Life's amazing and nobody's happy

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

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 programmes such as Ashoka, the Schwab foundation and the Skoll Centre.

As we come to the end of the On Purpose programme and we’ve had nearly a year to learn about the realities of the UK social enterprise sector, I often find myself reflecting on what the sector really needs and what is the current missing piece of the puzzle that will allow it to grow exponentially. It became evident to me that money is not the issue. In fact, we are nearly at a point where there is more capital to invest in social projects than there are projects that satisfy both the social purpose and the commercial viability. “Investment readiness” seems to be the buzzword of the month. What it really means is that unfortunately this sector still has a long tail of small starters, relatively few more established groups trying to prove their business models and a scarcity of success stories which many aspire to (HTC, Fifteen, Big Issue).

Going back to the question of networks, could this be the magic ingredient? Andres Falconer (Managing director of Ashoka) opened the conversation by referring to networks as the holy grail of social enterprise and presented the way Ashoka endeavours to niche out individuals who could unleash the potential when paired with the right network and support. Similarly, Mirjiam explained how the Schwab Foundation moved away from granting financial prizes to simply offering their chosen members connections to other leaders and access to high profile circles such as the Davos Summit. Sarah Orr (Director of the Kravis Leadership Institute) explained how relationship building spanned from cooperation to coordination and ultimately collaboration, where the level of risk and interaction increases respectively. Then they all consecutively exposed their own approaches to finding these rising star entrepreneurs who they were going to help and plug into their web. Schwab has five criteria on the project idea; Ashoka looks for personal traits through in-depth interviews.

All these sounded like quite coherent and straightforward arguments until Indy Johar, co-founder of the newly established Hub Westminster, dared to challenge the status quo. He urged us to re-question the underlying principles in which these well-recognised entities operate and the way we’ve been framing the challenge, while proposing new ways in which the system could adapt. First of all, he urged us to abandon the theory of the hero entrepreneur. In his experience, the most successful ventures were founded by at least two people. By overly focusing on the single person, we are mystifying their capacities and hampering the rest of the supporting team. Members of the audience who were social entrepreneurs themselves were pleased to pitch in his favour: they could not have done it without their teams, they are still looking for more support and they do not feel like super-heroes. Indy also brought an innovative approach to the concept of due diligence. Although he admits not having the answers to this one, he’s convinced that something must be wrong if it takes so many and so long due diligence processes to in the end not find enough good social entrepreneurs to fund. Maybe that’s why he’s so pleased to host Village Capital at the HUB as an alternative model. Based on the group-lending mechanisms of microfinance, Village Capital is a social enterprise incubator where the seven organisation members decide among themselves who gets the funding prize of £50k at the end of twelve weeks.

Rather than picking out winners, Indy is more in favour of a user-based approach, where the individual builds the network once provided with the conditions. This would look more like a many-to-many exchange, building the network from the bottom up rather than with the pretense of a magic hand from above designing the ideal connections. That’s probably one of his inspirations for co-founding the HUB Westminster, in his words: “a place for unlikely encounters.”

Ultimately, all panel members agreed that there was probably room for more than one approach to support social enterprise initiatives and that, although these established programmes had been crucial for kick starting the movement and for building it from scratch, it was probably time to rethink the approach and open it up to others. Indeed, more and more individuals are willing to contribute with their unique skills. From university students to private sector consultants, the passion and interest are growing, but many do not find it easy to channel it given the nearly exclusive focus on the social entrepreneur persona.

In the end, hands were shaken and large smiles exchanged; nevertheless someone had rocked the boat.

The Emerge Conference

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 non-internet enabled phone. One recent application of this service is for Mothers to Mothers, who prevent transmission of HIV from mother to child through a peer to peer advice service and currently 1 in 5 of HIV-infected pregnant women in Africa. They are integrating SMS messages into their services to remind mothers to take medication and attend. This exemplifies the fact that technology solutions work often because they are simple, effective and focussed on the nuances of communication and delivery, rather than any technological innovation.

In two impact investing conferences, it was striking that the vast majority of investors shunned rigorous measurement of impact for a simple metric of measurement, a story that resonated, and a balanced portfolio covering different human needs (education, health care etc). It’s probable that with the inadequacy of impact measurement, investors prefer simply to be wooed by an entrepreneur’s story and assess their ability to deliver on it.

