Case Study: The University of Minnesota Foundation achieves 350% crowdfunding growth and boosts fundraising engagement with CiviCRM

Crowdfunding Platform for Personal and Team Campaigns Leads to Increased Fundraising and Engagement

The University of Minnesota Foundation needed a robust, scalable peer‑to‑peer crowdfunding platform to support more than 66,000 students across campuses, unify hundreds of individual and team campaign pages, and collect donations efficiently. To avoid commercial platform fees and gain customizability, The University of Minnesota Foundation chose CiviCRM (implemented with Drupal by Skvare) as the core solution.

Using CiviCRM extended with custom Drupal modules, Skvare delivered rich personal campaign pages, aggregated team pages, improved social sharing and search/navigation, and an XML feed to sync donations into the central donor database. The result was a measurable lift in fundraising—more than a 350% increase in crowdfunding dollars (raising $463,508 in under 18 months) and a greater than 50% jump in the University’s giving day ($515,000 in a single day in 2015)—demonstrating CiviCRM’s significant impact on engagement, reporting, and cost predictability.

The University of Minnesota Foundation

Robyn White

Digital Content Manager