At TechSoup, making a difference in communities around the world is our job and our passion. We are committed to building a more equitable planet by helping nonprofits, charities, and NGOs around the world access affordable, effective technology so they can accomplish their missions.
And we want to support even more organizations and the important work they do. To do that, we must — among other things — expand our nonprofit marketplace, support and develop more apps for good, and continue to improve our own business processes and systems. That's why we're proud to introduce our direct public offering (DPO). The DPO will allow nearly anyone to invest in TechSoup and to receive a financial benefit while helping our organization grow its capacity to support changemakers across the planet.
What does this mean for you? It means that you can now make an impact investment in TechSoup with as little as $50.
That investment will have an annual return of 2 to 5 percent over five years. This community investment campaign grows from our belief that TechSoup should be financed by people and entities of diverse economic means who care about supporting civil society.
TechSoup already connects with over 1 million nonprofits around the world, and distributes $1.56 billion worth of technology, services, and knowledge each year. The DPO will allow us to amplify these successes to help a projected 1.7 million organizations activate and transform their communities.
Recently we discussed the DPO in a Facebook Live event. A recording of some of that event is now in our YouTube channel.
As a community of civil society organizations, many of you have invested in us already. Whether it's through an administrative fee for a donated product, by volunteering your time at one of our events, or by sharing the work we do with others, we see our network as a body of community stakeholders.
And that's precisely why we are offering a DPO. We want to bring all our stakeholders to the table. We want you to be part of our mission, and to be provided with the opportunity to make an impact investment.
We need this investment so that we can build out our capacity to change the world through technology, information, and the mutual support of civil society organizations across the planet. Because where governments and private institutions fall short, these organizations fill in the spaces left behind, providing critical resources to those who need them most.
We need this investment to continue to connect with our network, and to build new and meaningful solutions for nonprofits — solutions developed by people with mission-driven organizations in mind. We want to make it easier to gain access to all we have to offer, and we want to forever innovate our approach to providing our community with everything we can.
And finally, we need this community-driven investment to give all our stakeholders a voice in the future of TechSoup, and for civil society at large. Join us. Together, let's build a more equitable planet.
Annie Dizon can be reached for media inquiries at annie [at] techsoup [dot] org. She can also be found on Twitter at @ann_dizon.