Regarding the legal structures of companies, there were a number of not for profits that used hybrid models of funding. The profit arm of Embrace handles manufacturing, distribution and R & D, whilst the NFP arm makes a loss on delivering to the most needy and performs monitoring and evaluation. The not for profit holds the IP, which the for profit arm pays a royalty for its use, and therefore supports the unprofitable part of the business.

The conference closed with some wonderfully articulated pearls of wisdom by James Chin, founder of the World Toilet Organisation (check it out: it’s brilliant, http://www.worldtoilet.org/wto/). He recommended taking calculated risks: for example, naming your organisation the WTO because getting sued by the better known organisation by the same name would be worth it for the PR storm. Another gem of many: “There’s no such thing as work that’s easy or hard, just that which is fun or boring.”

O2 Learn Competition Winner

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 Big, which aims to support young people in every area of their lives.

A competition was launched on the site in November 2010 to encourage teachers to contribute video content. On Friday 14th October, the winner of this year's prize was announced and the O2 Learn team threw a surprise assembly at the winning school. Click here to see the winning video and here to see a clip from London Tonight from this past Friday evening.

Company Fundraising launches at JustGiving

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!) this product seems to me to be a great way to build a sense of community and purpose at work.

Employees can view current appeals or sign up for company events, join teams, and even try to get to the top of the fundraising league table. It’s easy to see how your efforts contribute to the company’s overall total. Employers can promote appeals, get better visibility over their fundraising activity as a whole, and run reports to make company matched giving easier – meaning more money for charities.

Some of Britain’s best known companies have been trialling the product for the past six months – and it’s been brilliant to see it evolve. Waitrose, for example, piloted the tool with its London-based employees, and raised over £30,000 for sports charity The Lord’s Taverners. This paid for a brand new minibus to give young people the opportunity to get involved in more sporting activities. A 900-strong workforce took part in Barclays’ Step in to the Night event and raised over £50,000 for UNICEF and Have a Heart.

Of course, employee fundraising is only one aspect of corporate citizenship, and certainly it shouldn’t be seen as an alternative to embedding social purpose at the heart of a business model. But that’s no reason to celebrate it any less. During my time at JustGiving I’ve seen just how inspirational fundraising for charity can be (and, of course, how important this is to the charities themselves). And at our launch event this week we heard directly from Barclays the great effect it has on employee motivation and engagement.

And as for my own motivation – well, there’s times in any job when you can get a little weary communing with your computer screen . There’s nothing quite like getting out of the office to reconnect with your job’s mission. In the run up to the launch of Company Fundraising some of my favourite days have been those out and about with company fundraisers as they’ve walked, abseiled and cycled in aid of great causes. I met Gigi from Barclays who single-handedly raised over £2,000 for UNICEF and Have a Heart. And I got to hang out with Maria (you might recognise her as Superwoman in our short film!) who masterminded KPMG employees abseiling down the side of their Canary Wharf building in aid of Barnardo’s (they raised over £20,000 in 2 days). It’s been pretty inspiring stuff!

Walled garden's awakening

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 experience. Luckily there is no shortage of opportunities.



Less than two weeks ago on a beautiful Sunday morning, I found myself amidst a gang of volunteering 'Garden Angels' in eastern London. The sun was shining, people were getting dirty and excited, and one walled garden was slowly awaking from its long slumber, sending ripples to the whole neighbourhood.



The garden, the people, and the whole project were an unusual mix, aiming to go far beyond just planting a patch of lettuce. Their aim was to recreate a meaning for the old place within the context of contemporary communities. Pulling together an award-winning singer Imogen Heap, design thinking and micro-urbanism expertise of Clear Village, a bunch of excited volunteers from all over the world, and committed local partners, it was a collaborative effort to inspire local communities. To inspire locals by retelling the forgotten tale of a vast, magnificent, Georgian kitchen garden lying hidden within its four-meter walls amidst a beautiful park on a hill overseeing London. A tale about a garden that used to serve those in a dire need as a food source of last resort, before it was shut down. A garden that was vandalised and erased from memories of common folk of that area.



