Fabiano, You beat me to it!
This would be a great idea. The important part would be in the execution. First identify a launch opportunity, satellite and budget that is real BEFORE launching a kickstarter. A review of some of the failed Kickstarter schemes would be important lesson.
When AO40 launched, I was amazed just to be able to receive the 2M engineering beacon with a Standard C508 portable sitting on my dashboard WHILE driving!
One of the incentives could be an inexpensive SDR kit designed specifically to receive and decode telemetry, SSTV images and other data. This could get the masses interested in the hobby.
For bragging rights, contributors at a higher level would get a Vanity QSL card or similar vanity image item (for the unlicensed) stored in the bird and randomly displayed on SSTV or HDTV that could be decoded with the SDR kit.
Make the SDR receiver kit portable and IOS and/or Android compatible and you have captured the younger demographic.
Maybe some of the radio manufacturers could throw in gear as incentives for larger donations.
To mis-quote Frank Zappa, AMSAT is not dead, it just smells bad.
Message: 5 Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2013 18:41:44 +0100 From: Fabiano Moserfabianomoser@gmail.com Cc: amsat-bbamsat-bb@amsat.org Subject: [amsat-bb] Re: High orbit satellites? Message-ID: CAM6o-maX=9KaU6mjALYxUtjk_BMNp=+x5M0fvfZ=Q2JETUKFwA@mail.gmail.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
How manny Amateur Radio whole world can join this Challenge?
What about: http://www.kickstarter.com
???