Over the weekend, Indiegogo revealed the importance of diversity and inclusion on its crowdfunding platform. The company announced that over 700,000 from 223 countries and territories have used its funding portal since its launch in 2008.
“We started Indiegogo because when all ideas from all kinds of people get a chance, the world is better. More problems are solved; more communities are served; more beauty is created. And to give every idea a fair shot, we believe our team must mirror the very people and diverse perspectives we aim to empower. Otherwise we will fail as a business, and we will fail in achieving our mission. For us, diversity and inclusivity are not nice-to-haves, but must-haves. They’re not just an output of success, they’re an input that makes success possible.
“Unfortunately, diversity has long been a challenge for the tech industry, but it’s a challenge we’ve leaned into since our inception in 2008. In an effort to improve transparency and encourage other companies in the industry to work on diversity, we first published our diversity statistics in 2014. Moving forward we are excited to publish annual diversity reports, and share what’s helping us continue to make progress.”
Indiegogo presented its latest findings:
The Indiegogo team went on to note:
“The specific categories of diversity that we looked at were gender and race/ethnicity, and we saw measurable improvement in both areas overall, but one slip. Starting with gender, we saw an increase in percentage of women team members at the company level as well as at the leadership level between 2014-2016. We also saw improvement in racial and ethnic diversity in the company overall, in tech positions, in non-tech positions, and in our leadership. Where we lost ground a bit was in the percentage of tech roles held by women. While the former improvements are ones we want to build on, this latter decline is one we’d like to reverse in the year ahead.”
In regards to goals for 2017, the team added:
“Even though we have made progress, we know there is still a lot of work to be done at Indiegogo and the tech industry in general. We are lucky to have a team who wants to lead the charge, and lucky to have our headquarters in the incredibly diverse city of San Francisco. We’ll know we’re on the right track when Indiegogo looks more and more like the community around us. Our Diversity & Inclusion Team will continue to take the lead in helping us make Indiegogo an even more diverse and inclusive place tomorrow than we are today. While we’re pleased to see progress in our diversity statistic and grateful for a mission and long-standing values-based culture that has made these results possible, we remain committed to making more progress and sharing this progress next year. Stay tuned!”