The School for Social Entrepreneurs

Thursday round-up: 2gether, 2 winners, 2-pennorth

Quick round-up; am in Belfast tomorrow at SSEI so won't be an end-of-the-week trawl.

- Enjoyed my one day at 2gether08; mixed feedback, but then that's what you get with a mixed crowd, I guess...and a mixed line-up; networking was great, even if the social media-meets-social good crowd is a realtively small and incestuous one. Do check out the site for video of the sessions and speakers: there was a lot there....include myself and Cliff from UnLtd now in full technicolour video apparently....

- At the event last night, they announced the New Statesman New Media Award winners. Check out the list here, including two SSE Fellow-led/involved organisations, Patient Opinion and School of Everything. Congratulations to Paul Hodgkin and Andy Gibson (and the rest of Everything), as well as all the other nominees, which included SSE Fellow Nathalie McDermott for the excellent SavvyChavvy

- Am not avoiding talking about this, but easier to check out previous posts, or my comments on Rob's blog for my two-pence worth of views....

- Doing very nicely by doing good: the Economist's take on microfinance making macro profits

- Room to Read founder John Wood featured in the Sunday Times; interesting feature on an amazing organisation

- Lots on social enterprises in the health sphere and pensions....check it out on Third Sector et al. You'll be glad to know you can TUPE yourself over. For nurse-led stuff, you'd do well to check out Entreprenurses (and their recent 5-part podcast), the fount of all knowledge and expertise on the subject

- Finally, self-referential link news: this blog got picked up by New Start (who also have a decent article on 'accidental social entrepreneurs') and, halcyon days indeed, Social Enterprise Coalition's Media Monitor....

Is mission drift better for your bottom line?

One of SSE's strengths over the past decade or more has been its adherence to both a central mission (supporting and developing social entrepreneurs in order to etc etc) and a central product (long-term action learning, practitioner-led, and peer-networked programmes, involving a variety of different interventions). This has given the organisation clarity of focus, and a well-refined, improved and robust product offering: a proven methodology that is replicating around the UK (am just back from Penzance!).

But the flipside to that clarity and focus is that it can affect flexibility, the ability to change with the times and, to an extent, the ability to seize a varied range of opportunities. This isn't totally the case with SSE, as our work has, if anything, become more and more relevant over time....and the programme appeals to a wide range of audiences. Nevertheless, I have been frustrated recently looking at other organisations who, seemingly, go for anything vaguely in this sector....decisions that are clearly powered by pound signs, not purpose.

When doing Myers-Briggs or Belbin-type team analysis, a key person is the 'values holder'...the person(s) who is principled and helps keep an organisation focused on its mission. The person who will discuss and debate with those who are pushing for a more diversified / entrepreneurial route. Ideally, those debates end up at a healthy central position between the two. But there are a few organisations for whom the values holders seem to have (literally) left the building. Or whose lack of clarity about their product / specialism is actually beneficial because it means they can shape themselves (or a work programme) to fit any tender, application or proposal. And this is, arguably, particularly the case in the social enterprise / entrepreneurship world where the primacy of the financial and social missions is less evident.

I'm not normally a fan of management tools and frameworks, but I am a fan of the old mission-money matrix. The one below comes from Fieldstone Alliance's Tools You Can Use:

I particularly like the imagery here....obviously the ideal is everything falls in the 'star' category, but the reality is often activities dotted in all three (heart, star, cash) categories. If you're doing anything that loses you money and has nothing to do with your mission, then please stop now, as the sign suggests.

What's important in using this simple tool to evaluate business development choices is to have clarity of mission first and, ideally, clarity about how you're measuring that impact. Otherwise, financial sustainability can naturally become the pre-eminent force, and you end up with organisations sustaining themselves in order to....well... sustain, rather than in order to achieve the social impact / mission that prompted their establishment.

