At Rally.org, Fundraising for Charitable Causes Is Big Business
A website that channels political donations finds a new calling
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When director Sam French learned in January that his short film Buzkashi Boys had been nominated for an Oscar, he brooded over how to get the two 14-year-old Afghan boys who star in it to Los Angeles for the awards ceremony. “Fawad [Mohammadi] was a street kid when we cast him in the film,” says French, who made the movie on a $245,000 budget. “He has no father. He was peddling maps and dictionaries for money.”
To fund the boys’ travel costs, the American filmmaker turned to Rally.org, a crowdfunding website for political and charitable causes. French and his team posted a video on the site and promoted it widely via social media. In less than two weeks they had raised more than $10,000, with contributions from 243 donors in 13 countries.