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Kickstarter is a crowdfunding resource for creative projects. Here’s how it works: artists or entrepreneurs create a page detailing their project and funding needs, incentivize contributions at different levels, and then wait for donations to come pouring in. Kickstarter takes a small cut of the funding if the project reaches its fundraising goals.

It’s one of the most interesting ways entrepreneurs have leveraged the massive reach of the internet to accomplish something clearly in the public interest. To date, Kickstarter has funnelled over $1.5billion into ambitious art projects such as films, albums, plays and art installations as well as functional devices like the Pebble Watch.

That sounds like a lot of success for a company who’s mission is to ‘help bring creative projects to life.” And it is, especially if you consider that the National Endowment for the Arts has provided only $5billion in grants for artists since 1965. Kickstarter was founded 2009.

And The New York Times reported over the weekend that Kickstarter is expanding its mission, reincorporating as a “Public Benefit Company”. From the Times:

“Public benefit corporations are a relatively new designation that has been signed into law by a number of states. Delaware, where Kickstarter is reincorporating, began allowing public benefit corporations in 2013.”

They seem to be a sort of legal invention somewhere between for-profit incorporation and a non-profit 501c(3). The designation protects a company’s altruism from purely profit-driven decision making.  The Times continues:

“Under the designation, companies must aim to do something that would aid the pubic…and include that goal in their corporate charter. Board members must also take that public benefit into account when making decisions, and the company has to report on its social impact.”

You can find out exactly what those goals are by visiting Kickstarter’s new Charter Page, or by reading the full article over at the New York Times.