Capital C : Crowd funding

What is Crowd Funding ?
Intro para from Wikipedia says -

Crowd funding or crowdfunding (alternately crowd financing, equity crowdfunding, or hyper funding) describes the collective effort of individuals who network and pool their money, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations.^[1][2] Crowd funding is used in support of a wide variety of activities, including disaster relief, citizen journalism, support of artists by fans, political campaigns, startup company funding,^[3] movie^[4] or free software development, inventions development and scientific research.^[5]

Techcrunch has a neat article - 2012: The year crowd funding was kickstarted Into The Mainstream that covers the various crowd funding happenings including the Title 3 JOBS Act passed by Obama that allows end-users to jump on the angel funding.

There are a lot of folks/communities ( NGOs, schools, medical aid etc.) who can benefit through crowd funding who would other wise be limited by resources.

Social Scenario
Imagine a scenario where you have started a social project that is much needed for your community and know for sure that it would not scale-up without funding. You could involve people with time as volunteers and get a crowd to help fund the initiative without having to burn your pocket.

What does the crowd in-turn get for their noble contribution, the credit for having participated in helping setup & execute a social initiative which could be any cause like "teach computers for free" or "night school" for working class or "stop corruption".

Different stripes for different types !
There are a variety of crowdfunding organizations that help complete the dots. CrowdsUnite brings order and transparency to crowd funding platforms. You can explore a variety of crowd investors who may want to help in your endeavor.

References :

• Crowdfund Act 2012
• Can Crowdfunding help you launch your next book ?