Trust (noun): firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.

Good relationships are built on trust, and so is community. At Indiegogo, your trust and safety are our top priorities. We want our community of entrepreneurs and backers to thrive.

We believe that every idea deserves an equal shot at success, and that great things happen when backers and entrepreneurs join together to create something new. We’re committed to equipping every campaigner with the tools not only to create and ultimately deliver a successful project, but also to keep their community of backers in the loop, including when things don’t go as planned. It’s with this transparency and support that great projects come to life.

To preserve your trust, we understand that you need a secure platform. That’s why our Trust and Safety team is always working hard to strengthen our safeguards and improve our processes and policies. We’re constantly refining these processes: we review campaigns—automatically and manually—based on evolving, self-improving algorithms, and we investigate real-time concerns from our community and partners.

Our responsibility doesn’t stop here. We recognize that there is much more we can do to ensure a high level of trust and transparency for our community.

What We’re Doing to Keep Indiegogo a Platform You Can Trust

Indiegogo exists to unite people around the ideas that matter to them, and providing a safe, secure and trusted platform is an essential part of achieving that mission.

To keep building your trust, maintain our platform’s integrity, and protect our campaigners and backers, we’ve started to implement rigorous security steps: up-front ID verification, holding campaign owners more accountable to the expectations in our recently updated Terms of Use, and performing in-depth investigation when things don’t look right—or when we get feedback directly from our community.

We often get asked about the feasibility of projects and, while we may not review every project, we will work with the campaign owner directly if we receive questions or concerns. We respect quality, honesty and accountability.

That being said, we will not tolerate abuse of our platform. If an entrepreneur breaches our Terms of Use or doesn’t fulfill their obligations to backers, we will take appropriate action against the campaign. We will do everything in our power to recover funds for our backers, including contacting third-party collections agencies. In some cases, if the situation is not egregious, we will reach out to the campaign owners to try to work with them before taking definitive action. Overall, we pledge to do what is fair.

The Trust and Safety team and Indiegogo care about and are committed to providing a trusted and safe platform you can rely on. We listen to feedback from our community to inform our policies, so don’t please hesitate to tell us what you think. We’ll continue to update you on our progress. Thank you for making Indiegogo what it is today and being a part of our community!

Read more about Trust and Safety at Indiegogo here.