Of course, this is a balance, as I've discussed before. And money remains of utmost importance.......but importance as a means to achieving social change, not in and of itself. And, ultimately, drifting off mission will have medium-to-long term effects: staff leaving, internal disputes, diminution of credibility in any one field/area, reputational damage from competition at all costs and so forth. Drifting starts with rapid movement and a swirl of activity....but soon forms into a frozen, stationary mass.

Is there a left-right divide in social enterprise?

The rumbling debate about ECT and its takeover and its CIC status (or lack of, now its recycling arm is privately-owned) has continued over on the Society Guardian's Joe Public blog, with Patrick Butler asking "Does it matter if a social enterprise is bought up by a big corporate?". It's a fair question, and a pretty decent summary of what the ECT Recycling takeover looks like from an 'outsider' point of view.

What's been interesting has been the comments that have followed from 'insiders' such as Craig Deardern-Phillips, Jim Brown and others (I'm SocEnt on there, btw). Beyond the calls for clarity on the detail of the situation, which I echo, it's been interesting to see how have been categorised (in some cases by themselves) as on the left or right of social enterprise. In summary, this seems to mean those who are concerned with community governance / ownership / democratic accountability are on the "left", while those who are (more) comfortable with influencing, partnering and being absorbed by the mainstream are on the "right". In the case of ECT, as this illuminating post by Rod Schwartz highlights, this means it could be viewed either as a cause for jubilation or concern

As Rod (somewhat provocatively!) writes: "Readers of our blog will know that we normally applaud when successful social entrepreneurs sell out"....before going on to state that ECT maybe didn't get as good a price as it could have: "Price is not everything but we cannot help but feel (and did ourselves believe) that ECTR would have been worth more. I do not know if this went to auction or not." Well, it would be nice to think that ECT was looking for a strategic partner to scale up, and that that is how this all came about. But the reality, which Rod hints at in his talk of ECT's bankers "not being very supportive" is that this was more of a short-term solution to an imminent problem. ECT already had a relationship with May Gurney, so to that degree the partnerships were being thought about. But this wasn't a planned auction.

This shareholder vs. stakeholder terrain is too simplistic to divide into left and right, though. Neither stance is easily applied to a political party currently....and social enterprise has always been viewed as being on that centre ground (third way territory) where economic progress meets social justice. What it might instead demonstrate are the different segments along a spectrum from voluntary and charitable through to for-profit. As we go along the spectrum (and as legal structures and investment streams / returns change), different people get more uncomfortable and draw a (personal) line. And people start on that spectrum at different ends (oh, hold on, maybe it is left and right ;0). This is why people like Rod and Nigel Kershaw have berated the CIC for not allowing large enough investment to scale up social enterprise-type organisations, whilst the 'other camp' have pointed to the CIC's lack of rigour around democratic and transparent ownership, and accountability to the community. Or, as one commenter puts it on the Joe Public post:

"I see the immersion of any not-for-private-profit social enterprise into the 'for profit' sector as a surrender to the very set of practices and values which cause ingrained poverty and exclusion in the first place"

Where do we stand? Well, SSE has never backed a "legal structure" as the solution, and believe that all sorts of different organisations (charities, social enterprises, for-profits) can have positive social impact. Our belief is that it is up to the social entrepreneur to choose the 'right' structure for them given their proposed activities, mission, financing, governance and so on. The vast majority choose a non-profit structure (regd. charity / co. ltd by guarantee / CIC etc), but some that have had the greatest social impact have had a for-profit structure. What is definitely needed is a push for all organisations in this field to measure their social impact and communicate and report transparently to their consumers / customers / beneficiaries / community / stakeholders / funders.........regardless of their structure.

A final point is that the ECT story should raise the debate about the fetishisation of scale, and the best (most sustainable and most consistent) routes to achieving that. If it's wanted / right / needed. Because there will be more organisations coming along the ECT route over the coming years.

