Crowdfunding via Steemit?

Could Steemit and other rewards based platforms be the ideal way of crowdfunding sports and services?

While crowdfunding a product can easily be done by preselling the product, things are not that simple for some of the other campaigns.

Let me back up a bit and hopefully explain my thinking.

My daughter is a budding figure skater who is training towards international competition and a career in figure skating. Contrary to popular belief, figure skating is not a cheap sport. Once ice time, coaches, physios, choreographers, dresses, boots and blades, travel, competition fees and accommodation is taken into account, this can run to more than $65 000 in a season.

I recently ran a crowdfunding campaign for her earlier this year. Taking into account that I have nearly 10 000 LinkedIn contacts, over 700 Facebook friends and just over 200 followers on twitter, the $10 000 that we wanted to raise should have been easy – 1000 people contributing $10 would meet the goal!

Nett result – 2 contributors (1 x $10 and 1 x $20). The feedback that I received was that people are reluctant to contribute to something intangible and would rather pre buy an item as they see it as less of a risk.

With Steemit, all that would be required, is a number of followers of the campaign voting on the story of the athlete’s progress. The fact that your vote does not, essentially, cost you anything, seems to also make a lot of sense, as there is less of a risk factor. The rewards could also be given in the form of votes on posts by the contributors. This would spread the income stream over a period of time and would then determine whether the campaign is genuine of not.

I would value the input from the community at large as to whether there would be support for such a campaign or not.......

Please let me know whether you would be interested in supporting a campaign like this by commenting. I would also appreciate if you resteemed, or even voted on this post.