Digital Pioneers

Non Profit ID card: present your project/organisation/campaign

Questions answered by Nikki Timmermans, project leader Digital Pioneers, and Chris Sigaloff, director Knowledgeland.

– Where are you based? Digital Pioneers is a project run by Knowledgeland, an independent think tank strengthening the Dutch knowledge society. We are based in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands

– What are you called? Digital Pioneers and Digital Pioneers Academy.

– What are you doing and why? Since the digital revolution social issues can be approached in new ways with the help of social media. More than ever before, citizens locally and worldwide are able to cooperate and tackle problems related to these issues bottom-up. In other words, the Internet offers an enormous potential for empowering civil society organisations and ad-hoc groups of citizens interested in influencing and shaping the society around them. However, starting a social non-profit from scratch has proven to be difficult. This is where Digital Pioneers come in.

Digital Pioneers is a small-scale fund for innovative social media initiatives. It is the home to innovative new media projects that can’t get support from regular funds and cannot be realized without development money.

– What kind of projects has Digital Pioneers supported?

Since the set up Digital Pioneers has supported more than 175 projects (many of them run by people or organisations who had never submitted a funding application before). The projects that have been supported with amounts between €5000 and €32.000 cover a wide range of topics (from distributed noise pollution measurement networks, to online libraries for children with severe learning disabilities to online communities for migrants and everything in-between) and approaches (some have built softwares for others to re-use, some have produced content to highlight specific social issues, while others have provided platforms to organize social participation and inclusion). More than 80% of these projects have been successful and they generate together more than 2 million visits per month.

For a lot of these projects the Digital Pioneers fund has provided the incentive to realize their ideas and transform them into projects that would have otherwise remained at the idea stage. Over the years we have recognized that for a big number of these projects sustainability is the most important challenge.

– What is the Digital Pioneers Academy?

To help the initiatives develop into sustainable projects we have set up the Digital Pioneers Academy, an intensive six-month course that helps these initiatives to develop a business plan to make them sustainable without project funding. Since 2007 more than 50 projects have successfully graduated from the digital pioneers academy. Most of them are still up and running as independent organisations.

– Do you have a website/email? Website: www.digitalepioniers.nl (Dutch), Digital Pioneers State of Social Media Summit on www.stateofsocialmedia.org , e-mail: info@digitalepioniers.nl. 

– Do you have a Twitter/facebook link/name? You can follow us at twitter.com/digitalpioneers.

– What makes you so special? The application procedure attempts to be as accessible as possible and the turn-around time from submitting a proposal to receiving the first 80% of the grant sum is only six weeks. There are also very few formal prerequisites for getting support from the Digital Pioneers fund. This makes bottom-up innovation possible. The lack of formal requirements is compensated by close and intensive contact between the digital pioneers team at Knowledgeland and the applicants. Besides financial support Digital Pioneers provides real life support.

 

The turning point

– How did you start and how are you financed? We started in 2002.Since then the Digital Pioneers fund is run by Knowledgeland. After a public debate, which ended up with questions being asked by members of Parliament, we received funding from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

– What keeps you going every day? Working with the most creative and innovative social entrepreneurs in the Netherlands and seeing how little money can create a large effect.

– Who is your target? We want to contribute to social innovation on the Internet by enabling small-scale organisations and individuals in their attempts to change the society.

 

The challenge

– A  proud moment? Winning a prize in the first European social innovation competitition.It means to us that what we do is recognized as an important social innovation programme that has come forth in Europe. We do believe that the method we developed within the Digital Pioneers program – giving bottom-up support with both financial and professional support, fast procedures and selection on quality – can also be successful if used in other European countries.

– A problem you face? The impact Digital Pioneers creates on society is not very often publicly recognised, due to the small-scale strategy. In the Netherlands everybody knows about one of the projects supported by the programme. But in most cases Digital Pioneers is not the first to trust and support the project.

– Your personal motto when things get hard? If you do not know the answer, someone in your network will.

– Another cool project/organisation/campaign you would like to recommend? We love Fundbreak, a new crowdfunding project from Australia. Follow them and learn from them!

www.fundbreak.com.au

www.digitalepioniers.nl; www.stateofsocialmedia.org

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