Fundraising & NFTs

White Paper on Nonprofit / Public Sector Fundraising via Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

Focusing on a hypothetical case study involving art museums.

Shown here is a royalty-free image of the National Gallery of Ireland, courtesy of Juliet Furst on Unsplash.

Articles on non-fungible tokens (NFTs, sometimes referred to as “Nifties”) have dominated tech headlines in recent months. What might this mean opportunity-wise for nonprofit and public sector fundraising?

Below, I’ll offer a brief summary of what NFTs are, using artwork as an example (including links to additional reading). Then I’ll jump into a hypothetical NFT-based fundraising scenario involving an art museum. I’m choosing art museums as my subject primarily because they’re prime examples of immense NFT profit potential.

The NFT of this image sold for nearly $500k. (See link to the NYT article covering this in the article here.)

Recently, I was discussing the New York Times article “The World Knows Her as ‘Disaster Girl.’ She Just Made $500,000 Off the Meme” with some successful working artists and musicians. Their responses ranged from (1) a few being “infuriated” (to quote one musician expressing anger at a digital asset being perceived as more valuable than the art itself), to (2) others struggling to understand why anyone would spend money on these (not that I can blame…