Reimagining Fundraising: The 2022 Global Innovation Challenge Association of Fundraising Professionals

Such activity is evidence of the U.S. government’s significant role in creating and funding the innovation ecosystem, where it is playing an outsized role. Recent work by economist Michael Kremer suggests that DIV had delivered significant impact at the portfolio level. In a 2019 paper that reviewed DIV’s early portfolio investments, Kremer and his coauthors found that 10 out of 41 initial innovations reached 1 million or more direct beneficiaries. These 10 innovations likely accounted for 95 percent of the 55 million people that the 41 innovations reached, accounting for the vast majority of DIV’s social return. Sufficient data was available for Kremer and his coauthors to estimate a social rate of return on four of DIV’s innovations that reach 1 million or more direct beneficiaries. They estimate that these four innovations will generate $86 million in discounted social benefits, or $5 per $1 invested by DIV.

Expanding Innovation

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 gogetfunding 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.

Embracing collaboration to share a bigger pie

This powerful combination allows you to first validate your idea, and then raise the growth capital to implement it. In equity crowdfunding, investors are buying equity from your company (rather than buying your company’s product). Chance Barnett’s company, Crowdfunder.com, is a platform that makes it easy (and legal) for you to do this by creating a profile, uploading your offering documents and adding fundraising information.

Benefits of a Community Platform

Hailing from Rhode Island, Cassie lives and works from Charleston, SC with her husband, two children, and a rescue pup Bella. Each of these rising fundraising and donor engagement efforts has been used by real-world nonprofits to great success, so there aren’t uncharted waters. Despite substantial investment in entrepreneurship—by the government, universities, and the private sector—the per capita rate of job creation from new companies has declined for decades. They ran a Kickstarter campaign, and presold 15,000 units, raising $6.4 million in advanced market commitments.

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.

For successful innovations, moving to scale is the goal, but this remains a challenging objective for the field. Donors, philanthropists, and impact investors have been able to generate a fair amount of funding for pilot and early-stage innovations, but there is a significant gap in funding after these stages, creating the so-called pioneer gap. For social entrepreneurs, this means greater access to patient, impact-focused capital. For nonprofits, this will mean continuing to work with philanthropists, donors, and local governments to identify the resources needed to take successful innovations to scale. Through this support for innovation, there is an expansive ecosystem that enables development innovation. However, most of the support remains focused on piloting new ideas and therefore drops off precipitously after launch, creating the so-called pioneer gap.

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.