Norton puts fun into fundraising
Cheeky online platform Crowdrise helps make world a better place
R unning the New York City Marathon is no easy feat. Try convincing 29 friends — including three Maasai warriors and Canadian pop icon Alanis Morissette — to join you for the gruelling 42.1 kilometres, all the while raising $1.2 million for African wilderness conservation using a website you invented with your friends.
Alas, we can’t all be as cool as the award-winning actor and marathon-running philanthropist Edward Norton. But the star of blockbuster films Primal Fear, American History X, Fight Club and The Incredible Hulk recently told us he believes we each have the ability to do something extraordinary. And he has a full-time “side project” designed to prove it.
That quirky marathon website evolved into Crowdrise, an online platform for individuals, event organizers, non-profits and even companies to leverage the power of charitable crowdfunding through individualized fundraising pages. Community members and casual visitors can browse fundraisers, causes or events to donate to instantly.
Launched in 2010 amid an explosion in crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Causes, Norton’s Crowdrise stands out for its emphasis on fun, creativity and friendly competition. Its motto is, “If you don’t give back no one will like you,” and its community members can earn prizes, merchandise and even amusing “noble” titles for their profiles — baron, mime, tsar and DJ, among others — by collecting “points” through their fundraising activities.
“This stuff has to be fun,” Norton explained. “The work of doing good in the world can’t feel too dry. It’s important for young people especially to feel like, ‘This is a space I want to hang out.’”
Crowdrise takes a small percentage of funds donated to reinvest in the enterprise, which Norton runs between movie gigs with his wife, two friends from the online marketing world, and almost 50 staff in Detroit.
So why did an acclaimed actor, already living the dream, launch a nearly full-time social enterprise?
“Being engaged in efforts to make the world a better place will take you into the most rewarding adventures of your life,” said Norton. “Plus, I reached a point in life like a lot of people where they say, ‘I feel that I can do something with the opportunities and resources I have.’ If you’re not a total ass, you think to yourself, ‘I think I can do something more with this.’” It’s important to have standards. His invention allows anybody to do more with their passion for a cause. A five-year-old girl in Kansas raised $26,000 for peace with a “virtual lemonade stand,” while two guys raised over $5,000 for MS research by going to the concerts of boy bands they can’t stand. One ambitious man ran a series of marathons around the world dressed in a rhinoceros suit, raising $21,000 to save the (real) rhinos.
“Even a love of pancakes can be turned into a lever for social change,” Norton said. He showed us the Crowdrise page of two men who ate pancakes for 24 hours to raise $5,000 for a local women’s shelter.
Hollywood celebrities have also hosted fundraisers on Crowdrise, from Seth Rogen and Jimmy Kimmel, to Barbra Streisand and Harrison Ford.
According to the cheeky site, you can set up your personal fundraiser and “begin accepting donations for any cause within 21 seconds. The record is actually 19 seconds by (world-record-holding sprinter) Usain Bolt.”
“The Greek mathematician Archimedes said, ‘Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I’ll move the world,’ ” Norton told the crowd of 15,000 students at We Day Seattle last month.
“With a lever, you can move things that you could have never moved on your own. We can each take some aspect of what’s happened in our lives, put it against a fulcrum and lean on it, and make bigger things happen.”
Norton’s lever led him to start Crowdrise. Brothers Craig and Marc Kielburger founded the educational partner and international charity Free The Children and the youth empowerment movement We Day.