The School for Social Entrepreneurs

New podcasts: leadership, social entrepreneurs and numbers

The benefits of having lost the argument over who should have the long commute with my wife is that I have plenty of time to catch up on podcasts and a bit of work-related listening on the way in (and back). Though the journey itself is routine, it also provides a chance to listen to things that are outside the normal sphere of work stuff, and stretch the brain a bit.

At the moment, there's a few programmes I'd heartily recommend:

1) Guardian Charity Effectiveness Podcast: this time on What makes a good leader? and withan excellent line-up including Debra Allcock-Tyler from DSC and James Partridge from Changing Faces (who is one of the most admired leaders here at SSE). And a bit of SSE representation from SSE Fellow Debbie Ariyo from AFRUCA, phoning in on the lack of diversity in leadership in the sector. All produced by another SSE Fellow Jude Habib's organisation SoundDelivery.  Plenty of nuggets here on leadership, challenges ahead in 2011, and keeping focus whilst retaining a long-term view.

2) Peter Day on Not for Profits: Peter Day is a genius, as far as I'm concerned, and have often mentioned his great podcasts about the world of business here before. This episode includes his recent appearance at the Good Deals conference a few weeks back, and looks at the recurring issue of scale. Does the non-profit sector need to become more like the market? Challenging and valuable listening.

3) More Or Less: There are, of course, geeks in the sector, many of whom are operating in the evaluation field (I was delighted to learn on a recent visit to New Philanthropy Capital that they had a feedback form after their Xmas party: that's devotion to the evaluative cause right there...). My own inner geek loves More Or Less, which is all about looking at the numbers behind the stories: this week it looked at the issue of student debt, and how much people would actually pay. The sanest, most reasoned take on that issue heard all month.

4) An interview with Matthew Taylor: Podcasting in the sector is rare, so also been enjoying this recent initiative from Social Investment Business; Matthew Taylor, Chief Exec of the RSA is a really interesting thinker on a lot of big current issues: Big Society, civil society, engagement + membership, citizen-centred social action, the power of networks and more. Very much worth 10 minutes of your time

Happy listening....

Social enterprise and entrepreneurship links from August

Lots to do, lots to read, lots more to do....

My last post-holiday round-up seemed to go down well, so thought I'd do the same for August as I did for July. No particular rationale, just stuff I've found interesting or think might be relevant. Hope it is. Enjoy:

- The big hairy article of the month was in the Economist (I assume by Matthew Bishop), titled "Social innovation: let's hear those ideas" which covers how the US and UK governments are seeking to encourage social innovation and social entrepreneurship. Also includes cogent round-up of Big Society agenda to date.

- If you're interested in working out what the hell is happening with Local Enterprise Partnerships (*entire readership switches blogs*), then this round-up is the best place STILL to do so.

- Some interesting stuff written about the Big Society. Dai Powell of HCT's ("The clock is ticking on the Big Society") and Geoff Mulgan of Young Foundation's ("Can the Big Society be more than a slogan?") stood out for me, along with Craig Dearden-Phillips call for a constructive, engaged response See http://del.icio.us/SSE/bigsociety for more

- Twenty by Twenty: twenty essays on future of social enterprise, charity et al by good (as well as big) names

- Great social media decision-making guide for social entrepreneurs / non-profits from US experts Idealware

- Good piece in the New York Times about a social entrepreneur (don't be put off by the title): What Exactly Is A Social Entrepreneur?

- Giving is no longer a government preserve: interesting piece in the Telegraph touching on social entrepreneurship + big society

- Amanda Jones of RedButtonDesign in Director magazine on the trials and tribulations of raising funding/investment as a social enterprise

- Nice (Canadian) round-up of summer reading for social entrepreneurs which of course you can buy in the SSE bookstore

- Social enterprise start-up: 3 lessons to learn....by Involver

- Worry isn't work: Don't be Anxious! wise words from Dan Pallotta in Harvard Business Review; now if I could just follow his advice...

