What you are seeing today on SkolaFund.com is actually meant to be an alpha – the first version, a test version of the website. We know that it is not perfect and a lot more can be done to improve it. Our initial intention was to use it for one campaign which was Latifi’s.
To get this current website up, the co-founders had to fork out quite a some of their own money to engage developers. Both co-founders are still students so they are cash-strapped themselves. All of the people and bodies that they’ve approached for funding were not ready to help financially. They either don’t believe in the idea or that the “inexperienced” team can pull it off. Oh well, we’ll save this for a different post.
The whole idea to come up with this alpha website was to validate our assumption that the community cares and will fund a student in need. We wanted to prove that crowdfunding scholarship can work in this region. We needed to validate this to increase our chances to get funding to build the actual website or at least the beta version. However, few days after the first campaign was launched, applications from more students to start a campaign kept flowing in. We couldn’t tell them no or to wait for the new website, because some of them urgently needed help. So we allowed some of them to use the current website.
We hope the users understand that at times we feel frustrated as well that the website couldn’t be better. We really want to work on rebuilding a better more user-friendly, less buggy website for SkolaFund. Let’s pray that people with funds see value in what we do and spare us some funding soon.
We’re running out of cash. :’)
Hello there 🙂 I just tweeted to you regarding some of the links on your website says ‘Error in exception handler’ when being clicked on. Only after that, I encountered with this blog post. First of all, I am sorry :'( I am sorry to hear about your short of funding too.
Why don’t you start a campaign on SkolaFund itself? I’m sure many see the potential of SkolaFund’s good intention and would be delighted to contribute for SkolaFund sustainability it just that, not many of us have thousands of Ringgit to invest. You can raise some money just enough to fix the bugs on SkolaFund.com and approach organisations for the beta version. I hope this does not sound stupid as I’m lacking of IT knowledge hehe :))
Above all, I am truly grateful for the existence of SkolaFund as it gives hope to many students out there to get some financial aid for their studies. I truly think what SkolaFund are doing is really noble and inspiring. Keep it up! 😀
Hey! You’re HizzNadia right? haha. Don’t worry about it. We are considering starting a crowdfunding campaign for ourselves but scared that it might distract people from funding the students. But you have a good point! I will share this with my teammates. Thanks for supporting what we do! 😀