Crowd sourcing has nothing to do with funding, it's about how they gather information. I'll copy a paragraph from they article where they explain it since you obviously haven't read it:

"In 2014, he used a Kickstarter campaign to launch Bellingcat, an online platform for citizen journalists to verify and publish research that taps into the hive mind approach to worldwide, Internet-era collaboration and open-source sleuthing. Whereas traditional investigative journalism—commissioned and published by newspapers or foundations or blogs—is only as expansive and wide-ranging as the team of reporters assigned to any given project, Bellingcat is more like an online meritocracy of ideas à la Wikipedia: Start a thread or page or investigation or project, and if it yields something good, some will read while others will contribute. Get enough people involved, and things can even start to snowball."