- Happy tale of a women's social enterprise (minicabs for women only) struggling, thriving and becoming the subject of a BBC comedy show

- Ten tips on elevator pitches; I think the Brits aren't as good at this stuff (myself included); I think we do escalator pitches....so will try and read 5 lessons from 150 start-up pitches as well

- Merger advice for small and medium orgs + collaboration advice from Bassac and others....

- ....and, for balance, an argument on DSC against merger: Total efficiency is the enemy of freedom

- Pollgate: the results of the storm in our own particular UK #socent teacup; but gratifying nonetheless!

- Freeing the Social Entrepreneur: a piece in Stanford Social Innovation Review well worth reading, covering founder syndrome, leadership and much more

- Great video on the Homeless World Cup and its impact: warms the cockles and all that

- The Social Intrapreneur: a field guide for corporate changemakers.... ; well, those MBA-ers had to come up with something :0)

- Alex Nicholls says Social Entrepreneurship Is Growing Up on Dowser.org. Which I would heartily endorse. So I'll end with the good professor's words. Cheers:

”We're moving into a period of much more critical analysis of social entrepreneurship. We've ridden a wave of consensus; we're all hugging each other and patting ourselves on the back. There's been lots of money pouring into this and support from governments. I think all that's changing. We've had an economic calamity, governments are looking at austerity, foundations are pulling back, the media and others are getting more critical. I think we're going to have a critical decade for social entrepreneurship, and that's great. It's high time we looked at the stuff that's useful and does have impact and the stuff that has no impact at all, and I think we're going to have a big reality check. The hero-worshiping, self-congratulatory period's over. I don't see that as a challenge; I see it as a sign that we're growing up.”

Is a Social App Store just Toolkits 2.0?

I was inspired to write by the latest issue of Third Sector magazine this week. Not a sentence I've written too often, perhaps, (tend to rely on it for news, rather than inspiration...) but there were three thought-provoking pieces in the current issue.

The first was what is probably the best interview I've read with Nick Hurd, the Minister for Civil Society, on the Conservative approach to the sector. There are some good challenges  here for naysayers and cut-watchers alike, and a good summary 'progress report'.

The second was by John Kingston of Venturesome asking "How can we increase supply of capital to the third sector?' I'll cover that in a forthcoming post on Big Society Bank / social investment

And the third was a great challenge from Craig Dearden-Phillips to move away from just complaining politely about cuts (and doing so ever more loudly) and to think radically about how to react, survive, thrive and reconfigure in the current context. To be constructive about the Big Society agenda.

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To that end, I've been reading up on one initiative bubbling away in the affiliations of the Big Society Network: the concept of a Social App Store. David Wilcox, arch social reporter, suggested this as an idea and it has begun to be shaped and formed online by the contributions of others. His outline of it is here, and you can read the subsequent discussions here. The concept is summarised as follows:

It will aim to offer online users simple navigation to easy-to-use content and tools for social action - some free, some paid-for. It will offer developers of how-to materials for social action the opportunity to showcase their existing work, and work with others to develop new offerings. By creating a substantial market place it will provide developers with an incentive to develop or re-purpose materials in formats easy to use by those new to social action.

In principle, I like a lot about this: making ideas accessible, thinking radically about how we can scale up their take-up, a commitment to openness, the potential largeness of reach, democratising design / co-production, utilising new tech to connect, providing a real product (or even 'shopfront') to what big society is and means, financial transaction / trading element and so on. Much to build on and work with here.

My constructive questions or concerns are: is the language alienating (does it smack of metropolitan smart-phone-owning tech-savvy people etc)? Others, including David, have noted this already though, and suggested alternatives. More substantively, it is the communicated sense that this type of social action can be 'downloaded and installed' (to borrow the terminology) so simply. Implementation of such work is not one-click and instant, but, often, achieved with hard slog and determination over the long haul. And it is often challenging and difficult and messy. Where I can get up and running with an app or MySociety website cleanly and instantly, other social projects and tools need support, capacity, confidence and persistence to put into action.

