Deadline: September 9, 2024
Applications are open for the Fast Forward Startup Accelerator 2025. Need to raise money? They will teach you how. Want to learn about building a board? Hiring technical talent? They can help you with that too. The Startup Accelerator bridges the tech and nonprofit worlds, providing you the training to push through the challenges only a tech nonprofit entrepreneur knows.
You’ll receive funding, mentorship, and connections to people who can help you scale. Described as “a prominent player in the tech-for-good landscape,” they have supported over 100 startups in tackling issues like poverty, healthcare inequity, and education disparities. Through the Startup Accelerator, you’ll be part of a community dedicated to using tech to make a difference.
Program Details
Fast Forward’s program is designed to address the unique needs of tech nonprofits:
- Capital. Fundraising strategies (including tactics and sources of capital) are different for tech nonprofits at every stage of the fundraising process as compared to their for-profit peers. There are also unique challenges and opportunities available to tech nonprofits in particular, which we will help you navigate.
- Content. Their curriculum is different. Yes, tech nonprofits must focus on product, scaling, and growth. However, tech nonprofits also need to learn about board development, governance, leveraging volunteers, and other issues specific to nonprofits. The knowledge base they have put together for tech nonprofits differs substantially from what for-profits would find valuable.
- Customer. Because of their focus on impact over profit, nonprofits often chase the least profitable customer, which impacts go-to-market strategy and customer life cycle in a way that’s different from for-profits.
- Cohort. Entrepreneurship is lonely. Tech nonprofit entrepreneurship even more so. Tech nonprofit leaders tell them that because of their nonprofit focus they don’t quite fit into for-profit accelerators, and because of their tech/product focus they don’t quite fit into nonprofit fellowships. They share a set of challenges unique to this intersection, and they’re excited to go through a program with others like them as well as provide each other ongoing support as their organizations grow.
- Community. Key to their mission is building closer ties between the nonprofit and for-profit tech community. The tech world has the opportunity to have a huge impact on these organizations and therefore the world. Their focus on collaborative philanthropy is quite different from for-profit accelerators, which don’t need to invest heavily in community building due to the nature of venture investing.
Benefits
- Receive a $25,000 philanthropic grant
- Learn from tech and social sector leaders
- Meet investors and like-minded founders
Eligibility
- The Accelerator is built exclusively for early-stage tech nonprofits. These are organizations that look like typical tech startups—they build tech products—and have selected a nonprofit structure because they are building for impact instead of profit.
Selection Criteria
- Leadership. Tech nonprofits face everything that is hard in a tech startup and everything that’s hard in a nonprofit. To pull it off, the leaders must have steadfast vision and incredible gumption.
- Tech talent. The tech vision should be the driving force of the organization and not an auxiliary program. To successfully execute that vision, tech talent must be in a leadership role.
- Potential for Impact. Impact is a thorny subject. To get to the heart of an organization’s potential, we ask questions like: Who is the organization primarily serving? If successful, how many lives will be positively influenced? How deeply will the organization impact those lives?
- Scalability. Software scales incredibly well. They support organizations with a vision for change that is matched only by the potential for scale.
- Lived Experience with the Problem. People solve problems in front of them. They want to empower people to solve the problems they see and experience.
- Alignment. Fast Forward is a small organization. As such, they choose organizations who they are best poised to help scale.
Application
The Accelerator application will close on September 9, 2024. The program will run from late February to early June 2025. Demo Day will likely occur at the end of May and beginning of June 2025.
For more information, visit Startup Accelerator.
