How it Works

You must be a student at UCB and have a valid CalNet identification username and password. You will need this to register in the Big Ideas @ Berkeley Marketplace, and once registered you will be able to submit project ideas for which you are seeking support. Big Ideas will review the project idea and either approve or make further suggestions as to how your proposal might be modified to conform more closely with our requirements before it can be posted live. If approved, you will then be able to provide more information on your project and publish it live to the marketplace. You can go back in at any time and edit your information. You are encouraged to upload progress reports regularly. However, Big Ideas will require progress reports at least every 6 months through an e-mail notification reminder.

Please note: All donations made to initiatives go through the UC Berkeley Foundation Fund. Big Ideas @ Berkeley will appropriately allocate those funds to the specific student projects.
To cover administrative costs, there is a 2.5% gift fee through GiveToCal on all donations.

Please ensure that you specify how you would like your project funds to be disbursed when filling out the project information form.

Themes

Projects Ordering - The order in which initiatives appear on "browse" pages is dynamic and changes every time you click on the theme titles. We want to give all the projects that we support equal opportunity to be listed at the top of the list to attract the attention of donors.

Progress Reports - Progress reports on Big Ideas are posted directly to bigideas.berkeley.edu by project leaders as they are completed, or at least once every 6 months (in January and June) as required by Big Ideas administration. To protect the privacy of the student teams, these documents are made accessible only to supporters of projects (financial or in-kind) through password protection.

Promoting Your Project

The following features for promoting projects can be found by clicking on the "Spread the Word" button on any of the project overview pages.

Tell a Friend - Spread the word about Big Ideas @ Berkeley and update your friends and family on the projects you're either working on or interested in supporting.

Start a ChipIn Event - Ask your friends and family to help raise funds for a project by creating a ChipIn event. Organize and communicate with donors and track fundraising easily with this online "social giving" feature.

Create a Widget - Find the project you want to support and create a widget to promote it! The Widget, customized as you want, can be added to your Web pages, social networking pages like MySpace, blogs, or any other Web precense. They help drive traffic directly to your chosen project and show real time information on the amount of funds raised.