The abbreviated dilemma: SSE

As a social franchise, SSE's brand is important...and is included in our license agreements (along with brand guidelines and the rest). And, as we look internationally as well as to the UK, trademarking in different countries becomes a relevant concern. Unfortunately, our acronym / abbreviation is an increasingly common one, as I discovered whilst buying shaving oil this weekend. That's right, King of Shaves have "Shave Surface Enhancing" technology. Or, as they call it, SSE.

I was already aware of Scottish and Southern Energy, whose website makes great reading from our point of view: "SSE has consent to build a 288 megawatt (MW) offshore wind farm in Germany"; "SSE supplies electricity and gas to 8.45 million customers"; "SSE owns and operates the UK’s largest onshore gas storage facility at Hornsea in East Yorkshire". Who knew?

Then there are newcomers, like the Stop Stansted Expansion campaign. Slightly less impressive here ("SSE Float at Bishop's Stortford Carnival"; "Where can I buy SSE's Calendar, Christmas Cards and Notelets?" etc) but a worthy cause, one could say.

Here's a big threat: Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS; if Microsoft start bandying that term around as SSE, we're in trouble...not to mention potentially baffled: "This is a required element of all items in all feeds wishing to participate in SSE-based synchronization." Absolutely.

We also have the Society for Scientific Exploration ("the SSE supports a Young Investigators programme"; sounds mysterious), the Society for the Study of Evolution, various Schools (of Systems Engineering, that sort of thing), and the Shanghai Stock Exchange.

Which brings me to the newest, most pertinent arrival: the Social Stock Exchange; here's to calling it a social stock market from here on in......

Podcasts and audio links and updates

I linked the other day to some recent podcasts on Social Innovation Conversations and that got me thinking about the various other bits of audio I've been listening to of late; some of this is repetition of previous podcast posts, but anyway:

- You can do a lot worse than Peter Day: both his InBusiness and his Global Business programmes. And, topically enough, the last programme of the latter was from the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurship. Shame that a UK-based programme on the subject was so US-centric but maybe next time....

- SmallBizPod is good (as is the blog and their news RSS feeds); hope that Alex Bellinger will put online some stuff from the Shine Unconference which he came to

- Also enjoying the Bottom Line with Evan Davis; always interesting when the 3 CEOs he has each week are from organisations of vastly different scale and sector...

- Others to watch out for are the various US magazines (Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review) and universities (MIT etc) which are putting more and more material online.

- Finally, for a bit of light-ish relief, the Bugle which, in my humble opinion, is carat-gold genius.

Heavyweight week

Been quite a week here at SSE. Both London programmes are sharing a joint study session today: John Bird's voice is echoing through the courtyard into our office as I write. And this morning Colin Crooks of Green-Works was the expert witness. Colin's a great guy: he's built such an impressive organisation over the last eight years, and he had some interesting things to say over lunch about franchising (a topic we share!), about diversification, about boards and board management, and about growing office recycling in the years to come. And that was just lunch, so I'm assuming the session with the students was enlightening and informative.

Another thing Colin mentioned over lunch was their new(er) work overseas. In particular, they're doing some extraordinary work in Sierra Leone, where they are basically kitting out a whole town through re-using furniture from the UK: a library, a hospital and 37 schools. Humbling stuff.

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Yesterday we helped facilitate a day for the Social Enterprise Ambassadors which also had some big players in attendance: not only the ambassadors themselves, but also 25 high-ranking civil servants from across different government departments, two ministers (Ed Milband and Phil Hope) and Gus O'Donnell, head of the civil service (as someone said to me, he's taking time out from running the country). So quite a powerful and intimidating group to work with....but it went well. The programme has taken a while to bed down and to get going (though announced last June, the appointments/launch took place in October-time), and everyone's committed to making the most of the next two years.

