Women-Led Crowdfunding

FintekNews has seen a huge interest in stories we've published covering women in leadership roles in financial technology firms. When we learned about a new women-led crowdfunding platform for female entrepreneurs, we thought our readers would be interested in learning more. At present, the site lists only 9 campaigns, so it's pretty small thus far, and some of those are for NFP enterprises, rather than entrepreneurial endeavors. Still, 6 of the 9 campaigns show a successful completion of the funding, with $32,000 being the largest funding to date. Ironically that campaign was for the Harriet Tubman Home to bid on a photograph of Harriet Tubman up for auction for their archives. They were outbid by nearly $100,000, so the contributors to that crowdfund had the option to leave their funding with the Harriet Tubman home for other uses, or not have their transaction processed.

Anyway, all startups have hiccups, and we anticipate that the two highly accomplished women behind this enterprise, Cynthia Hornig & Jen Jones, will see success as they build out this platform.

(Cindy Taylor/CEO)

"...About a year ago, Cynthia Hornig and Jen Jones considered those facts and decided to launch Women You Should Fund, a Kickstarter-style crowdfunding platform for women and women-led, gender diverse teams. Its unofficial debut was in March for Women's History Month and official launch was earlier this month. The platform is an extension of the co-founders' six-year-old site Women You Should Know, which is about sharing stories of women and creating a community. "We wanted to take our mission to the next level," says Jones.

The platform joins the ranks of such crowdfunding sites as iFundWomen that focus on women-owned entrepreneurial ventures.

How the idea came about: According to Hornig and Jones, their editorial team often receives pitches from women running crowdfunding campaigns, trying to get their stories in front of the Women You Should Know audience. Thus, the concept of starting their own crowdfunding platform for women seemed a natural, particularly if it could give such entrepreneurs additional exposure by promoting them to existing readers...

..."There's a very large, robust, like-minded community to support these women and to exponentially increase the number of potential backers," says Hornig.

Some campaigns that have already met their fundraising goals (They both were in the platform's beta test): Catrinka, a Brooklyn startup that produces women-made handbags to raise money for girls' education ($9,268) and the Illustrated Women in Science comic series ($3,351). The first campaign on the launched site: Harriet Tubman Home, the nonprofit that manages and operates Harriet Tubman’s homestead in Auburn, NY ($32,121)..."

Source: Forbes.com