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Cancer. Heart Disease. AIDS. Diabetes. There are researchers working diligently to find more effective treatments, and cures for these and most other medical conditions and diseases you can think of. Unfortunately, that research takes much longer than it needs to. Researchers, research ethics committees and research administrators all work overtime as it is to get ethical research studies up and running; by and large, it’s not possible for any of these people to work harder. So what’s the alternative? To work smarter.
We have undertaken this project to establish a standard for wording that researchers and research ethics committees the world over, collectively spend at least a million hours negotiating back and forth, every year. This is part of the current research oversight system that adds zero value for research participants; if anything, it detracts value because everyone uses different wording to describe the same activities and risks involved in research studies. Even at the very same hospital, it’s possible for hundreds of different studies to have different language to describe the same things.
Through the Shorter Research = Longer Lives project, we will permanently remove a million hours from the process of research oversight. Not only this year, but every year into the future. Imagine the possibilities of reinvesting a million hours back into the world’s healthcare systems, permanently! That’s a million more hours every year for researchers to plan and undertake new and exciting research, and for research ethics committees to focus on their important role of ensuring that the research studies are ethical, and that research participants are informed, and protected. Let’s make it happen.
Awesome! How Can I Help?
There are three ways you can help research happen faster:
- Share the campaign with your social networks by clicking one of the buttons at the top of this campaign page (just under the video).
- Spread our message far and wide by adding your social voice to our Thunderclap campaign. If our Thunderclap campaign reaches its goal of 100 participants, our message will be amplified when — simultaneously — every participant has a one-time post to his/her social media profile(s) about this project.
- Make a donation and help us reach our target by choosing one of the donation levels to the right of the page, and the corresponding “perk”.
How Will You Use My Funds?
Charting the Course:
- Hire a summer intern to conduct a meta-analysis of research studies
- Determine the most common activities in research studies
Finding the Experts:
- Crowdsourcing of expertise
- Vetting of expertise
Getting It Done:
- Bring together the experts to do this work, and compensate them for their time (it's going to be hard work!)
- Electronic platform development costs (mostly developed already by Stewardly)
Nitty Gritty:
- Establish a non-profit organization to evolve and steward this standard into the future
- Legal costs
- Insurance
Processing + Platform
- FundRazr fee
- PayPal/payment processing fees
Every dollar raised above our goal, minus the processing and platform costs, will be provided directly to the newly established non-profit, to further this work. See the video for the research community for more details on what that work will involve. (coming soon)
About the Perks for this campaign...
- 1 million hours divided by 125,000 = 8. That means that each $1 =
8 hours.
- For the purposes of calculating these perks, 1 week = 40 work hours.
- Our 52-week calendar doesn’t divide up equally into 4 weeks/month, which is why it appears that the math doesn’t add up in the perks.
- However, those extra 4 weeks sneak into each three-month quarter of the year, and figures are rounded up or down accordingly.
Who is spearheading this project?
You might be wondering who thought up this project, and has been the driving force behind it. Josh Leslie, the founder of Stewardly shares a bit of his story and his reasons for undertaking this work in this short video:
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q: How do researchers provide better care to you, me and everyone?
A: A great and important question!
Perhaps it is best to start with what research is not. Research is not clinical care. It is the rigorous scientific process by which we as a society, advance the state of our medical knowledge, and perform experiments (in research studies) to find out whether or not new methods or health products (drugs, devices, natural health products, biologics and genetic therapies, etc.) improve health outcomes.
This is a common misunderstanding on the part of research participants (the people who decide to take part in research studies). So common, that there is a term for it, called “therapeutic misconception”. Here is the definition of therapeutic misconception, from the Tri-Council Policy Statement:
“Therapeutic Misconception: A misunderstanding, on the part of participants, of the purpose, benefits, and/or risks of clinical trials. Often participants do not understand that research is aimed primarily at producing knowledge and may not provide any therapeutic benefit to them.”
So our healthcare professionals can provide us with better care as a result of the work of researchers, and the research studies that they complete. Hence the “Shorter Research” part of the name of this project; the faster that researchers can initiate and complete research studies, the better the state of our medical knowledge, which means healthcare professionals learn important things that help them provide better care for their patients. Sometimes this is a new health product or medical innovation, and sometimes this is simply because they have a better understanding of how to provide the right treatment, to the right person, at the right time — the goal of personalized medicine.
Q: Why do you ask for a minimum $5 donation?
A: We ask for a minimum $5 donation because of the way crowdfunding platforms and payment processing companies (like PayPal) work. In a nutshell, they take the most money in fees off of the first $1 in each transaction. What’s left is ~60 cents or less of that dollar.
