3 Fundraising Innovations to Keep on Your Radar in 2022

If you check online, you’ll see that GoFundMe has hundreds of thousands of successful campaigns. Internally, programs such as DIV and PI2 are understaffed relative to their overall impact. USAID and the DFC should increase the number of staff assigned to these two programs to enable greater impact and an increased number of investments.

Launching a Crowdfunding Campaign

This week, Migicovsky launched a new Kickstarter campaign for Pebble TIME and raised $17 million in only 11 days ($7.4 million in the first day!). With 19 days left (as of the writing of this blog) it’s crushing the record. Other than that, you can also have your backers club by using these platforms, which would help provide necessary support in taking your business forward and putting together a list of future investors. In addition, you can show your campaign in front of thousands of people interested in seeing unique new projects come to life, which makes it an ideal scenario for creatives or businesses looking to make their dreams come true. People love this site because it allows them to be directly involved with giving money. However, they feel it is best used without having any personal ties or responsibility towards how that donation will impact other people’s lives.

GIF backs innovations with the potential for social impact at a large scale, whether they are new technologies, business models, policy practices, technologies, or behavioral insights. GIF supports innovators at all stages of their life cycle, from start-up and pilot testing through to larger scale implementation. The innovations that GIF funds can be in any developing country and can focus on any sector relevant to international development, provided they improve the lives of those living on less than $5 a day. Innovations can be tech enabled but often are simply a new model (e.g., a farmer cooperative) or process to encourage change in behavior (e.g., using behavioral nudges to encourage tax compliance). The International Development Innovation Alliance defines innovation as “a new solution with the transformative ability to accelerate impact. In addition to using evidence, donors have sought to better measure the impact of these new innovations and understand the advantages or disadvantages of one model over another.

At Singularity University, we’ve also launched a Crowdfunder campaign to raise capital for our SU Labs Accelerator Seed Fund. This comes from Title II of the Jobs Act (2012) that allows any company to publicly advertise their fundraising efforts. Title II takes the 80-year-old, highly regulated, private placement deals (~$1.2 trillion dollars/year) from the hush-hush boardrooms into the open public forum (at least for accredited investors). All the submissions – both proven concepts and innovative ideas – were fed into a Submissions Mind Map, visualizing the links between the different proposals. The Submissions Mind Map also allowed users to understand how the submissions could reinforce each other.

While rhetoric has frequently elevated the importance of innovation, actual allocations of funding and personnel have not quite matched this enthusiasm. Resources for innovation remain scant when compared to overall development assistance. USAID, for example, spends just $30 million per year on its DIV program, compared to the $18 billion in other assistance that USAID obligates each year. DIV and GIF are both meant to respond to this challenge, though GIF can engage with a broader range of innovators given its more extensive financial tools.

Simple to use platform.

Through grants and risk capital, GIF supports breakthrough solutions from for-profit firms, nonprofit organizations, researchers, and government agencies to maximize their impact and catalyze meaningful change. GIF’s portfolio currently includes 24 for-profit investments gogetfunding and 27 investments in other types of organizations. Through 2020, GIF had invested just over $100 million in these innovations. Funding for innovation remains relatively small compared to the overall amount of bilateral ODA and annual commitments by DFIs.

If you’d like to join my Syndicate — to follow the companies I’m personally advising/investing in, click here. The first deal I am backing on the platform is an exciting machine learning and data mining platform called Experfy. Over the last 30 years, I’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars for my startups and XPRIZEs. The open call reached over 1,500 participants, generating over 230 submissions.

When it has worked best, DIV has frequently provided a small initial pilot amount of funding that helped to generate additional evidence of impact. GIF then used that evidence to justify taking further risk and providing a greater amount of money to scale up a particular innovation. GIF has also coinvested alongside the DFC (or OPIC) and other DFIs, often playing a “de-risking” role by making an investment more palatable. By their nature, innovation funders such as GIF and DIV have smaller amounts of funding available. This is why both adopted a model of tiered funding that ties higher financing to greater evidence of impact.

Looking ahead, Kremer and his colleagues suggest that the net benefit of DIV’s portfolio could be as much $17 per $1 invested. Some innovations have scaled, but the focus has been largely on early- to mid-stage innovations which evidence indicates GCs are better placed to support. GCs have provided innovators with support for acceleration (moving along the pathway to scale) and for engaging with the innovation ecosystem which has to be tailored to context to be effective. Covid-19 created cascades of shortages, disruptions, and problems that rolled downhill and landed in the most vulnerable neighborhoods.