FundRazr, one of the largest crowdfunding sites in Canada, has started up a partnership designed to help people embark on crowdfunding campaigns and raise money for their medical bills.
This week, FundRazr announced it is partnering with Healthline Networks Inc., a U.S.-based website dispensing medical information and tech solutions aimed at healthcare providers, publishers, and health plan providers.
Healthline is turning to FundRazr so it can add crowdfunding for medical expenses to its site – but instead of posting a link and sending potential campaign backers to a page on FundRazr, driving away traffic, the company is setting up a crowdfunding solution directly on its own site.
So if individuals want to set up their own crowdfunding campaigns, they can post it on Healthline, share the story via social media or by email, post updates, and collect contributions via credit card, debit card, or PayPal – without having to keep all of that data on a page on FundRazr.
The B.C.-based crowdfunding platform is calling this “plug and play” software, branding the tool as “Powered by FundRazr” and launching it earlier this summer. It takes crowdfunding efforts from being hosted on just one site – like FundRazr or Indiegogo – to making it into a software-as-a-service plug-in that other sites can use.
Healthline isn’t the first to use the tool – Save the Children, an international NGO, and the SETI Institute in California, have both used Powered by FundRazr to raise money for their work.
“We developed Powered by FundRazr from a real desire to provide effective funding software for our partners,” said FundRazr founder and CEO Daryl Hatton in a statement.
“Healthline.com visitors can now raise funds to help address medical care bills, complete with coaching and support every step of the way. We’ve already raised millions of dollars online for patient care and proven that patients’ online communities want to help with financial and moral support.”
So far, FundRazr has raised more than $40 million in 20 countries since 2010. About half of that amount has gone to medical crowdfunding campaigns.