"Since we adopted cloud technologies we work entirely differently than we used to."
That's what executives from a human services organization told me on a visit to Medellin, Colombia. It changed how they engage with the families they serve. It transformed how they train staff and how they work together to support children with special needs.
This organization's story is an example of the transformation that is underway for all of us.
At TechSoup, we spent most of fiscal 2019 building the services that support nonprofit executives in these digital transformations. We added to TechSoup Courses, launched the Digital Skills Center, and continued on-the-ground training in topics ranging from media literacy to design thinking. Through Meet and Code in Europe, we collaborated with local partners from 22 countries to teach digital skills to more than 50,000 youth. And we partnered with more organizations around the world to add services to the TechSoup Marketplace, such as Asana and Avis. The TechSoup Global Network connected 157,000 NGOs with more than US$1.6 billion in resources last year.
Our Year in Review highlights TechSoup's growth over the past year as a cooperative platform that enables technology to amplify positive social change. It features the community-building work we are lucky to do with a wide range of partners comprising the largest civil society network in the world.
When our 61 TechSoup Global Network partners gathered in San Francisco in March for the TechSoup Global Network Summit, they showcased the diversity and multiple dimensions of the network, including new and longtime members from Russia to Kenya to Saudi Arabia. The TechSoup Global Network is robust, capable, and growing stronger. It allows us to build resilience across the sector, which helps each organization address challenging, urgent problems.
We also launched our first-ever Growth Capital Campaign to scale and transform the resources and services we offer. We seek to nearly double the number of nonprofits we serve and deepen the transformative impact we have with the hundreds of thousands we have served for decades. In the first nine months of the campaign, we raised 70 percent of our three-year investment goal of US$11.5 million. Contributions to this campaign came from diverse sources and vehicles, from long-term partners like Microsoft and VMware, who evolve and grow with us, to leading impact investors like Nonprofit Finance Fund.
The campaign includes an innovative way that stakeholders can invest: a direct public offering (DPO) of debt securities. The DPO is a community investment campaign that embodies our belief that TechSoup should be financed by people and entities of all economic backgrounds who want to support our mission and help create an innovative, sustainable, and community-funded approach to TechSoup's growth. The DPO engages TechSoup's community of stakeholders, including the nonprofits we support, as impact investors with investment minimums as low as $50. These investments will drive our transformation, building an innovation platform that will power our service delivery to more organizations. It will allow them to achieve things that are beyond our imaginations.
With the projects and partnerships, and the investments we've established and grown this year, we can make the transformation the Colombian executives experienced available to NGOs everywhere. We can transform the way we work with our beneficiaries, our communities, and the broader group of collaborators like you to create a more equitable planet.
Thank you for being a part of this work, and we hope you will be a part of what happens next.
