Frequently Asked Questions (and answers)

We actually don’t consider ourselves to be a “platform” like a lot of the sites you might come across (and maybe even used). Yes, operate a platform and your project will be hosted on it, but Jewcer is more of a non-profit organization with the mission to help you do more of what you are passionate about, through crowdfunding.

We spend most of our time and resources on helping individuals and organizations use crowdfunding to raise the funds they need, and teaching them how to use it as an engagement tool. This may result in fewer campaigns on our site, but the success rate is much higher than any other platform, and we can keep our fees lower since we don’t spend your money on our marketing.

Think of Jewcer as a platform with experts that work with you as if you hired a team of consultants, but all included in our already-low fees. For a more in-depth comparison to other platforms, see check out “The Jewcer Advantage.”

There are no upfront fees and it is free to start a campaign. However, as you start receiving contributions, there are fees involved as a portion of each contribution. Luckily for you, we offer donors the option to cover the fees, leaving you with more funds to strengthen our community.

More than 80% of funders on Jewcer choose to cover the fees, which brings the actual fees campaign managers end up paying to below 2% on average (compare that with roughly 10% on KickStarter & IndieGoGo). For more details about the fees involved, please see our pricing page.

Absolutely not. In fact, most campaigns on Jewcer have been created by innovative individuals and groups in our community who just wanted to affect change in the world.

In general, people are happy to contribute on Jewcer in order to be part of the cause behind each campaign. A significant part of our mentorship is around helping you create a campaign that gives people an opportunity to be part of something important, which will get you more contributions and greater exposure!

YES! (Well, most of the time…) 

If you are a non-profit or are already fiscally sponsored by one, you can provide your funders with a tax deduction for their contribution.

Not a non-profit? Jewcer can often times be your fiscal sponsor, at no additional cost! See our grants page for more info and how to apply in seconds!

The first step is starting to describe your project so that we can start helping you with the descriptions, media and strategy. Do not worry, until you launch it, it is private and only you and the Jewcer experts can see it:

Once you get started, we help you with choosing the right goal amount, best length of time, media and strategy to reach your goal. When you finish creating the page, we are happy to go over it and send you notes on how to make it better based on our experience with hundreds of campaigns. You launch your campaign when you are ready and have a “game plan” for how to reach your goal (we help you with that too). If you want to read more about how we help you get fully funded, please see our “how it works” page.

Running a crowdfunding campaign with Jewcer makes it a combined effort. People will hear about your campaign page and read about your cause from actions you take and actions that we do as part of our mission as a non-profit organization. Our platform is specifically designed for the thousands of visitors we have daily to find causes they care about in addition to our newsletter and social media that reach tens of thousands of people who care about causes that strengthen the Jewish community and/or Israel.

An important aspect of our help is providing you with a personalized campaigning strategy that would maximize the exposure of your campaign and help you raise more funds. In other words, who to contact, when and how.

Absolutely. We help causes in the USA, Israel and globally. If you have a cause that can strengthen the Jewish community locally where you are or globally, we want to help!

There is no application process. We are happy to support any cause that strengthen the jewish community and/or Israel, directly and indirectly. An addition to that is Tikun Olam projects that we are also very happy to help. The only type of campaigns that fall into these categories and we cannot support (unfortunately) at this time, are personal-expenses type of campaigns (campaigns that are ran by individuals to pay for personal expenses). If you are not certain, please email us to help@jewcer.com and we would be happy to discuss with you how we can help.

This is an excellent question that we spend a lot of time with each campaign organizer on. You might be tempted to look at what amounts other people raised (go ahead, its good to look at other camapigns), but, ultimately, the amount you will raise depends on you. Yes, we will help with giving you feedback on your campaign page and people will hear about your cause from browsing around the platform or hearing about it from our newsletter or social media, but it is your campaign and you run it. In some sense, you can look at Jewcer as an “amplifier” of your own ability to raise funds with the time you have to spend on it and the current capability you have to reach people. The more you push, the more we amplify your outcome (amount you raise). On the other hand, if you sit back and stop promoting your cause, our amplification will also reduce.

All this said, your goal amount should be chosen based on what you want to raise money for and be transparent about it. Our experts are always happy to talk to you about what your goal amount should be. At the same time, we also created a calculator that can help you estimate. You can find it here.

At Jewcer, we realize how important to you every dollar you raise and thus, we follow the “keep all your raise” when it comes to crowdfunding. In other words, you keep all the funds that you raise, no matter if you reach your goal amount or not.

YES!

As a non-profit organization, unlike other platforms, we can spend our resources on helping you get a better campaign and part of it is having our experts go over your campaign page and send you notes. You are always welcome to visit out Help Desk for some great tutorials or contact us if you have any questions while building your campaign page. When you are done and have not launched your campaign yet, send us a note and our experts would be happy to snd you specific notes on how to make your campaign page better and some strategic tips.