text post from 11 years ago

See. Click. Fund.

Yesterday, the City Council in Raleigh North Carolina voted down a proposal to begin testing a new service designed by one of our portfolio companies, SeeClickFix.

The idea behind the service won’t sound novel to most readers here, but to non-net natives it may be one that needs to be approached with caution.

The opportunity for this new service emerged out of SeeClickFix’s core business- reporting and routing non-emergency problems to city government officials for repair. 

As city budgets have tightened and staff sizes decrease, many cities are finding a healthy backlog of repairs that need to be made or projects their residents would like to see happen. Unfortunately, for many of these projects, the money is simply not available.

Concurrently, there’s been a rise in awareness and excitement around using crowdfunding for backing everything from art and technology projects to startups to providing  working capital for growing businesses.

Seeing the rise of crowd funding and this growing backlog within cities, last year the team at SeeClickFix set out on a series of pilots to fund small projects around their native New Haven. The first was a project to makeover a dark and dilapidated highway underpass with an art installation. Not something the city would ever allocate dollars for, but the citizens of the city did. And, over the course of a month long fundraising campaign  residents were able to pool enough dollars to make the project happen. 

Since that initial art project several, more practical, projects have funded such as additional city benches and bike racks around town.

The vote in Raleigh was a close one, getting struck down by a final of 4-4. It Seems the primary point of discomfort was around neighborhood equality. 

From the city councilwoman:

Baldwin also said said she isn’t comfortable with the issue of neighborhood equality. Wealthy neighborhoods would have more money to spend on neighborhood projects while less affluent neighborhoods would not.

As a general rule, we love investments that make people, like Councilwoman Baldwin, uncomfortable. 

However, the counter was also raise that successfully funded projects in wealthier neighborhoods would free up other dollars: 

Gaylord said he doesn’t think equality would be a big issue. He reasoned that if wealthy neighborhoods took on the cost of small projects, such action would free up city funds for projects in other parts of the city.

I agree with councilman Gaylord on the distribution of city dollars. But, I’m also a believer that compelling projects in less wealthy neighborhoods can, and will, attract dollars from those outside of their own zip codes. As with most crowd funding campaigns, these projects can be opened to anyone, anywhere to back. Given the right tools, I think they’d be surprised at the results the creativity and networks of their citizens can produce.

I’m really excited to watch SeeClickFix try and cut through the red tape and constrains of cities around the country and hope to see other city councils move forward with pilots. 

I think they’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results.