Indiegogo was founded in 2008. Seven years later, they now get about 15 million visitors per month and have hosted more than 275,000 campaigns from 224 countries and territories!
An interesting side note: 47% of successful Indiegogo campaigns are run by women (yay for gender diversity in crowdfunding!).
The team at Indiegogo has been making a lot of recent changes in the hopes of further setting themselves apart from their main competitor, Kickstarter. In September 2014 (just over a year ago), Indiegogo introduced InDemand, their new e-commerce feature that has seen quite a bit of success:
“InDemand is a feature that makes it easy for any campaigner who reaches his or her goal to keep raising funds after the campaign ends. Campaign owners can continue accepting contributions, growing their communities, reaching new audiences and receiving ongoing exposure through the Indiegogo platform.
Through the familiar Indiegogo interface, InDemand participants can capture profitable customers, analyze customer data, send ongoing communications and manage orders – all from a single, easy-to-use platform.”
You can see a lot more of the benefits of using InDemand here.
In a monthly product update published on the Indiegogo blog on October 29 2015, Indiegogo announced several new features for both backers and creators (and also said to expect more in the coming months). Here are 5 new things you should know about the platform before launching your Indiegogo campaign:
1. Generosity
It seems like the launch of Indiegogo Life was not that long ago, but Indiegogo’s personal and cause crowdfunding service has now been rebranded as Generosity. A stand-alone platform, Generosity offers a place where individuals and charities can launch projects without any platform fees.
The main categories on Generosity are: medical, community, education, celebrations, emergencies, memorials, animals, faith, volunteer and sports.
One popular campaign that is currently on the platform, Love for Grace Kim, has raised over $35,000 in four days to help pay for 3-year-old Grace’s medical costs after she was hit by a car in October.
2. Refunds
Indiegogo has been processing refunds for two months now, and now this feature is here to stay. Backers can easily request a refund without Indiegogo’s customer happiness team by going to the ‘View Order Details’ section. If the funds haven’t been disbursed yet, campaigners don’t have to manage refund requests.
In the event that the funds have been disbursed or the button to request a refund is not there, backers can still contact the creator directly to request a refund.
3. Address Changes
If your perk hasn’t been shipped yet, you can now change your address directly on the ‘Order Details’ page under ‘Contributions’.
This makes it easy for backers to make sure their pledge ends up at the right place (if you are planning a move, this feature will probably give you some peace of mind when backing a project).
Now creators can focus on other important things without having to keep track of address changes themselves.
4. Pre-Order Beta
For tech and design creators already using InDemand, the Pre-Order Beta is now available to help you take orders before your product is fully available in retail.
This gives the Indiegogo community a chance to save money by pre-ordering at a lower price, and you get to continue to take in pledges even after your campaign is over.
Tech and design creators that are interested but not already using InDemand can reach out to the team at Indiegogo for a chance to try this new feature.
5. Project Tags
Campaign creators can now add between 1 to 5 tags to their Indiegogo campaign under the ‘Basics’ section of the Campaign Editor. These tags show up on your campaign page and can be edited even after the project is live.
This is a step in the right direction for Indiegogo, which doesn’t seem to have as sophisticated a filtering system for projects as Kickstarter does. Before you could search by category or things like ‘New This Week’ and ‘Most Funded’, but there is not an advanced search option.
Adding tags to Indiegogo campaigns may make it easier for creators to guide potential backers to their project by using words that people would use to search for that type of product! You can also compare with similar projects in your category to see what tags they are using.
Conclusion
Several projects have been moving over from Kickstarter to Indiegogo in recent weeks, a trend that has not gone unnoticed by the media. These include the Skarp Laser Razor (which was suspended from Kickstarter), Nanoleaf and more. This trend seems to have started with the introduction of Indiegogo’s post-campaign e-commerce solution, InDemand, which makes it easy for creators to continue to accept pledges once the project has ended.
I look forward to seeing whether the one of the next steps for Indiegogo includes equity crowdfunding. Now that the SEC passed Title III of the JOBS Act on Oct 30 2015, which will give startups more opportunities to raise funds from unaccredited investors in exchange for equity, it seems like only a matter of time.
For now, creators and backers have a range of new tools at their disposal that will make running a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo easier and more convenient.
