On Purpose Blog

Creating behavioural change

2012-01-25T10:01:00.000Z

Creating behavioural change is always a difficult task and one that our Associates often have to grapple with in the work they do for their placement organisations. The topic also come up during our induction training with Charmian Love of Volans. Unilever has been doing some interesting work on this. The sustainability targets they have set themselves won't be achieved unless they can inspire

Year End Goals

2011-12-12T16:16:00.005Z

My year of On Purpose is coming to an end. Last week was our last official training session on Friday afternoon. It was an internal meeting, just the 11 Associates alongside the OP team of Tom and Kate. Part of the time was taken by evaluating how well we had achieved the goals we set in the beginning of the year and by setting out our new goals for 2012. Friday’s group setting gave us a chance

How Marketing needs to adapt to Social Media

2011-12-09T12:45:00.000Z

Here's a video we liked that we saw in our training last Fri, shown to us by Adele Barlow who was giving us the basics on all things digital.

More Social Finance

2011-12-05T12:50:00.003Z

As the Eurozone seems to continually teeter on the brink of collapse, Western governments strain to control budget deficits generated by bailing out failed banks and the stagnant economies left in their wake, there are growing demands for new ways of doing business. The Occupy Wall Street protests have swept the globe, now totalling some 951 cities in 82 countries. Calls for reform are not just

Life's amazing and nobody's happy

2011-11-25T08:14:00.003Z

This is a funny but also thought-provoking video we watched last week in training, courtesy of Steve Coles from Intentionality who was talking about well-being.

The Power of Networks

2011-11-03T13:24:00.012Z

Building on Martin’s post about the Emerge conference last weekend, I wanted to share the insights from one of the sessions that I found particularly interesting. This session from the “Do It” breakout stream addressed the question of networks in the social enterprise space and how intermediaries could support social entrepreneurs. The discussion was animated by experts from well-established

The Emerge Conference

2011-11-01T18:53:00.008Z

The Emerge Conference took place this weekend in Oxford with successful social business leaders from around the globe speaking to a few hundred delegates, mostly post-graduate students.Application of technologies featured heavily. Ken Banks, the founder of kiwanja.net, spoke about his NGO’s provision of a free, open-source platform to send, receive and aggregate bulk text messages all from a

O2 Learn Competition Winner

2011-10-23T23:05:00.008+01:00

O2 Learn was set up by Kate Richardson and Harriet Barclay from the 2010 On Purpose cohort. www.o2learn.co.uk is a free video library of lessons for secondary school students - a bit like a youtube for learning. It allows great teachers to upload their best lessons to the platform, making them accessible to young people everywhere. The website is a supporting pillar of O2's core CSR brand: Think

Company Fundraising launches at JustGiving

2011-10-13T11:38:00.015+01:00

It was a high point of my placement this week when we launched JustGiving’s new Company Fundraising product. It’s a really exciting new fundraising tool that enables companies to celebrate their charity partnerships and bring all their employee fundraising activity together in one place. JustGiving is built on the premise of fundraising as a social activity – and (although I’m a little biased!)

Walled garden's awakening

2011-10-03T23:08:00.005+01:00

Sometimes people in social enterprise slip into detachment from reality behind their LCD screens as easily as their business-as-usual colleagues. When we start to confuse social impact metrics for real people, or carbon credits for, well, anything real, it is probably the time. It is the right time to get ourselves out of our offices and to dive into some offline, hands-on, local engagement

Ten things I've learnt about effective partnerships between business and charity

2011-09-21T15:06:00.003+01:00

Civil society organisations have at their core distinct social missions to tackle problems that are often outside the scope of conventional market appetite and may be ill-addressed by existing government institutions. However increasingly the lines between CSR, state intervention and social action are becoming blurred and new partnerships that cross sectors are emerging, galvanised by shared

Guardian Social Enterprise Network: On Purpose Interview Series

2011-09-13T09:17:00.007+01:00

Over the last 8 weeks the On Purpose Associates have been contributing to a series of articles for The Guardian's Social Enterprise Network. Each week, one Associate talks to a 'builder or runner' from a social enterprise or commercially-driven charity, many from our current placement organisations. So far we've interviewed:Charlotte Glynn, Head of People at Just GivingJonathan Bamber,

Finding meaning behind the numbers

2011-09-05T13:42:00.008+01:00