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Public Offering Fueling TechSoup’s $11.5 Million Goal
Public Offering Fueling TechSoup’s $11.5 Million Goal

TechSoup is more than 80% toward the $11.5-million goal of its growth capital campaign, with an aim to raise the remaining $2 million by the end of September.

The San Francisco-based nonprofit technology provider so far has raised $9,496,370 since launching the campaign in late 2018, with almost one-third coming from Direct Public Offering (DPO) investments:

  • $2,896,370 in DPO investments
  • $4 million loan from Nonprofit Finance Fund (NFF)
  • $2.6 million in recoverable grants

“The DPO is a community investment campaign embodying our belief that TechSoup should be financed by people and entities of all economic backgrounds,” Ken Tsunoda, vice president of development and network, wrote in a blog post last month. “The DPO enables us to offer debt securities as an impact investment to U.S.-based individuals and smaller organizations in our community with investment minimums as low as $50.”

There are three tiers of debt securities investments of the DPO, all five-year terms with varying minimums and returns:

  • Community Capital Note: $50 minimum, 2% return;
  • Patient Capital Note: $2,500 minimum, 3.5% return; and,
  • Risk Capital Note: $50,000 minimum, 5% return.

It’s the first time the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has qualified a nonprofit to raise funds nationally through a Regulation A+/Tier 2 offering.

TechSoup identified five long-term strategic initiatives focused on growing both its core business and new lines of business and programming, scaling internal capacity, and developing a nimble platform for the core product.

The campaign is also enabling market research and analytics for the philanthropic supply chain and local community organizations. In June, TechSoup released results of a 2020 survey asking organizations about IT resources, digital readiness, data management and the impact of COVID-19. The TechSoup Data Handling and Digital Readiness Global Study received almost 12,000 respondents from 135 countries and localized versions of study will be produced for nine countries across Central and South America and the Caribbean, as well as Egypt, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and Kenya.

During the three-month period from April to June 2020, while nonprofits struggled with transition to remote work and disruptions in serving their communities caused by the COVID pandemic, TechSoup was able to help in excess of 85,000 nonprofits gain access to more than $440 million in technology and other needed resources. For every $100 invested, TechSoup estimates it will be able to distribute $47,000 of additional resources to nonprofits. TechSoup has reached more than one million organizations in 236 countries and territories around the world.