This project by Clear Village saw the garden re-inhabited for a week, showed a glimpse of the garden's potential, and teased the locals with some thought-provoking questions: Should an enchanting place of such a deep soul and history stay neglected? Can it be helped to a grow into a new meaning in the 21st century? Can we find new invigorating modes of coexistence between the garden and the humans? Could it become a refuge, an organic food site, a place of gathering, a place of peace and joy? What effort and commitment would that require?



Such questions are not unique to this walled garden project, and they capture a lot of what a social enterprise is about in my eyes -- real communities and their places -- that is where social enterprise happens. And those of us whose sense of reality is too often endangered by an office space should get out from time to time to projects like this one to stay in touch.

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

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 objectives and mutual benefit.

Many businesses are already engaged in programmes that have significant social value, either through their core business or through ancillary CSR endeavours. As a charity, identifying and partnering with these organisations can have profound benefits due to the reach and resource of big business. In return, the insights and access that working on the front line of social change can bring often hold wider commercial value to organisations working in complementary areas.

Here are a few thoughts that may be useful to those wondering how to create valuable relationships with business:

1. Have a clear idea of your organisational needs and priorities. It helps to know if you need funding support how much, when and for what, but remember that in these times corporate donations are hard to come by and companies are looking to partner with not just support charity. By understanding your core costs you may be able to find areas where you can benefit from in-kind support (for example space, time or training) which may have equal value and be a more realistic request.

2. Think about areas where a business could enhance the goods or services that you deliver. This may be expertise from their core business, technology, scale or geographic location.

3. Make sure you think not just about your organisational needs but also your end user needs. Holding end user/customer focus groups can surface up areas of potential for improvements that you may not have picked up on or may be less equipped to address than someone else.

4. Map the needs of your organisation to sectors and start to think where in that sector support could come from. Is there a tech firm that might help with systems implementation or could a bank help with impact measurement? Find out what priorities these companies have in the CSR space and whether they may be similar to your own organisation. Websites like Business in the Community or CSR networks like this can be useful.

5. Talking to the right people in companies helps ensure discussions are productive. If people in your networks work at or know people at the organisation you are interested in approaching they may be able to suggest the most appropriate person to contact.

6. When approaching companies be clear about why you are contacting them, what your organisation does and where you see potential to collaborate.

7. It's helpful to go to meetings with an idea of how you see a partnership working but be prepared to release your agenda. Take time to hear what they are already doing and about their organisational priorities, culture and business environment. Work together to identify areas of mutual interest.

8. Be clear about the value proposition of what you are suggesting. Where possible quantify it with facts and figures (for example the City of London released a great report on the business case for employee volunteering in education). Thinking from their perspective about the cost-benefit of their support is a useful exercise that may lead you to other areas where you can add value.

9. Understand how perspective may vary depending on the level in the organisation that you engage. Painting a creative and inspiring 3-5 year plan of collaborative innovation could excite a CEO but come across as completely unrealistic to someone less senior.

10. Remember that relationships take time to cultivate and what may be a conversation this year could be a pilot the next and grow into something deeper. Using a robust CRM system (such as Salesforce) is extremely helpful when maintaining a large number of relationships. Don't just cultivate the successful relationships, take time to explore and follow up on proposals that didn't get off the ground, there may be useful insight that helps you make more effective proposals in the future. Finally, be meticulous in your communication, ensure you follow up in a reasonable time, help where you can with information and be prepared to know the difference between gently pushing and hassling someone!

Dominic is currently Partnerships Manager at Teaching Leaders, a charity that addresses educational disadvantage by training and developing high potential middle leaders in challenging schools.

Guardian Social Enterprise Network: On Purpose Interview Series

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 Giving

Jonathan Bamber, International Sales & Development Director at Tough Stuff

Damian Peat, Operational Director and Financial Controller at Terra Plana and VIVOBAREFOOT

Ariane van de Ven, Head of Future and Trend Insights at O2

Sylvia Lowe, Head of UK Innovation at Comic Relief

Miriam Turner, Innovations Director EMEAI at InterfaceFLOR

Patrick Reyburn, Strategic Development Manager at HCT Group

Lucy Payton, Associate Director at Teaching Leaders


To check out the series of interviews click here.