In some ways, the ambassadors programme reminds me a bit of SSE, in that a group of entrepreneurs are, by their nature, not always the easiest group to lead and facilitate....and the group dynamics can take a while to settle (the old forming-storming-norming-performing stuff), particularly when the group doesn't meet very often, and it's difficult for all to attend each time. So still a bit of forming and storming yesterday (from some) and more norming (from others). And hopefully performing over the coming months. :0)

Ended the day at the Edge Upstarts Awards. Congratulations to all the winners (who will no doubt appear on the website soon) who included Lily Lapenna of MyBnk, Carmel McConnell of Magic Breakfast, and Forth Sector. And now we're off to address our sleep deprivation.............

Monday round-up: tribute, Twitter, tracking

A long overdue post: been utterly swamped the last week. But....back in the game:

- The shock from Sarah Dodd's death has still not dissipated. There's now a blog to leave tributes, and links there to an online memorial fund + photos (you can upload them to flickr and tag with 'sarahdodds')

- Haven't been able to do a trawl of the honours list yet. I did note that Social Enterprise Ambassador Claudine Reid picked up a gong of some sort....links to follow soon.

- Should you tweet? A guide to Twitter for non-profits....I'll say no more

- Interesting piece on social entrepreneurship in Director magazine by Rebecca Harding.

- Winners of the Spark award programme were announced recently. it's a homeless / social enterprise combo, and delighted to spot a couple of SSE Fellows amongst the winners; congrats to Dave Miller's Bikeworks and Simon Fenton-Jones' StreetShine

- How ethical business was bought by big business: article in the Independent that's worth a read, if you didn't know that Cadbury own Green & Black's, and Unilever own Ben & Jerry's that is....

- The reason why, if I start up a charity / social enterprise, it will help dogs.....

- Edge Upstarts Awards shortlist announced

- Understanding social enterprise: for those of you who love the world / debate of definitions....

- How you can give with one-click (but please don't just do that)

- there've been some good podcasts at Social Innovation Conversations recently: if you've lost track of this site, it's worth a (re)visit. recent speakers include Paul Farmer and recent topics include the delightfully titled "Evaluation for Normal People"; given I head up our evaluation, I won't take that personally....

Lots more, but I'll catch up with that towards the end of the week. Hopefully more time to blog a more interesting post soon. In the meantime, check out the video from the Shine Unconference by Smarta (thanks Smarta):

A sad way to start the week

I was full of optimism coming to the office this morning: a beautiful sunny day, after a great, relaxing weekend, and a relatively light schedule this week to plough through work. So I came in early and trawled through the blogs, and ran across this post from Rod Schwartz:

A Tribute to Sarah Dodds

[NB: UPDATE: there is now a site set up to post tributes here and a memorial fund to donate to online]

Apparently, Sarah, who was UnLtd Ventures Director until very recently (she was set to move on to pastures new), was involved in a cycle accident last week. Sadly she died this weekend. I didn't know Sarah as well as Rod or some others, but she started work at UnLtd around the time I joined SSE, so our paths have crossed a lot over the past few years. As Rod details in his post, she was an exuberant, larger-than-life presence with a healthy irreverence; combined with a sharp brain, this led to plenty of interesting (and entertaining) conversations at events and conferences. It is always shocking to lose someone of a young age with so much ahead of them; so am a bit stunned by that this morning.

SSE's thoughts are with her family, friends and colleagues.

Thursday round-up: Sunlight, shares, scale, SROI

Quick round-up, as there seems to be lots coming in and lots of interest:

- Peter Holbrook has written a blog post about David Cameron launching the Tory green paper at Sunlight Development Trust, and has some interesting initial thoughts from a practitioner's point of view on its recommendations; more reaction on Bubb's blog (who's on rare form of late), here, and here.

- Paul Miller of School of Everything has written an interesting post about why their organisation is a company limited by shares and how they balance the need for start-up investment (in a silicon valley web2.0 type way) with a social mission at their heart....

