Entries Tagged 'Social Enterprise' ↓

Myself and 4Pioneers partner-in-crime Nick Lockey went to the World Entrepreneurship Summit last week at the invitation of Oli Barrett and Steve Moore (thanks again both).

Some really interesting stuff going on - the two highlights of the day were Kevin Spacey’s fantastic talk on the community centred business model of the Old Vic (apparently it has NO arts funding whatsoever - that’s some achievement) and the brilliant session hosted by Oli on enterprise education. This was really useful for us in the context of 4Pioneers which we’re developing around that exact subject.

Most interestingly for me, almost everything I heard had something to do with social enterprise. I was quite surprised as I don’t think it was a theme for the day. Are we really getting to a point where it’s becoming natural practice for entrepreneurs to create a social benefit in everything they do, as well as making profit?

I’d like to think so but I’m not yet convinced - I still meet people to this day who don’t believe that humans are causing climate change so we’ve got some way to go yet.

It was very encouraging though and has confirmed for me even more strongly that social enterprise is going to be massive in the next 10 years.

A concept I use a lot in my work is that of the Global Microbrand, a company that "stays small but sells all over the world".

Working with social enterprises and other socially focussed organisations I started to realise that this concept could apply quite neatly to an organisation’s social impact as well as its financial success.

Put simply, instead of "stay small but sell all over the world", an organisation can now use the web to "stay small but influence all over the world". This is good news for organisations that want to remain small, nimble and innovative.

Instead of growing in influence by growing in size, organisations can now use the web to tell the world what they’re doing in great detail, start discussions and show others how to get things done effectively. Meanwhile they’re working on the next set of ideas. I mentioned an example of this in a previous post about my work with Impactt.

These ideas aren’t new, but I’ve found this to be a great way of encapsulating things when talking to socially focussed organisations about their web strategies.

Impactt are one of the world’s leading ethical trade consultancies.  They work with many of the world’s leading companies to improve labour standards and have been pushing things forward in this field for ten years. Looking at their client list is like taking a walk down the high street and they’re hugely respected in the industry as a company effecting real change for workers.

I’ve been working with the company’s team to develop a new web strategy; the first phase went online last week and you can see the results at impacttlimited.com

A few notes on the project:

My work is now primarily about strategy rather than straight builds so I’ve spent a great deal of time getting to know the company, the issues they’re working with and the team who run things. This has been fascinating, and also very good fun.

We started with the Global Microbrand principle (stay small and sell all over the world), and tweaked it for a social context (stay small and influence all over the world). It’s key that an innovative company like this are telling people what they’re doing both from a commercial and social point of view. If they can provoke a discussion both on their own site and elsewhere, that’s even better.

Impactt had been producing a printed newsletter full of stories on labour standards ("The Meteor"). We decided after some thought to move this over to a new, two-pronged strategy, and worked with the team to re-develop The Meteor as a blog and a live news feed.

With the help of Mark McGuinness we worked to map out the style, content and potential audience for the blog and coached the team as they made their first tentative footsteps into the blogosphere.  It’s now up and running and I must say, they’re doing an excellent job.

I think it’s vital to avoid a technology led approach with these things. I have a pet phrase which goes something like "Giving someone a blog is like giving them a blank piece of paper. It doesn’t mean anything until they know what to write". The potential readership of Impactt’s blog is a group of people who have huge influence in this field so there’s a big opportunity here to really help make change happen globally.

The Live News Feed is a great feature which allows users to receive the latest news on labour standards daily or weekly. It has the double function of keeping clients, and everyone in the office up to date with the latest news, all filtered by one person. 

Making this happen was an incredibly simple combination of delicious, Google Reader, Feedburner (all free) and a bit of training. This to me embodies the power of what can be done these days with free software.

I also worked together with the team at Rolled to build a brand new, fully content managed, accessible and (in my opinion) beatifully designed website. I’m really pleased with how this came out and initial feedback has been very good.

Moving into the future I’m keen to start looking at the company’s use of video and audio. There could well be a new podcast on labour standards coming your way soon!

I must extend a great thanks to the Impactt team for pulling together and really doing a great job of getting content together, no easy feat when you already have a full time job to do.

Incidentally, I’m not the only one with a pet saying about blogging. Mark McGuinness has one too: "A blog is for life, not just for Christmas".

Food for thought as we enter into the season of goodwill.

Last Wednesday I attended a presentation by Ashoka in the Société Générale.

Ashoka are the oldest association for social entrepreneurs in the world and support over 1800 fellows world-wide . I’ve been working with the Ashoka Support Network to put together some very early stage ideas on how the organisation could apply Web 2.0, and specifically social networking approaches to its work.

If the people I heard about (and met) on Wednesday are anything to go by, the Ashoka fellows are an interesting bunch of people.

I specifically found Lesley Ann Van Selm’s talk hugely inspiring.  She is a South African who founded Khulisa, a restorative justice programme:

"Khulisa is an initiative that tackles crime holistically, working at all levels of the crime cycle – preventing crime, diverting youth from the criminal justice system, providing alternatives to imprisonment, fostering personal transformation for those who are in prison, and assisting with their transition back to society."

