My Rich Aunt: Student Fundraising

Education

Marketplace

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CLIENT

My Rich Aunt

About Project

College Student Fundraising Platform

My Rich Aunt empowers college students to raise funds for academic and personal expenses not covered by traditional financial aid programs. Students create campaigns, share personal stories, and connect with supporters through transparent fundraising workflows. The platform encourages community engagement while simplifying donation tracking and campaign management. By improving fundraising accessibility, the platform helps students secure financial support quickly while building trusted donor relationships around educational and personal growth initiatives.

Impact

$3.1M raised by students in the first eighteen months.
Average campaign reaches its goal in 19 days.
11,000 student campaigns created.
Platform fee at 0%, with costs covered by optional donor contribution.
73% of donors are outside the student's immediate family.
Built in 6 weeks.

Challenge & Solution

Challenge

Students lacked accessible digital platforms to raise funds for expenses outside institutional financial aid programs, limiting their ability to secure support quickly and effectively.

Solution

We developed a student focused fundraising platform that simplifies campaign creation, donor engagement, and contribution tracking, enabling students to secure funding more efficiently while maintaining transparency with supporters.

Story / Origin

Financial aid covers tuition and, quite often, nothing else. A laptop that dies in the second year, a flight home for a funeral, a deposit on housing, a course-required field trip. These are the costs that end degrees, and there is no institutional mechanism for any of them.

Students were using general crowdfunding sites, which was working badly. Those platforms take a percentage of small sums that cannot spare it, and they place a student asking for four hundred dollars for textbooks next to viral campaigns raising six figures. The comparison is demoralising and the discovery is nonexistent.

The founder had watched a housemate leave university over an amount of money that a dozen people would have covered without noticing, had any of them known. The problem was not generosity. It was that there was no dignified way to ask, and no place where people inclined to help students were already looking.

End Results

The 73% figure is the one that matters. If campaigns only reached family, the platform would be a payments tool. Reaching beyond that circle, mostly through institution pages and alumni, is what makes it a fundraising platform.

The zero fee model held, funded by optional donor contribution at a take-up rate high enough to cover operations. Several universities now link to institution pages from their student support resources.

Features Buit

Campaign creation structured around specific, verifiable needs rather than open appeals, with a required breakdown of what the money is for, which is what makes small campaigns credible.

Student status verification through institutional email, with optional enrolment confirmation for higher-value campaigns.

Discovery is organised by need category, institution and field of study, so donors who want to support students in a particular area can find them. Institution pages aggregate campaigns from a single university, which is what alumni respond to.

Funds release against the stated purpose with receipt upload for larger amounts. Donors can give anonymously, and updates are posted back to everyone who contributed. Recurring micro-support lets a donor back several students at a small monthly amount.

Typography & Color

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