward.

the number of days remaining until the campaign ends, theamount of money the campaign has raised, as well as whatfraction of the total funding goal the campaign has reached.The link at the bottom of this box to “invest in this project”allows a user to donate in order to support the campaign.

3.3.2 Donating on TinkerFundSupporting a campaign only requires a few steps. The firststep in funding has the user choose the amount to invest,shown in Figure 4. If the campaign has any rewards, theycan be seen and selected to designate funding amount. Theuser is allowed to submit any amount with a minimum do-nation of $1. After choosing the funding amount, the user isthen prompted for a payment method. Figure 5 shows thescreen that allows users to submit credit card informationto complete their donation to the campaign. After com-pleting a donation, the user is given the option to share onsocial media the fact that they just donated to a project onTinkerFund.

3.3.3 Other FeaturesUnderneath the campaign title, there are links to areas toget updates on progress of the project, a forum to post andchat with other users, and a list of supporters who want tobe recognized–users can always opt to support anonymously.When updates are posted to a campaign’s page an automaticmailing will be sent out to notify all registered supporters ofthat campaign. This auto-notification feature requires that

Figure 5: Step 2 in funding a campaign on Tinker-Fund. Input credit card information to completedonation.

the user created an account on TinkerFund before makinga payment. Any user can always browse directly to thecampaign’s progress page to manually check for updates.

After the main picture or video, there are a number of socialmedia sharing links to help promote the campaign. Thesecan be used to easily post on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook,and Google. There are also links to quickly email a friendand embed the progress box for the campaign on a blog.

The very bottom of the campaign details page contains thedetailed text description of the campaign along with theidentity of the creator of the campaign.

3.4 SecurityAll traffic to and from the TinkerFund platform is alwaysencrypted. If the user is using a supported browser, thenthe website will default to using TLS1.2 with DHE RSA forthe key exchange and AES 128bit GCM for all other traffic.This is the most up-to-date version of TLS that allows ac-cess to advanced cipher suites that support elliptical curvecryptography, for huge efficiency gains, and AEAD block ci-pher modes. This is the newest standard for highly securewebsites.

All users who visit the website should see the secure lock

Figure 6: The TinkerFund crowdfunding homepageviewed on a mobile device.

next to the URL in their web browser. Clicking on this willbring up details about the type of connection that was estab-lished with the TinkerFund server. If anything other thanTLS1.2 or 1.1 is being used, it is highly recommended thatthe user upgrade their browser before making a donation inorder to ensure proper information privacy and security.

The security certificate should be registered to tinkerfund.comand was issued by PositiveSSL.

3.4.1 Joomla SecurityAll Joomla related folders and files have the proper read/writepermissions in order to ensure that unauthorized users willnot be able to maliciously make changes to critical systemfiles. The administrators panel and all links to system criti-cal areas have been secured. The system has been hardenedagainst various exploits, though there may still be unknownvulnerabilities.

3.4.2 VPS SecurityThe VPS hosting the TinkerFund platform has had all un-used ports and services closed in order to decrease possibleattack vectors. Super user access is secured by a 2048bit keyand IP restricted.

4. TINKERFUND PLATFORM SUMMARYThe TinkerFund platform is currently running and has allof the required features of a basic crowdfunding platform.The platform allows users to anonymously browse all of thecontent on the website, however making donations requiresthat users register an account on the website. Spam androbot registrations are defeated by the Google ReCaptchasystem. Registration information is automatically mailedto the user at the registered email address after successfulaccount creation. The site includes features to recover lostpasswords and usernames.

The platform can display campaigns created by users or theadmin, including detailed pages that allow a user to donateto a campaign, share the campaign through social media,

and get the most up-to-date information from the campaigncreator. Users can make donations using all major creditcards, currently being processed through Stripe, though thiswill become Authorize.net in the near future.

Social media linking has internal tracking metrics to deter-mine which users have shared links using social media andif users use shortened URLs to access the website there areadditional usage metrics available.

Search-engine optimized links and keywords have been pop-ulated on the major platform landing pages to improve searchrankings.

The platform already has functionality to allow registeredusers to submit new campaigns complete with images, de-tailed text, rewards, and funding goals. Campaigns submit-ted through the system will notify the TinkerFund admin forreview. After successful review by the admin, the user whosubmitted the campaign is allowed to make the campaignactive and begin fundraising.

Basic campaign metrics can be accessed by campaign own-ers. These metrics include a standard 5-number summaryas well as the ability to filter contributions by various at-tributes included in user profiles, like age, sex, and loca-tion. A rudimentary algorithm using linear regression hasbeen implemented to help predict contribution numbers andamounts based on user-defined time scales.