- Fall-out from the ECT news continues; apparently the recycling arm is keeping its CIC structure, despite (or as well as?) being taken over by a private sector operator....will be interesting to see how that turns out. In the meantime, here's a piece in New Start about it all; as I mentioned previously, this can be seen as a positive as much as a negative, but I do think that the issue of scale is at the heart of it all

- On which subject (scale), some food for thought: The Fetishization of Scaling Up (Small is beautiful versus Big is essential....and local+local+local = global...) and a magazine/event called De-Growth

- The SROI-UK conference has spawned a network: SROI-UK is chaired by the evaluation legend Jeremy Nicholls, who we'll be doing some work with in mid-June

- DEFRA announced a big £4.6 million deal for the various third sector waste and recycling networks who have come together to form a new organisation, REconomy. Huge kudos to (former SSE Director of Learning) Matthew Thomson for masterminding the deal: word on the street is that the celebrations were substantial.....but well-deserved.

- Interesting article by Matthew Taylor of the RSA on the (independence of the) third sector and the need for accountability and transparency

- How to set up a refugee community organisation; consult this guide?

- And a brief final thought: Word of mouth is not created, it is co-created

Two big stories: ECT takeover + Tory Green paper

BREAKING NEWS. Oh yes. Two big stories, both with a 'green' slant.

The first is that the Tories have just released their green paper on what they would do to/with/for the third sector if they were in government.Launched at Sunlight Development Trust, It's the first salvo in what is intended to be a constructive and consultative dialogue between the party and the sector. I've only just downloaded it and am yet to digest (95 pages over lunch was beyond me), but our friends at Third Sector online have helpfully done so and come up with the 20 headline pledges.

Of particular relevance to this world:

"•    Creating a network of social enterprise zones to provide incentives for social investment in deprived communities

•    Setting up a Social Investment Bank as a wholesaler of 'patient capital' to a wide range of social investment institutions

•    Creating a powerful 'Office for Civil Society' at the heart of government to fight for the interests of charities, social enterprises, co-operatives and community groups"

Looks interesting, pretty well-thought through and pretty sector-friendly, even if a fair bit of it has been announced one way or another in the past. The OCS replacing the OTS would seem to indicate that NCVO's advocacy of 'civil society' as a concept has fallen on receptive ears. More soon after several tube commute reads.

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Second big story is that ECT Group, widely viewed and lauded as one of the leading social enterprises in the movement (and certainly one of the largest) has had the recycling part of its business taken over by May Gurney, a private firm. Their press release includes the following:

"ECT Recycling - part of the ECT Group with 1,100 employees - has been acquired by May Gurney, one of the UK’s most successful maintenance and support services companies and listed on the London stock market (AIM).

First and foremost, it’s ‘business as usual’ at ECT Recycling - the current strong management team will remain in place, led by Stephen Sears, and the focus will remain on delivering service quality for its customers and its customers’ customers – members of the public.

For some time, ECT Recycling had been exploring ways to secure its future and to build upon its successful business formula in delivering municipal waste services to local authorities.

Stephen Sears, who has led the development of ECT since 1980 said: “ECT has been looking for a partner for our recycling and waste management business with a good reputation in the local authority market place and with the commercial muscle to help us to secure bigger contracts. This will allow us to deliver our social and environmental objectives as well as the financial results that are essential to continued success." 

Which leaves the ECT Group back to its original core business: the CT of community transport, having sold its various other businesses (railways, health care etc.). A few questions fall out of this, of course. Not least that ECT Recycling was a CIC, so is this the first CIC to be taken over? (and how does that work re. asset lock etc.?) Is this a strategic move separating out the two businesses, or in response to more fundamental problems? And if ECT generally needed to find a bigger partner (with "more commercial muscle") to secure bigger contracts, what does that mean for procurement/commissioning for all the other third sector / social enterprises out there? (many of whom are significantly smaller).

New Start magazine rang me this morning to comment, and I kept it largely generic (because I don't know enough about ECT's business / governance etc; see q's above) but did say that we shouldn't overreact as a sector or movement. More of this will happen over the coming years, hopefully in both directions, as mainstream business is influenced as well as threatened by ethical and mission-led competitors.