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xigi.net
Voting Summary (Elevator Pitch):
Think of xigi (ziggy) as the Bloomberg of the emerging capital market for good. It provides news, research, analytical tools and due diligence for investors and wealth managers who care about financial and social impact in their decision-making.
Supporting organization:
Calvert Social Investment Foundation (Fiscal Sponsor)
URL:
www.xigi.net
City:
San Francisco
State/Region:
CA
Country:
USA
Project Vision Statement & Potential Social Impact:
Thousands of leading practitioners around the world are at work in the emerging hybrid “blended value” investment space that includes affordable housing, clean technology, community development, education, fair trade, green building, health, independent media, microfinance and technology. Investors who want to do good with their investment dollars are funding businesses that have, for example, found profitable ways to fight poverty, expand fair trade industries and provide expansion capital to independent media. While there’s been a dramatic increase in the number and sophistication of deals being structured in this space and the amount of dollars moving into it, this new landscape is difficult to comprehend, and thus the flow of capital is inhibited. xigi’s goal is to help this international emerging market to grow through market formation activities that guide and educate a growing wave of new money, while connecting it to the emergent entrepreneurs and deals in the space. In short, xigi is a market discovery platform to increase the flow of capital to this emerging marketplace.
Sustainability (financial) model:
While xigi.net is currently fiscally sponsored by the Calvert Social Investment Foundation as a non-profit, the organization will have substantial revenue generating activities. xigi will be a proving ground of the best thinking and knowledge on this growing landscape…a VentureOne[1] or Bloomberg[2] for the social capital market. And, in so doing, it will become a sustainable social enterprise in its own right, as it derives membership and sponsorship fees from its growing treasure trove of market intelligence, tools and products.
1. VentureOne, now a Dow Jones company, has long been a clearinghouse of information for the private equity and VC community where investors place their deal information for free, and then subscribe to the macro datasets to help derive intelligence on the landscape in which they operate. http://www.ventureone.com/
2. Bloomberg is the leading provider of data, news and analytics for the traditional capital markets.
Potential obstacles:
Establishing a busines model to sell xigi's services to top-tier traditional wealth management firms. Making the transition from a free service to fee-based services. Scaling our small virtual development team, possibly including establishing xigi as an open source project.
Resource Needs:
$250k per year for three years; Sponsorships; Editorial staffing; Development staffing
Key Milestones:
The original concept for xigi arose from a map of the social capital market completed in 2001. The project began in earnest in August 2005 with the first beta prototype site launched in December 2005 and the second in December 2006. The term of this project is three years (January 2007- January 2010). The goal is for xigi to be financially self-sustainable at the end of that time period.
We are currently in the beta 2 phase of the project, and releasing monthly updates to the site in response to feedback from our beta user community of over 500 practitioners. Over the next 90 days we will be continuing along this trajectory as we close on a major fund-raising campaign.
Upon the close of our funding campaign, we will increase investments in both site development and business development -focussing out building the community and the web infrastructure to support community activites -in particular, enhancements to the popular visual mapping capabilities.
Project Summary:
xigi.net (xigi is pronounced “ziggy” as in zeitgeist) is an online platform for tracking the nature and amount of investment activity in "the capital market that invests in good"; the deals being transacted and the relationships between investors, entrepreneurs and intermediaries. While the emphasis is on private debt and equity deals, the market extends into grant making and publicly traded markets. xigi provides the tools to contextualize this intelligence making it easy to understand a growing landscape of social enterprises, investment offerings and investors globally. xigi’s current toolset includes xigiMaps that graphically visualize the complex relationships between people and institutions in the field, and xigiDiscovery, a tool under development that presents investment options based on an investor’s unique social and financial objectives. This tool will be available to private investors as well as wealth managers to help them guide their clients. The site also offers extensive research capabilities and a blog written by diverse experts in the field. To date, roughly 1,000 organizations have been uploaded into the xigi database helping to generate the sharpest view to date of who’s who in the social enterprise market and how they are related to each other.
Comments
"It provides news, research,
maps are the killer app
just a note to those who have not been to the xigi site: mapping the relationships between the players in the social capital market is the killer app thus far for xigi particularly since the nature of those relationships is quickly identified allowing anyone to see the kinds of transactions that are occurring in the marketplace. as a market discovery platform this kind of information is hugely valuable as the players in the market see themselves in the context of the entire field and make decisions as to where they transact next.
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it's working
when the xigi team deployed maps in december, people started coming and putting themselves and their organizations on the map. and it's continuing to happen. so we are starting to get a community-built handle on who's doing what in fair trade, in social enterprise. new people are being educated faster and entrenched entrants are finding new players they need to know about; and the maps often show them people involved that they are already know so they can get up to speed quicker with a quick phone call or email.