Note: I wont be developing this plugin much in the future. I recommend using Ignition Deck instead.

I love the idea of crowd funding. It’s a perfect mixture of social media, wisdom of the crowds and good old fashioned business. For those of you who dont know what crowd funding is, it’s a way of collecting funds for a project, product or initiative.

Individuals commit to funding your project but are only charged if you reach some pre defined target. This plugin specifically uses PayPal’s adaptive payments API. I chose PayPal for a few reasons – mainly because it works internationally, unlike the alternatives which are USA only.

With this plugin you can create an entire project on your WordPress blog. Users can commit to funding your project without leaving your site – apart from a brief visit to PayPal of course. You don’t need to send your traffic off to some 3rd party site.

This has some massive benefits. All the time you spend marketing your project will benefit your own blog, instead of some 3rd party site. This will give you some long term social media and SEO advantages.

After you’ve payed PayPal’s payment processing fees, you keep 100% of of your funders’ contributions. That’s more money for you to get your project started.

Anther huge benefit is that you can create any type of project you want. As long as you aren’t breaking any of PayPal’s rules (which would only really prohibit illegal projects), you’re free to fund what ever you want.

So go ahead and take crowd funding for a spin. I’m offering free, premium-level support for anyone who wants to fund a project using my plugin. So you dont need to worry about anything going wrong.

So go on, make 2012 the year you get that dream project of yours off the ground.