Caroline Macfarland, director of London-based CoVi, explains why the business should win the innovation in funding category of the Guardian Small Business Showcase competition.
CoVi (Common Vision) is the world’s first crowdfunded and crowdsourced thinktank. We aim to promote civic engagement beyond a politically active minority, at a time when trust in the conventional political process is at an all-time low.
Following CoVi’s official launch in March 2014, we launched a crowdfunding campaign on the web platform Indiegogo, asking supporters and the public to fund a consultation that would define our work moving forward. Our choice to use crowdfunding as our initial funding source was not just a way of raising capital, it was a way of ensuring our vision is owned by ordinary people, rather than focusing purely on the status quo in Westminster.
The campaign was successful and as a result we conducted a crowdsourcing consultation, asking our supporters and stakeholders to tell us about the social priorities which influence their political decisions and priorities. The results were recently published as an interactive infographic and our findings have helped shape our “mission for #everydaypolitics” – a programmatic structure which frames all of CoVi’s work from 2015 onwards.
The crowdfunding and crowdsourcing initiatives were a way of challenging the perception that policymaking is dominated by a political elite, and a way of demonstrating our commitment to democratise CoVi’s business model as well as the ways in which we generate and distribute our ideas.
We strive to ensure that our work is accessible and shareable (via social media for example) by using visual, creative and interactive formats.
All entries which meet the competition criteria are published and our judging panel select a shortlist of the three for each category. Winners are announced at an awards ceremony in summer 2016.
