ItBusiness.ca | Candice So | January 8, 2014

Crowdfunding platform Indiegogo Inc. has launched a new feature called Outpost, giving campaigners the ability to embed their campaign pages on their own web pages, instead of just having them hosted on Indiegogo’s site.

The idea is to let well-known brands customize their campaigns to their own liking and to drive traffic to their own sites. There are no setup fees, and Outpost uses the same HTML and JavaScript code that appears with sites using plugins from Google Maps, Facebook commenting, and Google Analytics.

View:  Canadian Crowdfunding Presentation (PDF)

However, campaigners still get a spot on Indiegogo’s site, with the platform calling their pages “mirrored campaigns” that give them access to nine million unique monthly visitors and the chance to be featured in its email newsletters and on its social media channels. Using the Indiegogo site also helps campaigners keep track of what backers are doing, based on the site’s data analytics tools.

While Indiegogo is saying it is the first crowdfunding platform to offer an embedding capability, British Columbia-based crowdfunding platform FundRazr says it actually built a widget to allow people to directly contribute to campaigns on a website about two years ago. And in December, FundRazr launched a software-as-a-service plugin for embedding campaigns onto organizations’ sites.

In fact, WikiLeaks staff have been raising legal defence funds for founder Julian Assange through FundRazr, as it offers both a way to donate through Facebook as well as on the FundRazr site. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden also has a campaign on Fundrazr, aiming to raise money for his legal costs. At the time of this writing, Assange’s FundRazr campaign has raised about $27,250, while Snowden’s has raised about $97,000.

“We’ve been doing this in a variety of forms for a long time,” says Daryl Hatton, FundRazr’s founder and CEO. “The basic idea is that we think crowdfunding is going away from being a destination portal and into a tool where you use it wherever you need it.”

He compares embedding crowdfunding campaigns on company sites to what PayPal Inc. did, when it allowed people to pay for things directly on an e-commerce site without having to be redirected elsewhere.

Related:  FundRazr’s Crowdfunding as a Service Platform Launched at Grow 2013

However, he says it doesn’t really matter Indiegogo is saying it is the first crowdfunding platform to offer embedded campaigns – FundRazr isn’t going to dispute it.

“There’s a lot of innovation that’s happening outside of the main guys in here, like Kickstarter and Indiegogo. We have a curve of innovation like this, where you can run it on your site, where you can run as many campaigns as you want to on your site,” he says, adding one FundRazr’s customers, Healthline Networks Inc., recently added FundRazr’s software plugin to crowdfund medical expenses.

“It’s a couple of lines of embedded script code, is all it took for them to become a crowdfunding portal,” Hatton says.

Continue the full article --> here