Giving Compass' Take:

· Fast Company takes a look at the rapid rise of flash funding, how it has encouraged giving, and how crowdfunding has impacted the philanthropic sector.

· What is flash funding? How is flash funding affecting the philanthropy world? How can organizations use crowdfunding to their advantage?

· Here's what crowdfunding means for philanthropy. 

The first time it happened, DonorsChoose.org founder Charles Best was shocked. It was 2010, and a woman called his company saying that she was having a little bit of trouble making a donation to the site, a crowdfunding platform that helps teachers across the country fund classroom necessities and educational projects. Best called her back himself, “and I figured I would just be helping her troubleshoot a $10 donation,” he says,” but then a curious thing happened: She asked how many classroom projects there were from the state of California, and how much it would cost to fund them all.

Best did the math, and the nearly 2,000 projects totaled $1.2 million. The woman said, “Okay,” and hung up the phone, and Best thought that was the end of that. “But a few days later we got a $1.2 million check in the mail to fund every single classroom project in California as one surprise,” he says. “And it really was magical.”

This spurt of generosity was not a one-off, though each time it happens, Best says they’re still surprised. It’s grown into a trend that DonorsChoose staffers have dubbed “flash funding”: when a single donors funds all the projects—either in a geographic area or in a specific subject matter, like STEM.

But no matter how many teacher projects get wiped out by donors, there will be more projects created by more teachers to take their place. No matter how many people with medical bills or destroyed homes get an influx of cash from strangers on the internet through GoFundMe or Indiegogo, there’s already another tragic story to hold our attention and generosity. But with flash funding, at least, the pressure is off to stick out in the crowd. That means getting a project funded does come down to a little bit of luck for those in the right crowdfunding category at the right time, but it also means a potentially more equitable way of giving—one that only works on a platform like DonorsChoose, which rigorously vets all of its campaigns.

Read the full article about flash funding by Kristin Toussaint at Fast Company.