The associated risk, therefore, is that this is just toolkits 2.0: everyone in this sector knows there is a toolkit or a resource for everything from community planning to social impact measurement, and also that creating the content after the project (because you wrote it in the bid) is often the easy bit. An online store of these won't change that. (see Richard's recent post on SE Toolbelt for a similar take). Materials, by definition, are only the substances out of which things are made.

So my suggestion is to think and proffer questions about what offline support might look like: who the store workers or shop assistants might be, and where they might be located. Are they voluntary, app-ointees, connected to existing local networks? Are they located in actual stores (as David Barrie suggests in his response in the group discussion)? Where are the learning loops or support networks for those 'downloading' from the store, and what might those look like? Or is there a phone hotline to talk through problems? (the equivalent of e-mailing the app developer?) Will there be any quality control or measurement of success (app-raisals?), or is it genuinely radical in its devolving of trust and, possibly, resource?

Much to ponder, but also much to build.

Will a new toolbelt help social entrepreneurs?

The SE Toolbelt is an online information platform aiming to provide social entrepreneurs with practical resources that have been developed by their peers. It boasts 1000 or so items of various shapes and sizes on its data base, and these are grouped broadly by business topics and sectors. From the School’s point of view, you can imagine an ideal scenario where someone with a fledgling project could find a precedent, capitalise on pre-existing market research and a functioning business model, and adapt them to a new enterprise. More developed organisations could research approaches to scaling best practice or SROI in a format that is, in principle, an extension of, or addition to, the peer learning process.

Thumbing through the available materials, however, I’m sceptical of the claim that SE Toolbelt “brings a grassroots practitioner perspective to the fore”. The site is a library of business school-esque articles on topics from Marketing and External Communications to Risk Management – interesting in themselves, but part of the top-down academic approach that the site is hoping to challenge. It is easier to see a way for a collection of case studies to find their way into the SSE programme, supplementing live witness sessions with further examples.

At the moment though, most studies are based in North America, or hot beds of social enterprise in the developing world, particularly India. There is relatively little based in, or coming from the UK, which means students will always be dealing with a different legal system, funding structure, cultural and social context etc. But this doesn’t stop entrepreneurs in the UK getting involved, and it may be that as the site grows it will become increasingly relevant. Like any online platform, Toolbelt will be useful if it’s used.

[Richard is currently interning with SSE, helping on a wide variety of projects. You can also follow @SEToolbelt on Twitter]

What are the policy and communications futures for social entrepreneurs?

My role at SSE is Policy and Communications Director, so in keeping with that, today a bit of policy, and a bit of comms.

First up, I contributed to the Society Guardian podcast (in association with KnowHowNonProfit which is well worth a look) and produced excellently by Sound Delivery, an organisation started by SSE Fellow Jude Habib. With Public Services editor David Brindle as host, I joined Stephen Bubb from ACEVO in the Guardian's impressive in-house studios, and we discussed the Big Society, the new influx of MPs with a charity background, and the renaming of the Office of the Third Sector to the Office of Civil Society. You can listen / download here for our thoughts on what's ahead.

Secondly, from a communications perspective, this slideset came across my radar from the ever-industrious Ben Matthews at Bright One. It's an initiative called Charity Comms 2020, and features great tips, advice and future thinking about how communications will change in the future for the sector. Jude pops up again here, along with a whole host of media experts and practitioners. Here's the set of slides:

CharityComms 2020

View more presentations from Ben Matthews.

