Indiegogo has this week announced it will be changing its stance on crowdfunding campaigns and moving away from an open platform where anyone can post crowdfunding projects to a more closed model where every campaign will receive a manual review by the Indiegogo team before it can go live.
In a further move to tackle fraudulent crowdfunding campaigns Indiegogo has also established a partnership with the GoFundMe crowdfunding platform to create best practices for the crowdfunding industry and catch fraudulent campaigns before they can scam backers.
Changes to the way Indiegogo will screen crowdfunding campaigns
Will Haines VP of Product and Customer Trust explains more :
“Candidly, we have not always lived up to our backers’ expectations. Matching the ethos of the late 2000s, Indiegogo was founded as an open platform where anyone could raise money for almost anything, with little restriction.
However, I’ve learned that “open” is not what our community wants. Crowdfunding is not shopping — people generally understand that now — but it also shouldn’t be a leap in the dark. And it certainly can’t be scamming. Our community of backers is the reason that anything happens on Indiegogo, and they are counting on the platform to be a safe, trusted space to engage with innovation.
That’s why we’ve been working hard over the past year to put community and trust at the forefront of everything we do. And we’re not just talking about it; we’re actually doing it. I’m excited today to share what we’ve done and where we’re headed. There are too many changes to name them all, but I’d like to highlight a few of the big ones:
1. An overhauled and expanded Trust & Safety team. We take backer feedback seriously. Earlier this year, we completely revamped our Trust & Safety team under our new Trust Director and industry veteran, Nelson Ho. Since then we’ve made huge progress towards a safer platform. Beyond hiring Nelson, we’ve also invested in and grown our Trust & Safety organization with an eye toward the ultimate goal of being able to proactively vet the thousands campaigns live on our platform every day.
2. The Internal Review Board. We’ve also created an Internal Review Board to oversee our most impactful Trust decisions and ensure that we’re keeping our backer’s interests in mind at all times. The goal is to create a group specifically tasked with handling the riskiest campaigns escalated by the Trust & Safety team.
3. The Crowdfunding Trust Alliance. With our friends at GoFundMe, we have co-founded the Crowdfunding Trust Alliance to regularly share industry trends and best practices. We’re excited to work with the largest players in our industry and look forward to expanding the alliance to other reputable crowdfunding platforms.
4. The Guidepost Program. We recognize that our expertise can do a lot to ensure entrepreneurs only launch on Indiegogo when they have a viable plan to deliver. While we cannot guarantee that every campaign will fulfill successfully, we can protect backers from unfeasible projects and outright scams. We now have the resources and expertise to apply this level of scrutiny to all of our largest campaigns and will expand it to every campaign moving forward.
5. Coming Soon: Trust Loyalty Program. Over the last 10 years, we’ve had a lot of successful campaigns, and the relationships we’ve built with these entrepreneurs are no small feat. Our Trust Loyalty program will highlight new campaigns from entrepreneurs with a track record of success and tailor our vetting to match the historical risk level of these entrepreneurs.
In the coming year, we hope to bring most of this information directly to campaign pages to empower backers to make their best decisions about whether the risk is worthwhile. Further, we’ll leverage our community as a first line of defense to catch small problems before they become big problems.”
For more information on how Indiegogo will now manually screen crowdfunding campaigns jump over to the official blog post by Will Haines VP of Product and Customer Trust at Indiegogo by following the link below.
Source : Indiegogo
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