To explain the impact of this, consider what would happen if 125,000 people each gave $1 to help us reach our goal. Well, unfortunately we’d raise only 60% of $125,000 ($75,000 total), and wouldn’t be able to undertake our project until another 83,333 people also gave $1!
A $1 minimum donation means that 208,333 people would have to give $208,333 in total donations for us to reach our campaign goal of $125,000. That isn’t math we like, and we don’t think you should like it either!
Let’s get more specific in our calculations:
- From the 1st dollar, $0.38 (approximately) is taken, leaving $0.62 for this project.
- From the 2nd dollar, only $0.08 (approximately) is taken, leaving $1.54 for this project.
- From the 3rd dollar, only $0.08 (approximately) is taken, leaving $2.46 for this project.
- From the 4th dollar, only $0.08 (approximately) is taken, leaving $3.38 for this project.
- From the 5th dollar, only $0.08 (approximately) is taken, leaving $4.3 for this project.
- [...]
- From the 33rd dollar, only $0.08 (approximately) is taken, leaving $30.06 for this project.
Donating $5 then, means giving 7x as much as giving $1. Donating $33 means giving 48x as much as giving $1. That’s math we like, where everybody wins.
It would only take just over 29,000 people giving $5 each to reach our campaign goal, with $145,349 total donations. Giving more, brings the total donation amount required down even further. Taking $33 as an example, $30.06 goes to the campaign. So it would only take just over 4100 people giving $33 each to reach our campaign goal, with $137,226 total donations.
Don’t get us wrong; we’re very thankful that platforms like FundRazr and payment processing companies like PayPal exist. Otherwise we couldn’t do this campaign! We just believe in your money having maximum impact factor, with more of it going to the actual project, and less of it going to the platform and processing companies.
To support the calculations above, here is the fee structure of FundRazr + PayPal, as taken from the FundRazr website:
“Recipients pay 5% FundRazr fee plus Payment Provider fee of 2.9% + 30¢* per transaction."
Q: You are running 2 crowdfunding campaigns simultaneously: one for the general public, and one for the research community. Are you "double-dipping"?
A: This is a valid concern to have, but rest assured that this is not the case. The reason we are running 2 campaigns simultaneously, is for two main reasons:
- The different communities (general public vs. research) require different levels of detail with respect to this project.
- The "perks" for each of these communities are different.
We searched for a crowdfunding platform that would be able to support having the total amount raised for both campaigns roll up into an overall 'master' total, and thought that we would be able to accomplish this via FundRazr, the platform we ended up selecting. However, unfortunately the current FundRazr platform only supports #1 and cannot support #2. This caused a delay in launching our campaign to the research community, which was an unanticipated technical issue, and for which we apologize.
This also means that in order to keep the total in each campaign updated accurately, once a week we will have to manually 'sync' the funds raised. For the duration of both campaigns we will do this, and publish an update when the funds have been added. By way of concrete example, if $1000 is raised in one week via the research community campaign, we will manually add that to the total for the general public campaign, and then post an update letting followers of our general public campaign know.
More Q&A to be added throughout the campaign, as questions arise!
Images © Stewardly. All Rights Reserved.
Perks
Donating $2000 to this campaign has the impact of freeing up 5 YEARS of research capacity...permanently! You also get pre-recorded quarterly video updates as an avid supporter of this campaign, and this project. [Note: The video updates will only be shared with supporters contributing $2k or more to this campaign.]
Donating $10,000 to this campaign has the impact of freeing up 25 YEARS of research capacity...permanently! That's a quarter of a century in research capacity, freed up every year into the future. Amazing! You also get personal monthly updates via web meeting or telephone, as a top supporter of this campaign, and this project.
Highlights
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Shorter Research = Longer Lives. Make It Happen. Community
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and show your name, or inspire a contribution from someone else by sharing your personal link (below).
The more contributions you make or inspire, the higher you'll go and the more the campaign will benefit.
Here's your personal link to share:
CopyDonating $2000 to this campaign has the impact of freeing up 5 YEARS of research capacity...permanently! You also get pre-recorded quarterly video updates as an avid supporter of this campaign, and this project. [Note: The video updates will only be shared with supporters contributing $2k or more to this campaign.]
Donating $10,000 to this campaign has the impact of freeing up 25 YEARS of research capacity...permanently! That's a quarter of a century in research capacity, freed up every year into the future. Amazing! You also get personal monthly updates via web meeting or telephone, as a top supporter of this campaign, and this project.
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Together we can do some good for this cause. And it won't cost you a penny—just a few minutes of your time.
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