Empowerment is one of our core values at Indiegogo: our mission is to make entrepreneurship accessible to anyone with a passion. Our platform offers tons of help to entrepreneurs looking to go from idea to reality, with our Coming Soon pages featuring upcoming campaigns, to our InDemand category and enterprise partnerships helping our customers bring their products to market.  Plus, our customer happiness team is dedicated to coaching customers to success. But equally as important is our culture of having each other’s backs and helping each other grow.

When I witness an exchange between two colleagues, or even our own customers empowering others, I can see that our company’s values have completely infiltrated the way we do business. Lesbians Who Tech – both the leaders and community – live and breathe empowerment.  Just take a look at all they’ve done and continue to do on Indiegogo and understand why.

During the first conference, they held a nonprofit pitch contest to win $2500. Upon announcing the winner, someone in the audience stood up and declared that all nonprofits deserve funding, which catalyzed a real-time launch of an Indiegogo campaign that raised $50,000 (including $25k from Megan Smith) to be split equally across the five non-profits. In just a few hours, this audience collaborated to turn $2500 for one nonprofit into $50k for all five.

Since that first year, Lesbians Who Tech used Indiegogo to fund their first Summit in New York.

And now this year, 9 attendees are using Generosity.com (our fee-free sister site) to fund travel and ticket costs for the LWT Summit tickets. But it doesn’t stop there. What’s so amazing about this, is that leading up to the conference, nearly all conference communications to attendees promoted these campaigns. LWT stands for inclusion. They’re walking their talk by encouraging attendees who can afford tickets to fund the attendance of others who can’t.

Two years ago this week, I had the honor of speaking at Leanne Pittsford’s inaugural Lesbians Who Tech Summit in San Francisco on the power of empowerment and diversity in driving innovation.  Everything about that conference was amazing – the people, the energy, the passion, the hope and plans for a better world. That day one passionate attendee Aga Bojko discovered Indiegogo. Soon thereafter, Aga was running Indiegogo’s User Research team, and one year later, she was up on stage empowering others at the 2nd Annual Lesbians Who Tech Summit in San Francisco.

That is the cycle of empowerment we strive to create every day. What does empowerment mean to you?