As you know, Goteo is focused on open projects with social, cultural, scientific, educational, technological or ecological impact that generate new opportunities for social change from a civic perspective, releasing free licensed digital resources for other people to learn and apply knowledge in benefit of society, in order to channel progress and innovation for all.

That’s why we are glad to have been invited by Nesta (independent charity that works to increase the innovation capacity of the UK) in order to present Goteo and our experience after three initial years of activity. Coinciding with the launching today of the report “ Understanding Alternative Finance: The UK Alternative Finance Industry Report 2014 ” by Nesta and Cambridge University, we are sharing today how do we put innovative and impact crowdfunding into practice, at the event Alternative Finance in the UK: what we know and where it's going .

Because we think that crowdfunding campaigns are not only about money: they are about having and nourishing an engaged and supportive community around your project. And so, people crowdfund but also crowdsource. They can give projects their time, materials, information, advice and other valuable resources without expecting anything in exchange, but the fact of becoming part of the project itself as a real community (sometimes taking part even in the production process of the projects).

Slides: Crowdfunding Beyond money: sharing Goteo’s challenges with Nesta

Apart from great crowdfunding examples for transparency, openness and civic collaboration like Quién cobra la obra, Foldarap, Smart Citizen, Social Coin o Qué hacen los diputados, we are sharing in our session at the event challenges and future strategies based on:

  • Integrating contributions based on trust and real commitment.

  • Tracking and measuring the scope and impact of non-monetary contributions.

  • Storytelling and impact of collaborations and volunteering with time and skills.

  • Implementing social and complementary coins to trace value among those contributions within a community

  • Reinforcing people’s engagement with successful projects by shared mechanisms of evaluation and improvement .

For us the “crowd” paradigm is everywhere. We want to push crowdsourcing forward, beyond the funding, beyond the money! That’s why we are working to see the crowd involved in every step of the development of the projects. Something we call “crowdincubation”: from co-creation and idea assembling to crowdfunding, then from crowdsourcing to open delivery and impact tracking and measurement. All of this executed in a distributed and horizontal way, with our team facilitating those processes to happen.