Indiegogo Blog | March 11, 2017

All kinds of people from all over the world have come to Indiegogo to bring their ideas to life – more than 700,000 from 223 countries & territories to be exact.  This diversity of entrepreneurs and their endeavors is not only incredible, but also the foundation upon which Indiegogo was created.  Biases and bottlenecks in the funding process limited entrepreneurial success to a few, well-connected people.  By creating an open and engaging ecosystem for people to unite around ideas that matter to them, we’re making entrepreneurship accessible to all.

Why Diversity and Inclusion Matter to Us

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.

See:  The truth about women entrepreneurs and crowdfunding

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.

How We Measure Diversity

A note before diving into the numbers: We know that gender cannot be limited to two choices, and that our ethnic heritage is far too beautifully complex to be described by just five options. We’ve heard some ideas like expanding the categories used with our data, but that has its own limitations. We are still figuring out how to make our own reporting more inclusive, and if you have found an approach that works we would love to hear about it as we continue to evolve.

In the meantime, we are using the same categories as our last report so we can hold ourselves accountable to meaningful and measureable progress.

Our Progress

What Drives Diversity and Inclusion at Indiegogo

The answer seems to be three things: a mission rooted in inclusion, a heavily values-based culture, and a product dependent on innovation.

Indiegogo’s mission is to “empower all people to unite around the ideas that matter to them and together make those ideas come to life.”  Central to this mission is the principle of inclusion, which means that anyone who joins our team is drawn to our mission, and values inclusion at a deeply personal level too.  We don’t have to teach it because it’s already in people’s hearts and minds the moment they join.

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