Location: Boston, USA
Organization: iFundWomen
About the Wise Practice
Mayor Marty Walsh and iFundWomen partnered to launch iFundWomen Boston, a fundraising ecosystem for Boston’s women-led startups and small businesses. iFundWomen provides entrepreneurs with a crowdfunding platform, expert coaching, and video production services, in an effort to empower women to raise the capital they need to launch or grow their businesses.
According to some surveys:
- 72% of women founders cite lack of access to capital as the #1 barrier to starting a business.
- 49% of women cite a lack of access to coaches and mentors who have “been there, done that” as a major barrier.
- 31% of women cite a lack of access to a support system, community, and connections to help them level up as another huge barrier to launching a business.
The mission of this organization is to equip women with the confidence, knowledge, and funding they need to bring their visions to life.
IFundWomen provides early-stage entrepreneurs with access to capital via crowdfunding and grants, expert coaching, and one of the United State’s largest communities of women business owners — a vital network that sparks confidence, accelerates knowledge, and ignites action.
The reason why IFundWomen is fundamentally different than anything on the market today is because of their proprietary funding program, The IFundwomen Method, which brings three core principles together: Capital, Coaching, and Connections.
Category
Goals
Goal 4: Undertake reforms to give women equal rights to economic resources (SDG 5.a; CEDAW article 13).
Measurement
IFundWomen members who leverage their crowdfunding and coaching programs raise 27x the amount of capital in comparison to those who do it alone.
70% of mentored businesses survive twice as long as non-mentored businesses (according to a recent UPS study).
Monitoring
The number of projects that are posted on the site, the amount of capital raised, and the number of women that take part in the coaching program.
The Boston iFundwoman partnership was launched in October 2017, and $100K was raised by January 2018.
Lessons Learned
There is a complete lack of funding options for women entrepreneurs in the US.
Women are starting businesses 4.8 times faster than the national average, yet they struggle to access capital without going into debt. Regardless of the gender of the founder, only 1% of all businesses manage to raise venture capital. So, how do the remaining 99% of businesses get their startup funding? They max out their credit cards or try to take out a bank loan. The main motto of IFundWomen is that nobody should be indebted in the early days of a business.