If needed, the platform also has the ability to allow usersto fund campaigns directly into normal checking accountsusing the Stripe and PayPal payments systems. This featurewould only be useful if fundraising efforts were not for aCaltech-affiliated individual or group.

5. FUTURE WORKThe TinkerFund platform has the potential to generate veryuseful data for Caltech DIR use. If a significant numberof Caltech alumni use the platform to make contributions,the data generated would include information like user ad-dress, zipcode, email, site visit frequency, campaign visitfrequency, campaigns visited, campaigns supported, socialsharing of links, and social media sites used. Integrating so-cial media logins, instead of requiring user account creationlocally on the server, may improve the acquisition of usefuldata. A Facebook login would provide friends and other mis-cellaneous data that might otherwise not be accessible. Allof this data could help to build accurate models predictingdonor affinities and campaign engagement.

If enough alumni were making contributions on the plat-form and sharing links using the social media buttons, aloose network of friends might be able to be inferred. At thevery least, user propensity to make a donation to a givencampaign or user likelihood to seed their own personal socialnetwork with a campaign link would still be very useful infor-mation given enough data points from enough users. Donordata could be analyzed to identify those influential nodes inorganic social networks that have significantly higher prob-abilities of causing large information cascades.

The most interesting platform advances would require im-

plementing various machine learning algorithms. A recom-mender system for donors that suggests interesting projectsthat are similar to previously funded campaigns. Maybe, de-velop a usable model that integrates donor gifting behavior,social media behaviour, and total gift amounts. Integrat-ing visualizations for campaigners and donors to improveusability and provide easy to understand statistics aboutactive campaigns.

6. CONCLUSIONThe TinkerFund platform launched successfully and will pro-vide Caltech students and organizations a new funding sourcefor unfunded or underfunded projects. Just the ability to getthese types of projects funding will enrich student life andbenefit the Caltech community.

The platform can serve as a proof of concept for CaltechDIR to show the type of valuable additional data that couldbe generated by a system that was directly affiliated withCaltech and that had access to donor data from previousfundraising campaigns. By itself, the ability to better in-terface with young-alumni and help to update out-of-datealumni address records would already be worthwhile for DIR.However, when combined with the possibilities for donor so-cial network analysis and other more advanced donor met-rics, the platform should easily prove useful to help DIRmore efficiently continue its fundraising efforts.

Design and implementation of the platform took much morework than expected. All aspects of the project had vari-ous roadblocks that had to be overcome. Most importantly,there were two important facets of the project that neededto be tackled concurrently: the administrative discussionsand meetings and the actual web-development and platformdesign. If these two facets were tackled in a serial fashion,there would not have been any possibility of completing theproject in the requisite time.

Future extension of the TinkerFund platform should see in-teresting benefits for donor targeting and donor engagement.

7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis project would not have been possible without the helpof so many different groups and individuals. Thank you forall of the emails, meetings, and discussions. They were veryhelpful and were greatly appreciated!

Special thanks goes to those individuals who provided spe-cial assistance and were absolutely critical to TinkerFund.Without them TinkerFund would not exist!

Adam Wierman, CS145, Professor and Advisor; Athena Cas-tro, Caltech Y, Executive Director; Portia Harris, CaltechY, Director of Marketing and Development; Greg Fletcher,Caltech Y, Student Activities Director; Perry Radford, TheCaltech Fund, Asst. Director of Annual Giving Programs,Young Alumni and Student Philanthropy; Mark Longo, DIR,Director of Strategic Initiatives; Joe Boeke, DIR, Execu-tive Director for Advancement Information Services; RuthAnn Bevier, IMSS, Chief Information Security Officer; Dim-itris Sakellariou, Student Affairs Admin., Chief BusinessAdministrator-Student Affairs.

Thank you to everyone who made this project possible!

8. REFERENCES[1] Caltech. Development and institute relations | caltech.

[2] J. Craven. Universities explore crowdfunding, socialmedia to raise money.

[3] GoFundMe.com. Common questions.

[4] Jessica Raymond. USC launches pilot crowdfundingplatform.

[5] L. Johnson, S. Becker, V. Estrada, and A. Freeman.Horizon report: 2014 higher education.

[6] Jonathan Sandlund. Why universities need to get smarton crowdfunding.

[7] M. Miller-Huey and R. Johnson. CU-boulder launchesnew crowdfunding platform to support student, facultyand staff projects.

[8] Taylor Bench and Thad Kelling. University of utah

embraces aAIJcrowdfundingaAI to developtechnologies.

[9] University of Texas Austin. Students roll out projectson HornRaiser - UTs first crowdfunding platform.