ARMI’s first crowd funding campaign success

In July, we had four students from the Monash Global Science Challenges course approach ARMI about a crowd funding campaign – a first for ARMI and Monash.

This group of extraordinary students, with the help of the team here at ARMI, created a 24-hour crowd funding campaign to raise much needed funds for a qPCR Machine for the Currie Group’s work on Muscular Dystrophy.

The crowd funding campaign relied on three generous ‘backers’, who matched every dollar given by the general public. Meaning that for every dollar given, three more were donated by the backers. It is an ‘all or nothing’ campaign, meaning if we didn’t get to our goal amount of $10k, then the backers would not give the money. Any concerns the money would not be reached were quickly dashed – we reached $10k within two hours of the campaign opening.

The students, with ARMI’s help, had made a video to help spread the word and by the end of the campaign, it had over 17,000 views via the ARMI Facebook page (which you can still view). Daniel (pictured above) was the star of the campaign and we are incredibly grateful to him for allowing us to use his story.

We had two welcome surprises during the campaign, the first being Muscular Dystrophy Australia who came in once we hit our $10k target and offered to be a new backer for the campaign until we hit $15k. The second being contacted by the makers of the qPCR machine, Bio Molecular Systems, who said if we reach 15k they’ll donate a second machine to our research group for free!

The result of the 24-hours was a total donated amount of $16,955 – $10k of which will be used for buy the first qPCR machine and the rest for essential supplies to use with the machine – and a second machine kindly donated.

This was the first crowd funding campaign run at Monash and ARMI was so overwhelmed at the generosity and support of the community. You can see the results of the campaign here, and follow the day as it happened on our Facebook page.

If you missed the opportunity to donate, you can still make a difference by going to our Donations page and making a tax deductible gift.