In January, we wrote about Indiegogo at CES 2016 and how they had just announced their Enterprise Crowdfunding program, working with companies like General Electric, Hasbro, and ShockTop. Since then, Indiegogo has been working hard to offer more opportunities to their users.
In March, on International Women’s Day, Indiegogo launched a yearlong initiative to support women entrepreneurs with partners including Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network, Girls in Tech US, Girls in Tech UK, and more. With 47% of successful Indiegogo campaigns run by women, the crowdfunding platform wants to continue to encourage women to innovate and help create jobs. They also hope to change the trend where women are continuously turned down by VCs for funding and get little career support.
In May, Indiegogo announced a new partnership with Celery, helping its users connect to an even better pre-order and ecommerce platform. Their original pre-order service, InDemand, has been very popular since it was launched in January 2015, with successful creators from both Indiegogo and Kickstarter using InDemand to grow after crowdfunding.
“To support entrepreneurs in the post-campaign part of their journey, last year we launched InDemand to enable them to take pre-orders post-campaign,” Slava Rubin shared, “InDemand grew very quickly and is now generating over $20 million in pre-orders per quarter. We are excited to continue to build on this success to empower entrepreneurs across the lifecycle.”
Indiegogo also announced their partnership with hardware maker Arrow Electronics in May. Through this partnership, select tech campaigns on Indiegogo will have access to Arrow’s online services, including design tools, engineering experts, prototype services, and more!
Arrow will also be selecting campaigns to feature on their website and media network, which get over 50 million page views per month. One of the first campaigns that has been chosen for this program is Solar Roadways. Their campaign raised over $2.2 million in 2014 and now they will be joining Arrow to install the first solar roads in Idaho.
The last initiative that was launched in May is the Heineken and Indiegogo Cities Project. Until June 30 2016, people in New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles and Honolulu can submit an idea that they believe would make their city even better. The public will get to vote for their favorite ideas, and a panel of experts will help Heineken select the winners.
“Five winners will be selected to run a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, with $20,000 matched and marketing support from both Indiegogo and Heineken. Though each campaign focuses on an individual project, the goal is to make each city greater than ever,” they share, “Have an incredible project for one of Heineken’s Cities? Submit your 30-second pitch video to Heineken’s Facebook page!”
It looks like the team at Indiegogo has had a very busy year so far, which makes me curious about what they have in store for us next. All I know is that they are all over my news feeds with these announcements! The best part is that Indiegogo is sharing all of this success with the creators that use their platform, helping them to launch bigger and better campaigns. We aren’t even halfway through the year yet, and the platform has already hosted seven campaigns that raised between $1 and $3 million!
