Community and trust are the foundation of crowdfunding. That’s why we’ve made it a priority to put community and trust at the heart of everything we do. 

In an effort to empower our backers to make informed decisions on Indiegogo, we’re proud to introduce the Trust-Proven Program, a new initiative that spotlights campaigners with a demonstrated history of managing multiple campaigns on Indiegogo and fulfilling perks to their backers.  

We are in the process of reviewing the histories of our active campaigners, and we are bringing that information directly to the campaign pages via the Trust-Proven Badge.  

Here’s how it works: 

• Our Trust and Safety team is in the process of reviewing campaigners who have launched multiple technology and innovation campaigns on our platform. We may expand the scope in the future, but we want to prioritize experienced campaigners in the technology and innovation category as we first roll out the program. 
• Our criteria helps us honor campaigners who have a proven track record of consistent fulfillment, a high level of campaign management, and positive backer sentiment.  
• Our Trust and Safety team has the right to rescind the Trust-Proven Badge, in the event that the campaigner does not follow our policies.

Over the last 10 years, we’ve been home to thousands of successful campaigns, and the relationships we’ve built with these entrepreneurs are no small feat. We want to use the Trust-Proven Badge to highlight campaigners’ record of success, providing this information directly on the campaign pages so backers can make more informed decisions. 

In fact, we just awarded Firewalla, SIRUI, VAVA and Canon a Trust-Proven Badge on their campaign pages because the entrepreneurs behind these campaigns have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to deliver perks and manage campaigns in the past. There are many things to evaluate before contributing to a campaign, and we hope the Trust-Proven Badge can further help our community make informed decisions while evaluating campaigns. 

If you see the Trust-Proven Badge when discovering campaigns on Indiegogo, it means that the campaigner has met our criteria and is a member of our Trust Proven Program. Here’s what the badge looks like: 

The Trust-Proven Program is part of a larger set of initiatives we’ve rolled out recently to make Indiegogo safer. In the past year, we’ve also introduced these programs to make our platform more secure: 

• An overhauled and expanded Trust & Safety team: We completely revamped our Trust & Safety team under our new Trust Director and industry veteran, Nelson Ho.  
• The Internal Review Board: We’ve also created an Internal Review Board to oversee our most impactful Trust & Safety decisions and ensure that we’re keeping our backer’s interests in mind at all times.
• The Crowdfunding Trust Alliance: With our friends at GoFundMe, we have co-founded the Crowdfunding Trust Alliance to regularly share industry trends and best practices. We’re excited to work with the largest players in our industry and look forward to expanding the alliance to other reputable crowdfunding platforms.
• The Guidepost Program: The Guidepost Program is an initiative to proactively review campaigns prior to launch and ask pointed questions to gauge the ability to fulfill.

Our community of backers is the reason that anything happens on Indiegogo. We want to surface relevant information for our community to better identify campaigners on our platform. Trust isn’t something that develops overnight, and we will continue building even more tools and programs to make Indiegogo a safer and more trusted space for backers to engage with innovation. The Trust Proven Program is just one of the things we’re doing to keep the platform safe. More to come!