According to Van Selm, 80 percent of participants do not revert back to crime, and it costs about a third as much to run this programme as it does to keep someone in jail for one year.

Ashoka seem to really push their entrepreneurs towards taking a world-wide, and world-changing approach.  Khulisa is now coming to the UK; it’ll be fascinating to see how well a South African developed methodology would work in this country.

I think what I like most about the social enterprise sector is the intelligence, resilience and openness of the people I meet. Over the next few years I’m keen to help as many of these people as possible to use the web to tell more people about who they are, what they doing and why more people should be doing the same.

Post of the week this week goes to Stef Lewandowski for Tool Tips: 10 sites that make running a business easier on the new, improved Digital Central website.

Whatever kind of business you’re part of, check this out. You’re bound to find some useful stuff in here. Great stuff.

Great to see that one of the top ten, Diarised, is a project developed by our friends Made Media.

technorati tags:Diarised, DigitalCentral, Business, Plaxo, Basecamp, 37Signals, MadeMedia, Birmingham, 3form, CampaignMonitor, Guru

A quick update on the post about Coworking Spaces.

The response to this was very positive - as well as getting in touch with Ben from Inventicus who has already been researching the idea (and was looking for partners), Laura from Unlimited also responded saying she’d been looking into setting up something similar to The Hub in Birmingham.

Lawrence Cairns-Smith from The Studio in Cannon St. (ex Orange Studio) also got in touch as well a number of people who said they’d love to use a space like this if it existed.

So we’re getting together for a meeting next Thursday (5th April), 6pm at the Kitchen (Custard Factory) to see how we can move forward with this. Laura will hopefully from this point on be spending a significant portion of her time devoted to the project so it looks like there’s real potential for this to happen.

If anyone else is interested in coming along then please do - the more input the better.

Also I’d really like to canvas some opinion before the meeting so if you have any.

What kinds of features would you like in a coworking space? Where would you like it to be? How often would you use it?
Either respond using comments or email me direct.

Some links to get your creative juices flowing:

• Article on Coworking spaces from The Creativity Exchange
• Lemon Studios
• The Hub
• Coworking spaces wiki

I’ll post more after the meet.

Being someone who likes to move around between places while I’m working, and who does sometimes miss sitting in an office with a group of other like-minded people, I was really interested by an post on Co-working spaces I read on the Creativity Exchange blog today.

The idea is to create a flexible working space which can be hired out whenever necessary but more importantly to create a social space and sense of community around the space. As the post put it (sort of) “Part cubicle, part coffee shop”
I think this is exactly the kind of space we need in Birmingham City Centre and / or in Eastside. I’d use it. It fits exactly into a lot of what I think Glenn Howells was trying to say about the importance of dialogue to the development of the creative industries at the Eastside Dialogues last year.

One of the interesting things is that the idea has a wiki which spaces all over the world can use to share information and best practice on how to set one of these places up as well as finding other people to collaborate with when doing so. Having checked it out I’m pleased to see there are already plans to set one up in Birmingham. I’ve emailed Ben who’s proposed the idea to find out more and will post more if and when he gets back to me.

In the meantime I’d be interested to know what people’s thoughts on this are. Would you use it if there was one here? What features would you like it to have?

Here’s an idea - why not give 10,000 young people £10 and see what they can build with it in one month?

www.makeyourmarkwithatenner.com

A fantastic idea - I’m really looking forward to seeing the results.

UPDATE: You can now keep track of the results at The Tenner Blog

I’ve just been introduced to a fantastic new site, GlobalGiving.com, which gives anyone the opportunity to give to small, high impact, grassroots projects around the world. It’s a great idea.

Even though my knowledge of international development is limited, one thing I have always been aware of when travelling and meeting people who are doing socially concious work “on the ground” is how scathing many are of large NGOs and how much of these organisations’ money is sucked into bureaucracy and management. I don’t mean to discredit what these organisations do, but in some cases this structure is obviously not the most efficient.

When in Cambodia I met some incredibly committed people who were raising money in Canada, then physically taking it to Cambodia and spending it on sending children to the doctor, sending them to school, trying to find ways to get them away from living on rubbish tips and all sorts of other direct action. You couldn’t help but be impressed by the directness of what they were doing. After I met these guys I decided I’d much prefer to give my money directly to them than to any of the large NGOs, just because I knew it was going to have a real, direct impact.

Globalgiving seems to me a formalised way to search for these kinds of projects and give directly to them. What I find interesting about this is that it’s another example of how the internet is helping to create a long tail economy - this time in the charity / NGO sector. It exactly parallels the changes going on in other forms of commerce, one great example being the music industry. Maybe givers and charities don’t need huge NGOs quite so much these days, in the same way that musicians and listeners don’t need great big record companies.

UPDATE: Response to my post from Dennis Whittle of Global Giving.