General election charity podcast thing

Amongst an avalanche of swingometers and speeches, the general election could potentially be one of the most important in a generation for charity, social entrepreneurs and social enterprise. SSE has worked with many practitioners and other support organisations to develop the Social Entrepreneurs' Manifesto which has some specific calls of government to help social entrepreneurs have the most significant impact over the next decade or more. (and please add your ideas as well)

What are the key issues more generally, and what are the parties' policies and approaches? Worth checking out this new podcast from the Guardian that puts questions to the Tory, Labour and Lib Dem Third Sector Ministers / Shadow Ministers. Some good questions (including SSE), some decent responses, and also some more general and practical 'how do you effectively lobby and campaign' advice from experienced organisations. Well worth half an hour of your time, and hat-tip to SSE Fellow Jude Habib's Sound Delivery who help produce the podcasts.

Why the Social Entrepreneur Search is exciting...and worrying

The UK likes to position itself as a leader in social entrepreneurship, but in some areas I think we are way behind. Take the new Social Entrepreneur Search widgets in the US, which themselves come from the Social Entrepreneur API. For the non-geeks, an API is tech-speak for an 'application programming interface' which basically provides data or information that is open and available for others to use and do what they will with (as Social Actions put it, "The Social Entrepreneur API dataset is available for any website or individual to search, syndicate, republish, or use to build web applications, widgets, and search engines"). And so these new search widgets and engines have been developed from that data source.

On the one hand, this is tremendously exciting. It's open, collaborative, innovative, connective and potentially helps match social entrepreneurs to investors / funders / journalists / other entrepreneurs in a way that is currently not possible in the closed and more clunky UK equivalents. [I'd include our own online SSE Fellows database in the 'clunky' category, which is currently searchable by field, by geography and by keyword etc, but is not in this kind of shape...yet]. It also opens up the possibility of taking this information and publishing it or syndicating it anywhere: potentially enormously powerful. Kudos goes to Social Actions, Social Edge, and the funders who've both funded the work and contributed the data.

So why worrying? Because the data for these 'vetted' social entrepreneurs only comes from a relatively small range of funders who fund fairly big scale, 'successful' social entrepreneurs (Skoll Foundation, Schwab Foundation, Echoing Green etc). What concerns me about that is that, as with the main Ashoka Fellows programme, the resources and connections and profile are often being diverted to those who need it, in many cases, the least: those who are already credible, sizeable, recognisable and well networked enough to attract funds, gain support and expand their work. Is the risk not of funnelling more resource to the well-resourced, rather than tapping the under-resourced and under-networked into this opportunity?

Partly, of course, I acknowledge that's for us to sort out: if I want SSE Fellows (or UnLtd wants its awardees) to be part of this, then we will have to invest in getting our data sorted for the API, and make the case. And I had that discussion with Social Edge about UK sources. There is also the question, though, of whether these would be considered 'vetted' or credible enough for the project (who judges that?). And yet we know from experience that social entrepreneurs want to discover peers like them (or just ahead of them), not just 'stars' (indeed these extraordinary, unachievable role models can actually deter new entrants), and that funders are interested in new (riskier) innovations, not just credible and mature success stories. Nat Whittemore on Change.org reckons the API / search won't be a supply of much funding, but we also know that those who feature in research, journalism, blogs and profiles end up getting more support and resource in the long run.

Dan Elitzer at Full Contact Philanthropy thinks the widget is potentially damaging because it "promotes the damaging mythology of the social entrepreneur" (a point with some validity that I've answered in the comments on that post), but I think the greater potential damage could come from scaling and championing the few, instead of including, inspiring, resourcing and connecting the many.

Openness and transparency, at breakfast, lunch and dinner

I was trying to work out how to capture a few different bits of learning from the week and various different meetings, and thought I'd do so via the theme of openness...and three meals. 

1) First up, I met with David Gold and some of the Prospect-us team over dinner to discuss how to use social media effectively. Prospect-us are a third sector recruitment agency, and, alongside being their CEO, David is also a knowledgeable and supportive champion of SSE (and many SSE Fellows). It was great to meet some of his senior team and share our experience of using social media to achieve SSE's communication aims. Indeed, much of the conversation was about twitter, blogs, facebook, linkedin and the like being means to an end, not an end in themselves (something I made clear in my contribution to the excellent Social by Social guide), and the need to cut through the noise + measure impact / success.

