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(Note: I originally wrote this article for Contributoria as Crowdfunding Critical Thought , and it is republished here under a Creative Commons license. To republish please attribute original) Greg Palast’s approach to investigative journalism can be summed up in one phrase: Stand up for the underdogs, and take on the fatcats . His hard-hitting reports on corporations like ExxonMobil, politicians like Bush, and shadowy institutions like vulture funds stem from an impulse to challenge those players with the power to bend the rules to their private advantage. That’s why functioning democracies need people like Palast. Such a role faces two unique challenges though. Firstly, powerful institutions and individuals tend to hide behind walls of secrecy that extend over vast geographical space. Investigating a corporation, or a government spy programme, requires a lot of time, a lot of travel, and a lot of prying into hard-to-access information sources. HMM, WHERE TO START? Secondly, it enta...

KICKSTART IT BABY My Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for a finance activism school was a great success. I managed to raise double my initial target, which is a good sign. I also learned a few useful things about the process along the way, which I thought I'd share with people who're thinking about running their own crowdfunding campaigns. Here they are: Choosing a platform There are plenty of articles on what crowdfunding platform to choose , so I won't repeat those here in any detail. I used Indiegogo because it offered the flexible funding campaign - which means you get to keep whatever money you receive even if you don't hit your target. That was appropriate for me because the perks I was offering were limited edition copies of my forthcoming book ( The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance ) and in a sense I was pre-selling them at a premium to fund the School. Thus, even in the event of the campaign failing to hit its target, people still would have ended up with...