Spark Workshops
Spark provides Social Innovators with an opportunity to explore resources, connections and potential solutions to help their social ventures, by tapping the collective knowledge within Columbia University, and the larger entrepreneurial and social impact community in the New York area and beyond.
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The Social Enterprise Conference is proud to be featuring Spark Workshops as a fifth conference track for the first time.
Breakout Session 1: Spark Workshop – The Dog Ate My Grant Application: Crowdfunding for Social Innovation
- Facilitated by Breanna DiGiammarino, Education Vertical Lead and Vertical Team Ops at Indiegogo
Crowdfunding and social sector industry expert Breanna DiGiammarino will run a workshop on crowdfunding. She will cover use cases for crowdfunding in social innovation, and then delve deeply into the key pieces of a successful campaign: the pitch, perks and promotion. You will have the chance to select a social innovation crowdfunding case study and develop a campaign strategy for it over the course of the session. Come ready to think creatively about ways to leverage the crowd to achieve social impact, and leave inspired and ready to run a supercharged campaign!
Breakout Session 2: Spark Workshop – Crowdfunding for Frontier Innovations
- Facilitated by Ajaita Shah, Founder/CEO of Frontier Markets & the President of Frontier Innovations Foundation
Millions of people die annually as a direct result of exposure to carbon emissions from kerosene and cook stoves. There are many social enterprises that are building distribution companies to increase the access of clean energy solutions for low-income households in developing countries, however they face challenges including: energy financing and scaling distribution models.
Frontier Innovations (FI) is a 501c3 established in early 2013 to address the challenges of last-mile distribution in clean energy products in developing countries. FI promotes clean energy initiatives and partners with social entrepreneurs to ensure safe, reliable and sustainable access to energy for developing countries.
Recently, in efforts to raise funding for a project, FI launched a crowdfunding campaign for its partner, Frontier Markets, which was facing challenges in providing access to solar lanterns to ultra-poor households. However, the crowdfunding strategy was unsuccessful.
This session will discuss the challenges of crowdfunding through a casestudy of FI efforts with Frontier Markets.
Challenges to discuss:
Many social ventures look to crowdfunding as an option to raise capital to fund their projects. FI launched a crowdfunding campaign this year which donors sponsored a child in the ultra-poor who would receive solar lanterns in return. To identify the children needing solar lanterns, FI partnered with local rural schools to identify those needing the charitable donation. The crowdfunding platform was launched with a target of sponsoring 5,000 children, or $100K in funds for this campaign, however they did not meet our target.
Groups will be asked to brainstorm on the following questions to help FI with future campaigns:
- What approach should FI be using to raise capital?
- Is crowdfunding the best source?
- If so, how do they market it? Who do they reach out to? How should the campaign be setup? Who is their target donor? What should donors be funding and what are their interests?
- If not, what are some approaches they can use? What are similar social ventures doing to raise capital?
Breakout Session 3: Spark Workshop – Scaling for Frontier Markets
- Facilitated by Ajaita Shah, Founder/CEO of Frontier Markets & President of Frontier Innovations Foundation
Millions of people die annually as a direct result of exposure to carbon emissions from kerosene and cook stoves. Product exist which minimize this risk, however these organizations do not have the requisite customer understanding, rural infrastructure, or servicing capability to ensure customer adoption on a mass scale.
Frontier Markets (FM) provides rural Indian villagers access to clean energy for cooking and lighting. FM is able to bridge the gap between Indian Villagers and the organizations with an inclusive business model that makes last-mile distribution of clean-energy solutions possible. Brick-and-mortar retail and service centers have been setup by FM to establish a presence in the communities, and to facilitate transparency and trust in solar technology among rural villagers. Through FM innovative marketing campaigns are conducted and designed to educate rural villagers on the financial and health benefits of solar over kerosene, and are committed to unparalleled after-sales service to ensure ongoing customer satisfaction and thus, permanent social and environmental impact.
Currently, FM has operations in 2 states of India, with 4 service centers selling products through 75 rural entrepreneurs in 800 villages. FM will introduce technology integration as a potential solution to some of these challenges they face while scaling their organization.
Challenges to discuss:
FM will discuss the challenges for scaling their rural energy distribution company. Attendees will be asked to provide feedback on:
- What challenges do social ventures face during the scaling process in India?
- Will the new technology integration help FM scale their organization? What challenges will they face as they integrate technology into their organization?
- What is needed to implement Technology into FM?
- Are there alternative solutions to help address these challenges? What models do similar social ventures use to reach their mass market? Can these models, or parts of these models, be used at FM to help scale?
Facilitator Biographies
Breanna DiGiammarino
Education Vertical Lead and Vertical Team Ops, Indiegogo
@IndiegogoEdu
Breanna DiGiammarino is the education, research and social innovation category marketing director at Indiegogo. She has been responsible for developing key partnerships with institutions such as the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U), George Mason University and Village Capital.
Prior to Indiegogo, Ms. DiGiammarino was the Senior Associate at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, a social venture fund in San Francisco, where she helped raise $30 million to support the company’s second fund for social entrepreneurship called the Springstep Venture Fund and increased the number of applications from hundreds to thousands.
Before that, she was an Associate Consultant at The Bridgespan Group, the non-profit arm of Bain & Company, where she consulted with high impact educational organizations and foundations including the Cristo Rey Network to help urban students into work-study programs and the Gates Foundation to improve low-income graduation rates.
Ms. DiGiammarino was invited as a reader for the 2011 and 2012 Echoing Green social venture fellowship and Haas Global Social Venture competition. She is also an Avanti Fellows advisory board member.
Ms. DiGiammarino holds a Master of Public Administration in Nonprofit Management from the NYU Wagner School of Public Service and graduated with a B.A in Biology and Government from the University of Virginia.
Ajaita Shah
Founder/CEO, Frontier Markets; President, Frontier Innovations Foundation
Ajaita Shah is the Founder/CEO of Frontier Markets and the President of Frontier Innovations Foundation. Frontier Markets is a rural marketing, sales, and service distribution company providing access to affordable and quality consumer durables to low-income households; focusing on products in clean energy. Ms. Shah was an American India Foundation Fellow in 2006. She has 5 years of microfinance experience in India with organizations like SKS Microfinance, and Ujjivan Financial Services. Ms. Shah has worked on numerous development projects in 7 states in India. She has consulted with the World Bank about microfinance in South Asia. She served on the Committee of the Social Performance Task Force. Ms. Shah has been awarded with scholarships from SOCAP, is a 2012 Echoing Green Fellow, a Cordes Fellow, has been awarded the most influential award in Microfinance for people under 30, and Business Week’s 30 under 30 award. This year, she will be participating as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative. She is an active member of the UN Practitioner’s Network, Asian Development Bank’s Energy For All Partnership. Ajaita Shah holds her B.A. in International Relations from Tufts University.
Frontier Markets is a sales and marketing distribution company with a mission to reach low income households in emerging markets. Frontier Markets works with microfinance institutions and locally trained field staff to educate, relate, and reach households providing them access to high social impact and affordable products, and customer service. Frontier Markets started operations in rural India and are working with clean energy products like solar lighting and smokeless stoves. Frontier Markets’ innovative marketing and sales channel will open new opportunities for manufacturers to create affordable and relevant products for rural markets. Frontier Markets becomes THE scale solution for manufacturers creating products for rural markets, focusing on areas like clean energy, healthcare, and livelihoods. Frontier Markets’ mission is to provide over 10 million products to 30 million households in India by 2016, and become a global leader in rural distribution and products for low-income households.
