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

In 2021, PI² committed 20 investments totaling approximately $145 million, more than doubling the size of the program. The total portfolio is currently just over $300 million in 55 investments. But like DIV, PI2 is a relatively small part of the DFC’s overall annual commitments; in 2021, the DFC made new commitments of $5 billion. This portfolio is well aligned with the DFC’s development mandate, with these investments scoring as “highly developmental” on the DFC’s Impact Quotient. PI2 has also sought to innovate with the types of financial tools they use. For example, PI2 made two of the DFC’s first three direct equity investments and provided the first technical assistance grant.

Easy to use

On Facebook (Meta) alone, over $5 billion has been raised using the platform’s fundraising tools. TikTok, which only released fundraising tools in 2020, has already seen hundreds of thousands raised through the platform. Social giving, also known a virtual-first or virtual-native fundraising, is a type of fundraising that takes place entirely online through social media networks. A few examples of this would be the “Donate” buttons on Facebook (Meta), Instagram, gogetfunding and TikTok, Facebook (Meta) birthday fundraisers, and even social network-based peer-to-peer challenges. Many nonprofits stick with the tried-and-true fundraising methods when planning their fundraising calendars year after year. These organizations see innovative, on-the-rise donor engagement efforts as a risk— and they’re not willing to take that risk on the chance that the new method doesn’t achieve the results of their bread-and-butter fundraising efforts.

Capital Isn’t scarce…It’s Abundant!

Some approaches have sought to address this gap by adopting a tiered financing model (e.g., pilot, transition, and initial scale) that seeks to promote innovation during the early concept stage. Past this, innovation support begins to peter out as innovators and pioneers face a lack of financial resources tailored to meet their needs. Donors—who invested the initial resources needed to prove a concept—face the prospect that new innovative models will fail to launch. Founded in 2014, GIF is a nonprofit, impact-first investment fund headquartered in London, with offices in Washington, D.C., and Nairobi. GIF was originally backed by USAID, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, South Africa, and Sweden.

At the end of the day, it’s fundraisers who give ordinary members of the public the chance to make a real difference and achieve the impact they desire. Gofundme is a fundraising platform that works with people who are looking to raise money for themselves. GoGetFunding, on the other hand, focuses on businesses and entrepreneurs looking for Funding. A crowdfunding platform helps raise money from anyone without having to go through any middle man or institution. Crowdfunding allows everyone the same chance to raise money without having to worry about anything else. The impact of social giving has outpaced what anyone would have predicted at its creation in 2015.

Autonomous Innovation

The GoFundMe platform is a great way to raise funds for a personal cause or someone close to you. As the organizer, you will receive all of the funds raised from your campaign, and GoFundMe takes no fees. DIV continues to provide a significant amount of its funding to organizations and innovations that focus on sub-Saharan Africa (60 percent of new commitments in 2021) and South Asia (16 percent of new commitments in 2021).

For example, GIF has found that social entrepreneurs—those who have created a for-profit model—often prefer to receive risk capital (even if concessional in nature) because it signals to the broader market that they are a serious investment. While grants are useful to seed an early idea, they become less valuable as a business matures and seeks to raise the capital it needs to grow. Beginning in 2010, USAID sought to increase its support for innovation through the launch of the Global Development Lab.