Will the private sector discredit or absorb social enterprise?

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These (discredit / absorb) are two opinions of the private sector: social enterprise relationship I’ve read recently.

The first was from Cliff Prior, CEO of UnLtd, who was reported (in this Third Sector article) as making the point that "social enterprises are in danger of being discredited by private sector imitators" (aka profit-making businesses adopting a social enterprise model). Nigel Kershaw (of Big Issue Invest) rebutted this with "if you are transforming society, it doesn’t matter what you are".

The second was from Julia Meek on Catalyst’s Social Business Blog (Social Businesses: Victims of their own success?). In this post, she discusses the trend for mainstream businesses to adopt the approaches of social businesses, and then adopt them wholesale at a much bigger scale. Or, as Julia puts it:

"These supermarkets, electricity suppliers, market leaders and others
have been able to watch the market and let social businesses prove the
effectiveness of their various approaches. On observing a successful
one the companies have been able to leverage their infrastructure,
human capital, market positioning etc. to adopt it quickly themselves,
marketing ’social’ products and services to the same target audience
and at a lower price than can feasibly be offered by smaller, social
businesses."

This is partly a conversation about scale: can social businesses ever break the ‘ethical glass ceiling’, as Julia’s colleague puts it, and get the necessary investment to compete on more equal terms with the big boys? Does it mean that the best way for social businesses to make change is to pioneer/prove and hope for adaptation by the mainstream? (an approach often seen in the public sector and web 2.0 alike). She then posits 4 potential approaches, around quality, brand, partnerships and acquisitions. Well worth reading.

On the first, I partly agree with Cliff, in that just adopting a model / particular legal structure proves nothing, and this is a problem. This is as true for PCT’s hiving half of themselves off into a CIC (excuse acronym-itis) and then commissioning that ‘new’ half, as it is true for the private sector. Unless the primary mission of an organisation is a social one and the initiative is driven by a social entrepreneur / team of socially entrepreneurial leaders, then its motivation can always be called into question. But we see social entrepreneurs operating across all sectors, and that is where I agree with Nigel: ultimately, moving forward, there will be this increasing blurring of boundaries, and what will matter, as I’ve posted before, is:

– the quality of the work/activity/product
(reputation / measurement / evaluation / provenance etc)
– how well this is communicated
(brand / voice / connections to stakeholders etc)
– the transparency with which the organisation operates
(mission / finances / governance etc)

Regardless of the legal structure chosen, these will be key things for all organisations operating across this field; from enterprising charities through to socially-responsible companies.

It’s interesting to relate the second post to the ‘six practices of high-impact non-profits’ (which I mentioned here), in that one of those practices was to ‘serve and advocate’. If the pioneering role of social business in getting ethical / fair / green / social practices adopted by the mainstream is seen through this lens of advocacy, then maybe that helps place it in a slightly different context. Also, as I am bound to say in this context, the assumption is also there that social enterprises and the like want to scale up. As the Small Business Blog posted the other day, "69 percent of small business owners said that they prefer to have their business remain small.” If that is true in the private sector, surely the same can be said of the third sector / social enterprise movement as well? (If not more so, as ‘small and beautiful’ is a mantra to some).

And surely the movement should be proud to be influencing and changing the mainstream in the way that it has: how satisfying, however imperfectly done, to see big supermarkets pushing fairtrade coffee, to see Fiji water pushing its carbon neutrality, to see M&S put out its Plan A…none of which would have been achieved without hundreds of activists, campaigners and social entrepreneurs, and none of which we could have said even one, two, three years ago. Where we are strongest is in demonstrating, through quality practice and delivery, that things can be done differently….and that they are better done that way.

Innovation triptych: Exchange, Awards, Habits

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1) One of the side benefits of working at SSE is that you get invited to be involved in some interesting projects, discussions and (potentially) partnerships. A lot of recent chatter has been around innovation, as we’ve tracked over some time in various posts (see the Social Innovation post archives), and SSE finds itself in the unusual position of being involved in two ‘innovation exchanges’; one, the Social Innovation Exchange, is a global initiative powered by the Young Foundation (website currently under re-construction, but sign up here in the interim) which aims to collect, connect, network and disseminate social innovations, innovators and innovating organisations.

The other, on which I’m also a guest blogger, is a government-funded Innovation Exchange, run by the Innovation Unit, Headshift and ACEVO. Its approach involves offline and online networks (involving the supply and demand side, and the investors…) and a programme to support fledgling innovative projects on particular themes. [Read a much more coherent explanation on the site]. One of these is ‘Excluded Young People’ and I’ve been blogging a bit about that (see my posts here; log in required; excuse dreadful photo) and drawing on the work of SSE students and Fellows. The site is starting to get going, and is worth checking out.

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2) At a slight tangent, SSE was also judging the CAF Companies and Communities Awards the other week, in the Innovation category (there’s the link). The discussions with my fellow judges were interesting, particularly as we wrestled with ‘innovation’ in this context (not novelty, as is sometimes the case) and how much emphasis should be placed on track record and impact measurement in comparison. What is certain is that there is much significant activity going on in this area, where private meets non-profit, and that it goes far beyond ‘charity of the year’ or ‘greenwash‘ CSR. The shortlist demonstrated that genuine, long-term partnerships can make a big difference to both parties.

