In this live workshop Alisa Cordesius, Indiegogo’s Head of Social Innovation (West Coast), introduces newcomers to the fundamentals of crowdfunding on Indiegogo. She begins with a real‑world example – the Flow Beehive campaign from Australia – to illustrate the type of social‑impact projects the platform supports. Alisa then traces the historical roots of crowdfunding, noting the Statue of Liberty’s door‑to‑door fundraising as a pre‑internet precursor, before detailing Indiegogo’s 2008 founding by Danae Ringelmann, Slava Rubin, and Eric Schell and their motivation to create an open, global alternative to traditional financing. She highlights Indiegogo’s differentiators: a presence in over 224 countries, support for four languages and five currencies, an open‑application model (no gate‑keeping), a robust trust‑and‑safety team that uses proprietary fraud‑detection algorithms across PayPal, credit cards, Stripe and emerging Bitcoin payments, and a 24‑hour, multilingual customer‑happiness call center based in San Francisco. The session explores the psychological contract between backers and creators, using Solar Roadways as a case study of perk‑based accountability and the risk of campaigns not delivering. Finally, Alisa explains the two funding options – flexible and fixed – their strategic trade‑offs, and how messaging drives urgency regardless of the model. Audience questions about security, support, and the differences from Kickstarter are answered throughout.
Chapters
How many of you have the Indiegogo newsletter that comes into your inbox every day? Every other day? All right, this is not that many people, and that needs to change immediately, because there's some pretty cool things going on on there. Who heard of the Flow Beehive campaign recently? What is it?
Is it the one— You don't even know? Like they have the rooms for festivals that are shaped like beehives and are set up like little houses, kind of like little sitting areas?
No, but that's a cool one too. I know what you're talking about.
Cultivating beehives.
Yeah. Who else? Flow Beehives. Just launched on Sunday. No? All right. These guys are from Australia. They're social entrepreneurs. They have a beehive that revolutionizes the way that we collect and harvest bees. And it's not as invasive as other beehives. They've raised over— $4 million thus far. They launched on Sunday. It's pretty phenomenal what the innovation is. You guys should check it out if you haven't done so. But that's an example of who I work with. So my whole job being head of social innovation on the West Coast is basically to help campaign owners think through their strategy and objectives prior to launching a campaign. Because quite frankly, crowdfunding is more than just raising funds and it's more than just engaging the crowd. It's a whole slew of stuff that we're about to go through. Please interrupt me. Please ask questions. Please tell me if it's boring or if you want me to do a song and dance, and we will—
Song and dance.
Song and dance. Yeah, I can do a song and dance. Yeah, you want a song and dance?
Yeah.
I gotta think of what my inspiration will be for the dance later. Let me go with it. Let me go with it. What'd you say?
The beehive dance.
The beehive dance? We'll get to that. We'll do it. We'll do it. Oh no, what happened?
Sorry.
It's okay.
Cool.
All right. So crowdfunding's not new. Basically, if you didn't know or don't know already, the base of the Statue of Liberty was crowdfunded back in the day. It meant people went around door to door and solicited to try to get smaller funds of money in order to raise a larger fund to make this happen. The only difference was that we didn't have the internet then. Right? So Indiegogo was created in 2008 through Danae, Slava, and Eric. They decided that they wanted to kind of counteract the traditional financing market. So all 3 of them had personal stories where they had issues either getting loans or raising funds, or Danae was actually approached by a filmmaker who said, please, please, please, like, help me raise funds in order to make this film come to life. And she was 22 years old in New York in business school. She had a JPMorgan name tag on, and that's why he came and spoke to her. And she felt just horrible that she couldn't do anything about it. So she connected up with Eric at UC Berkeley when they were in business school, and they decided they wanted to revolutionize the way that people can get some funds in order to make their dreams come alive. Slava came from McKinsey. Slava then was like, hey, let's utilize the internet because the world is growing. We are global. And this way people can connect across the oceans. Boom! Indiegogo was born, and now we are the largest and most global platform to date. Differentiators. I'm sure you guys know there's a ton of crowdfunding platforms out there. Everyone has their own kind of specialties, but it's a great industry to be in because it's constantly changing. Examples and facts and tips and strategies that I would share one year ago are completely different than what I share now. So it's pretty exciting to see. But Indiegogo in and of itself, we are global. We pride ourselves off of that. We are in over 224 countries and territories and can have funds in 4 languages and 5 currencies. This really speaks to the idea of connecting the world across the continents. 30% of our business is actually international, which is great. We have folks in Berlin. We have folks in Israel. We have folks in Toronto, Vancouver, LA, New York. And headquarters is just down on Mission and 5th in the city. And that's where I'm at. So, Good. We're also open. So this is actually a key differentiator from other platforms. And recently Kickstarter actually made themselves open without an application process, but we started with not having an application process. So we allow entrepreneurial campaigns, nonprofit campaigns, entrepreneurs in social innovation. We have cause campaigns. We have film, music. Anyone under the sun can raise funds on Indiegogo. Obviously we have a trust and safety team that's extremely robust and goes through credit card algorithms, identity theft, to ensure that every campaign owner is in fact a real person before any funds are dispersed. But we didn't want to be another gatekeeper to be able to create some sort of application and process in order to use the tool. Make sense? Everyone know this before? Yeah.
