In spring 2019, Austin Hespe, vice president of Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship, along with six other on-campus ministries, came up with the idea of uniting their organizations for a religious event at Ball State.
“[The ministries] did a lot of things similar to each other, but we never really interacted,” Hespe said. “We all wanted to know whether there was a way we could kind of get more interaction and build a better community with each other.”
With help from the Ball State Foundation’s crowdfunding program, the event called “Unite” is one step closer to hosting a campus-wide event in 2020.
The crowdfunding program, started in the 2018-19 academic year, provides a platform for members of the Ball State community to raise money for their foundation-approved projects, according to its website.
Last academic year, Stormie Kirby, the foundation’s assistant director for digital marketing, said the platform was able to raise $50,000 for 10 to 12 projects. This year, the crowdfunding campaign has managed to raise more than $26,000 for 17 different projects within a week of its launch.
“Now, we’re doing much bigger campaigns and trying to make it a much larger effort,” Kirby said. “We’ve already had more campaigns in this one month than we’ve had in an entire year.”
While the foundation used the same platform last year, she said, “It wasn’t as strong of an effort.” This year, instead of running campaigns at random times, Kirby said the foundation made specific deadlines and limited crowdfunding periods to one month.
Crowdfunding platforms like IndieGoGo and KickStarter allow crowdfunding campaigns to run up to 60 days but also recommend limiting durations to around a month for greater chances of success in meeting fundraising goals.
Following the Oct. 7 to Nov. 7 crowdfunding campaign, the foundation will hold two more campaigns in 2020 — Feb. 3 to March 3 and April 7 to May 7 — the latter’s start date coinciding with One Ball State Day, the university’s annual day-long fundraising event, which debuted in April 2019.
Kirby said this will help crowdfunding campaigns “get that momentum” from One Ball State Day and continue raising money for another month.
“As long as we surpass $50,000, we just want to keep raising more and more,” she said. “We don’t have necessarily a trajectory, but we expect it to be a significant amount more because the amount of projects that we have are just a lot more than what they’ve been in the past.”
While organizations like Pride of Mid-America Marching Band and Ball State’s Jazz program have exceeded their fundraising goals to raise money for equipment and airline tickets, other projects have yet to hit 50 percent.
Hespe said “Unite” hasn’t been able to raise as much money yet because the project isn’t widely known because it is “brand new” and “never been done before,” and he added that some people “seem hesitant” over the success of the event.
“[The ministries] are very excited about the opportunity and the possibilities to have the event, but it’s never been done before,” he said. “There’s kind of that daunting task of, ‘Will we be able to pull it off and have the event, or will we not?’”
The event would potentially be held in Emens Auditorium and feature Jon Jorgenson, an author, speaker and spoken word poet. Hespe said 90 percent of the money raised would be used to secure the location and the speaker with the rest going toward T-shirts and other promotional material.
Despite the difficulties "Unite" is facing with the publicity of the event and raising money, Hespe said he hopes to make it an annual event open to Ball State students of all faiths and beliefs so everyone can “enjoy the benefits of it.”
Contact Rohith Rao with comments at rprao@bsu.edu or on Twitter @RaoReports.
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