To fund our undertaking we identified different scources of funding. Next to donations from individuals and companies, we will kick off a crowdfunding campaign in the next year. On top of that in the past week we have been looking for funding from institutions and discovered that there are a few competitions our project might fit in and have a chance to win funding.

‘We need money’ is a sentence many students have either said themselves or heard from friends not too long ago. But we don’t need the money to buy food at the end of the months or to buy the next round. We need the money to make our project NG3O come alive next summer because we DON’tto charge the organisations we want to support. Our expenses start with flights and visas, video and photo camera and all kind of equipment to offer the organisations the help they need. But luckily there are different ways of raising money for a good cause. Crowdfunding is a growing online trend that we will also explore but there is something else: competitions supporting social and innovative projects!

Competitions provide not only funding but coaching as well

Competitions have a couple of advantages compared to crowdfunding. The main advantage is that most organizers don’t only hand out cash prices but also offer know-how from experts to help develop ideas into projects that actually help. In addition most applications for competitions are very extensive and take up a lot of time to fill out. Although it might have been frustrating describing our concept from every single angle (again), it gave us the opportunity to make out weaknesses that we had not focussed on yet.

We prefer to receive more legitimate funding to make NG3O happen - thanks though to Jeremy Paige for this great photo!

We prefer to receive more legitimate funding to make NG3O happen – thanks though to Jeremy Paige for this great photo!

Similar idea won 250.000€ last year

We have found a couple of competitions that are looking to support social projects. Google Impact Challenge is a substantially funded initiative that hands out over 1 Million € to the winning projects. In it’s first year is “digital.engagiert”, an initiative mostly funded by Amazon and focusing on projects promoting digitalisation in helping society. We applied to these quite large competitions although we knew our chances are little.  A project with a very similar idea to what we developed as a long-term plan for NG3O won 250.000€ in funding last year in the Google Impact Challange, so chances they promote the same in green are not too big. digital.engagiert asks for projects with a business model, we are lacking one so far.

Bigger chance at smaller competitions

Furthermore we applied for a contest called ‘Yooweedoo’, put in place from the University of Kiel. It is a competition with a focus on supporting young entrepreneurs working on ecological and social projects. Here we have the chance to win 2000€, last year 35 projects out of 70 applicants won funding chances are 50/50 we can receive funding. Last but not least we applied for Ideenfutter’, a competition now in it’s third year spreading a total of 20.000€ among projects in the categories social, environment, culture and sport.

Our applications are sent off and we can’t wait to hear back in the spring of 2018. Follow our Social Media Channels to keep up to date with our progress. Some competitions also offer an audience price, so make sure you don’t miss the opportunity to vote for us and our project. If you know any further competitions that we should apply to, don’t hesitate to contact us!

You have questions? Send us a message using our Contact form or e-Mail 🙂