Openness was also central to the conversation: how it was refreshing to be honest and transparent (which builds trust, which builds credibility); how it was about internal organisational culture, not just external web activity; about the limits of openness (i.e. how open and honest can you be on an organisational blog: needless to say, I have blogged about this...); and about the line between personal and organisational on web 2.0. Fascinating couple of hours for me (to reflect, and strategize retrospectively!), and hopefully for David and the team too.

2) Secondly, lunch at the Ideas Exchange run by Gordon D'Silva over at Training For Life. Whilst attracted by lunch at the great Hoxton Apprentice, of course, it was the content of the debate that was of more interest. Gordon is committed to sharing and openness and had invited people to learn from some of Training For Life's experiences over the last couple of years. As he said, to learn from the good and the bad; I'd agree with his acknowledgement that this sector is not always very good at sharing its mistakes and challenges as much as its success. This is natural, to a degree, but (as we see on SSE programmes day in day out), learning comes from doing things, getting things wrong, and learning from them. Kudos to Gordon both for sharing, and for challenging others to be open and share. And, actually, though counter-intuitive, sharing the reality of challenges doesn't necessarily impair an organisation's standing. In many cases, as mentioned above, it can build greater trust and greater credibility.

3) Finally (and we are going in reverse meal order), I attended a Social Innovator breakfast at NESTA where the Young Foundation were launching their newest publication and companion website: the Open Book of Social Innovation and www.socialinnovator.info As the name would suggest, this is a book of social innovation: of the processes, connections and methods by which social innovation is achieved. A superb piece of work, filled not only with great case studies and innovations from across the world, but also with insights into how successful social innovation is instigated, replicated and implemented. Whilst some of the speakers present at the breakfast were seemingly congenitally unable to stick to anything like their allotted time, Sophi Tranchell brought a welcome clarity and concision to proceedings, and urged those present not to be 'thinkers' but be 'doers' and find ways to implement and put ideas into practice.

Much food for thought (if you excuse the pun) from all three meals, and no doubt more to follow as I process and digest (!) it all. For me, transparency and openness is so important for social entrepreneurs (see the Transparency of Social Entrepreneurs), and for all new aspiring businesses, that it holds great interest and great relevance.

First ever Australian SSE cohort graduates in Sydney

Hot on the heels of the first ever Cornwall graduation, the first Australian SSE Fellows have completed their programme in Sydney. Huge congratulations to all of them. You can see their projects + organisations here, and you can read the kind words of the Minister for Social Inclusion + Voluntary Sector, Ursula Stephens here. Top quote from that was:

"Tonight our graduating social entrepreneurs have become fellows of the global School for Social Entrepreneurs network, which comes with enormous responsibility – responsibility beyond your individual business interests. A responsibility to share the knowledge your have learned with others, to support each other and to maintain a network with your fellow graduates where you can keep the passionate fire of creativity burning.

I have little doubt that your time at School for Social Entrepreneurs Australia has equipped you with the ability to make an even greater contribution to your local community and beyond.

I would like to commend you for the tenacity, entrepreneurial drive and commitment reflected in all your inspiring projects, and wish you the best for the future."

As ever, though, images and pictures speak louder than words, so here is a video featuring some of these pioneering social entrepreneurs. Congratulations again from all of us over here to all of you over there!

Social media (twitter) tactics for social entrepreneurs

Not claiming I had anything to do with this. Kudos to Chad Norman at Blackbaud for what is a great slideshow of social media tactics (and tools) that non-profit organisations, or mission-driven organisations, can use. If you're wondering why/how twitter, facebook et al could be important and how to start, here you go.

50 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits

View more presentations from Chad Norman.