A new Slop University research poster classifies 138 community crowdfunding campaigns into a scope-versus-funding quadrant, finding four in five post a second stretch goal before either their base target or its own deliverable is ready, and reports the University has made a scope-readiness check mandatory for any affiliated cause's second ask.
A 138-campaign study of community fundraisers finds most stretch goals go up before either the money or the plan behind them is ready, and Slop University now gates the practice for its own affiliated causes.
A fundraising thermometer only ever reports how full the tube is, never how ready anyone is to spend what fills it.
A new Slop University research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities puts a number on the gap. Lead author Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director of the Master of Priority Studies, worked with Professor Verity Marris, Director of the Trajectory Analytics Group, to score 138 active community-cause campaigns against a blinded readiness rubric and match each one to what its own platform progress bar already showed at the moment a second stretch goal went live. Four in five cleared neither line first. The School counts the pattern among the more legible signals its commitment-durability work has produced this year.
A budget line is not a plan. It is just the loudest way of promising one.
— Associate Professor Kwame Lindqvist, Director, Master of Priority Studies, School of Emergent Priorities
Professor Marris said the pattern fit a wider one the Trajectory Analytics Group keeps finding: “A commitment can harden long before anyone has scoped what it’s a commitment to.”
The study scored each campaign’s second ask against the rubric, matched it to what the platform’s own progress bar already showed, and sorted the results onto a single grid crossing scope against funding. On the strength of the result, the University has made the same rubric a mandatory gate: no Slop-University-affiliated cause may list a second stretch goal until its deliverable and its base target both clear the line, with no in-term exception.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.jisa19.