Kickstarter is pretty cool. If you‘ve been living under a rock, its a website where you can propose a project, and people can pledge money to fund it. Different pledge amounts earn different rewards, usually of increasing value proportional to the pledge amount. Wildly successful Kickstarters include the Pebble smartwatch and an independent film by Zach Braff.

Especially timely in the wake of the Sciquester, here’s a question:

If crowdfunding can help develop and produce a smart watch, why shouldn’t it be able to fund scientific research?

It seems like the exact situation we want. Science funded by taxdollars is supposed to benefit society, and kickstarter backers directly see results of their investments. Let people have a direct involvement in the science they want to see done! Scientists and the public, connected!

In April 2012 a new platform launched that is exactly this: Experiment.com. It’s geared specifically at crowdfunding scientific research. They claim that in 2013, ten thousand donors funded 85 projects that sent researchers to 13 different countries. Perusing through projects, there’s a range of target budgets, from a few hundred to several thousand dollars.

But: a problem. In Kickstarter, the different pledge tiers are incentives to donate. Scientific research doesn’t really result in a product that can be sold, so what kinds of rewards can be promised to backers? Experiment.com doesn’t use reward tiers. Instead, donors get access to updates from the scientists, and I suppose the warm fuzzy feeling of having helped advance science.

I think this is the number one problem to crowdfunding scientific research—how do you actually get people to donate, when they don’t “get” anything in return? The result is that donors are going to be people interested in science for science’ sake. That’s good! But imagine if donors could receive something in return. For many Kickstarters, a main benefit of backing is that you usually receive the finished product at a cheaper cost than non-backers how order after the funding round has ended.

One reward I can imagine is to offer participation roles to backers over a certain limit. Maybe a donor would be interested in tagging along while you collect crabs along the coast of Oregon? Or help excavate a triceratops fossil in Wyoming? As an archaeologist, I can easily picture backers as participants in an excavation. It obviously depends on the project, but I think many could have opportunities for backers to directly participate.