Keep an eye on this space for the 3 remaining interviews!

Finding meaning behind the numbers

I’ve dipped my toes in the waters of Excel over the years, but the waves can get a bit large. When I wade too deep into it, I tend to get swamped. Yet I do admire a well-built model where the cells spin out their numbers like a slot machine in response to my toggling a single scenario. I just don’t entirely understand how it got to be like that. But as my accounting professor Tomo Suzuki likes to remark, the poets are necessary to interpret what the boffins create.

I’ve trudged through Excel when I worked in a bank to check a company's financials, grumbled as I’ve used Excel to inventory cases of wine (long story), and muddled through Excel when balancing my own budget. But I’ve never put numbers into one end of the Excel machine and had the impact on people’s lives be spit out the other side.

Two months into my six-month placement at ToughStuff, I’ve discovered the opportunity to do exactly that. Not all on my own from scratch, mind you. Let’s not get carried away. That would be the domain of the former consultants in our On Purpose year. But with some handholding from the CFO at ToughStuff, I think I might get my head around this.

ToughStuff is a social enterprise that sells affordable energy solutions in the developing world, mostly targeted at customers who live off the electrical grid. We provide flexible solar panels, solar lamps, mobile phone chargers, and radio battery systems starting at US$10. These replace expensive, smelly, and dangerous kerosene lanterns and candles, as well as removing the need to buy D-cell batteries for a radio.

So far, so good. I like what I’m hearing…

The benefits of this are huge, and we do have the stats to prove it. Generally, customers start saving on energy spending 2-3 months after buying ToughStuff products and save at least US$100 on their annual energy expenditure. Health risks like pulmonary diseases, burns, and poor eyesight are reduced. And it keeps carbon and batteries out of the environment – each lamp saves 24 litres of kerosene per year, and used batteries aren’t dumped into the soil. The people who sell the products for us also benefit; we’ve found that each solar entrepreneur can earn an additional US$450 by selling our products to their friends and neighbours.

These stats are averages from our existing programmes, and they are good to know. But let’s say a funding partner wants to kick-start a solar entrepreneur programme with US$100,000 of working capital and wants to know what the bang they are getting for their buck. After all, impact is the point of their investment. When they ask how many tons of carbon their money will save, there should be an answer for them. But what sensitive factors are specific to this situation that might influence the answer to their question? What scenario do I choose from the drop down menu in Excel? Ooops, they have yet to be built.

Cue the On Purpose Associate, who arrives on the scene to think strategically about what factors make or break a successful programme and to discover which inputs impact the outputs. Two months ago, it seemed that everyone here knew more about clean energy and distribution channels and carbon than I did. In fact, that’s still likely true. But I’ve discovered that my value lies in the places between specific roles. I found my footing by looking at the links between the work that people undertake across the company and the impact it has in the field on people’s lives. Essentially, I've found myself translating many people's opinions into the key variables that influence the outcome of a sales programme. Having an outsiders’ viewpoint to interview people across the company and ask “Why?” dozens of times and propose new explanations can translate the Big Picture into the direct impact. We know we are doing good overall, but we wanted to know how much good we are doing in each community.

So how was this poet-minded associate finally won over by the power of Excel? By knowing that the yearly savings per household in cell CD289 mean that these families can afford to send their daughters to school. By seeing how the average mother in cell AF36 can increase her family’s income annual by $450 just by charging her neighbours mobile phones through her fleet of solar panels. And by realising that removing the carbon from 24 litres of kerosene multiplied by the thousands of lamps per year in cell BH57 starts to clear the air.

I just have to figure out what inputs go into the boxes – but I’ll leave the formulas to the boffins.

Peter's Blog Post for Business Fights Poverty

Peter Babudu, one of this year's On Purpose Associates, talks about how Start!e will directly address one of the major challenges that impact investors currently face: finding investment-ready social enterprises. Start!e has been set up as an incubator to facilitate the rapid creation of social businesses that protect the environment and reduce poverty, accelerating qualified and viable ideas from conception through financing to sustainable operation. Check out his post for Business Fights Poverty here.