When you say you have the security team, what do they do besides just credit?
Credit, identity theft, we have secret, kind of our own proprietary algorithms that they utilize going through. I mean, I'm not necessarily on the team, but I know it's really robust analytics that make it sound before any funds are disbursed. And we hold them from PayPal, and we hold them from credit cards, and we hold them from Stripe, and Bitcoin coming up, before anything goes.
And then, like, so what's the follow-through if a campaign goes down?
Great question. Goes down? What do you mean? Like it doesn't follow through?
Yeah.
So that's an interesting thing about crowdfunding, the fact that it is kind of this inherent psychological and sociological feedback loop, right? If you have a crowd that has contributed, you know, $2 million and there's 42,000 people and they're actually putting a stake of a contribution, not equity, it's not investment, they're just giving you your dollars because they want to see your idea come to life. You, as a contributor, need to be smart to understand, like, okay, my thing that I get in return is a perk. A perk is a token of thanks. A perk can be something that's a Google Hangout. A perk can be a t-shirt. A perk can be a mug. A perk can be whatever. It can be your name credit in a movie. But you need to understand that that's what you're getting in return. But the cool part is that if the entrepreneur does not follow through, the crowd straight up is gonna come get you. A good example of this is actually solar roadways. Did you guys hear about solar roadways? Who can tell me what it was? I saw a no. Yeah?
They were hexagon panels that they would use as a replacement for the road that would get solar panels or trap energy and then recycle it to electric cars eventually.
Yeah, and essentially it's going to try to decrease— Oh my gosh, what is the word? Greenhouse gas emission of 75%, right? So the idea of this was, yeah, obviously as a contributor, maybe solar roadways isn't gonna happen tomorrow downtown right here, but me, I want to see this happen for generations to come, so I'm contributing for this research and development to happen perhaps in 10 years, perhaps in 5 years, perhaps in 2 years. And if people didn't do that back in the day, the Wright brothers would've probably never made The airplane. So it's a whole responsibility for us as a platform to educate and to have sound campaign owners and contributors on both ends. Which brings me to my third point of how customer-focused we are. Even the fact that my job exists really speaks to it. Our customer happiness team does 24-hour response time for any sort of questions that you may have. We're not a black box. And that's something we really pride ourselves on.
Do you have a call center?
Yeah. Call center. That's our customer happiness team.
Are they based in India or?
They're based in-house in San Francisco. Whole 7th floor.
Boom.
That's a lot of calls, actually.
It's a lot of calls. A lot of calls. A lot of emails. You should see all the tickets they have to do through Zendesk. It's crazy. Yeah. They're kick-ass. They also can speak all these languages. Not every single one of them, obviously. But we have a representative for all of them. Cool.
And by the way, Kickstarter actually has their methodology, which is if you do not hit the target amount, all the money will be back. And you guys don't. So what do you think— there's a difference there. And which one do you think is better?
Yeah. So great question. That brings me to this point of being able to have flexible and fixed funding. So when we started in 2008, we started with flexible funding. Or sorry, we started with fixed funding. And then we had people say, as campaign owners, hey, I just worked my butt off, and maybe I got to 75% of my goal. We just ran this 2-month campaign. I really could have used that 75% of the goal in order to do phase 1 of rollout, or perhaps this part of programming, or this part of manufacturing, right? So as nimble startup world, we decided to offer flexible funding. And quite frankly, the idea that fixed funding always is successful versus flexible funding, Sure, right, but there's other components of success in a crowdfunding campaign than just funds raised. So as a campaign owner, you can elect which one you want, and the urgency behind people wanting to fund you is gonna be about your messaging, not the fact that you're fixed or flex. With that said, I will say capital campaigns, manufacturing campaigns, more like tech wearable products, They tend to gravitate towards fixed funding for a good reason, because they wouldn't be able to achieve what they need to do without $150K or without X amount, right? Now, flexible funding, if you're saying, I just need to raise like $100,000 in order to launch this program in India, perhaps, you probably can still use $50K in order to start doing that. It just depends on how you're gonna message it to the crowd.
