#248: Emily Best, Founder & CEO of Seed&Spark, a Platform that Makes Entertainment More Diverse, Inclusive, Connected, and Essential

Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, a platform that makes entertainment more diverse, inclusive, connected, and essential. Seed&Spark’s platform and national education program have helped thousands of bold storytellers raise millions to bring to life entirely new stories, and Seed&Spark delivers those stories into workplaces for employee training, engagement, and intelligence through their proprietary Impact Screening Platform. They gather the qualitative and quantitative data essential for driving lasting structural change for inclusive and productive workplaces.

An advocate for diversity and inclusion in the entertainment industry, Best regularly speaks at conferences and events about leveraging entertainment to build equity and sustainability for everyone. She also runs workshops to help independent content creators successfully crowdfund, build an audience and pitch their projects.

Best was named a 2013 Indiewire Influencer, a 2014 New York Business Journal “Woman of Influence”, a 2015 Upstart 100 entrepreneur (Business Journals), received the Ivy Film Innovator Award in 2015 and in 2016, graduated from Techstars Boston, an elite accelerator program for the country’s top entrepreneurs. Best has raised millions of dollars in traditional funding, equity crowdfunding, and rewards-based crowdfunding and has personally participated in more than 300 crowdfunding campaigns.

Some of the Topics Covered by Emily Best in this Episode

• What Seed&Spark does and the big pivot they went through in 2020
• Why Film Forward was created by Seed&Spark
• How Seed&Spark got started
• The story of building the Seed&Spark platform itself
• What went into the launch of Seed&Spark
• How Emily grew Seed&Spark through 120 live workshops per year
• The business model behind Seed&Spark
• What goes into a successful crowdfunding campaign
• The biggest challenges that go into creating a crowdfunding platform
• Why Emily has a love/hate relationship with accelerators
• How Emily recharges away from work

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