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3) Finally, I stumbled across a post today about the seven habits of highly innovative people, and was struck how many of them apply equally to (social) entrepreneurs….So, if you’re persistent, uninhibited, risk-taking, like to escape, write things down, find patterns (and create combinations), and curious, you tick all the boxes. Or think outside them.

Death by PowerPoint

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I was at a conference a while back where I sat through so many dreadful PowerPoint presentations, that I considered setting up a PowerPoint training social enterprise on the side. Not that mine are paragons of presentational virtue, but these were the lowest of the low. My recipe for death by powerpoint is achieved as follows:

– give out a handout of your presentation at the start (so everyone reads it before you start)
– include lots of text on every slide (so people read it and don’t listen to you…unless they’re still reading the handout)
– read the text out word for word (the text that the audience have just read on the handout and/or on the slide before you started speaking)

Then stir in some additional ingredients (sound effects, animations, unreadable fonts, background images) and leave to simmer for absolutely ages….as the person has not rehearsed and has no idea that they won’t be able to do 54 slides in 30 minutes.

Ok, rant over. But presentations are an important part of social entrepreneurs’ work these days (indeed, lots of people’s…), and it’s worth addressing this. Powerpoint is not a teleprompter or a data dump (or a support mechanism for you being nervous), but a means to an end: to allow you to communicate and, yes, sell what you do with passion. If it’s getting in the way of you communicating, engaging, involving, enthusing, attracting attention for you/your organisation, then you shouldn’t use it (or start to use it differently). Many of the most powerful presentations at SSE graduation events have been by those who simply spoke without any slides, and, despite advice to the contrary, the less successful ones often use more features of PowerPoint than I knew existed. [for those present, the one that machine-gunned the letters across the slide will remain with them forever]

If you have written on the slide the words you want to say out loud, you can probably remove them and replace with a one word heading. If you haven’t thought about how it’s structured (and how it looks to someone from the outside), then you need to. If you haven’t rehearsed it, it almost certainly will take longer than you think it currently does. If you’ve used all the colours of the rainbow (my personal weakness), you should pick 2 or 3 and stick to them. If you love ClipArt, get over it and use some proper photos. If you love bullet points (another personal weakness), go "beyond bullets". If you love "those curly fonts", change them to Arial or Helvetica or something readable from a distance.

There’s a bunch of resources on how to avoid "evil" or "really bad" powerpoints (people get quite passionate about this stuff) in the SSE bookmarks / current reading. Feel free to send in your own, and any horror stories to share in the comments….

This presentation, by contrast, is absolute genius:

HAPPY SOCIAL ENTERPRISE DAY

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And so, it came to pass. Happy Social Enterprise Day everyone. There’s a whole load of things happening today, as I wrote at the start of the week. Couple more links to add about the Youth Commission for Social Entrepreneurs launching today, and this survey from SEC about how the public views social enterprise services. They are on a bus today travelling around to various places, handing out chocolate and coffee as they go: get moving with social enterprise, people.

See more here and here and here as well….and here and here (I could go on).

SSE is hosting an event with Stan Thekaekara today, as well as doing various talks and attending various events throughout (I believe our CEO may be hitching a ride on the social enterprise bus for part of the day).

The SSE blog, meanwhile, is spending the day interviewing the first potential Ashoka Fellows in the UK. Which is exciting, interesting and exhausting…and appropriate activity for the day.

Breakfast with Cameron on localism

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SSE attended a breakfast event this morning organised by its ever-active landlords the Young Foundation here in wintry Bethnal Green. This blog doesn’t really function till its second cup of coffee but made the effort to hear David Cameron speak about local entrepreneurship and accountability.

Geoff Mulgan of YF introduced by describing Bethnal Green as "one of the most rich and fertile places on earth" and mentioned several Michael Young-inspired initiatives, including "schools for social entrepreneurs". That’s us, folks. He also noted in passing that, whereas most politicians are boosted by an election, David Cameron is one of the select few to be boosted by a non-election….He was followed by Sheikh Aliur Rahman of the Davenant Centre, who gave his reflections on the local area, and their programme working with young people, Future Leaders.

Cameron started off by saying that Michael Young stood for "enterprise for social progress" and that he was "an institution builder", and that institutions help "formalise relationships for social purpose". This point he linked to his recent promotion of co-operative schools (dynamic, democratic structures to complement more commercial alternatives). He then moved on to more familiar territory: how the centralist state should be dismantled and abandoned, because our culture has changed: we are moving, he said, "into the post-bureaucratic age", with technology (eg Google Earth) liberating us and giving us power over our own lives.

This he related to democracy + local action, and how he wanted to "open up democracy" and see "customised solutions to local problems" and an "invigoration of local democracy". He made the interesting point that "local control works nationally" because "diversity strengthens the whole". Or, for you Latin scholars out there, ‘e pluribus unum’. What this boiled down to in practice was deregulation and greater powers for local government (re. schools, hospitals, police etc.). He also raised the prospect of doing away with various quangos (Learning and Skills Council, RDAs, Housing Corporation etc) to devolve their powers locally.

Then came the new initiative: the "democratisation of council tax", which involves doing away with capping and instead allowing a referendum if local councils want to impose large increases. Though some might think this would involve more bureaucracy / admin rather than less, this is intended to improve accountability and devolve power to people at the grassroots. (see here for more).

The theme of devolution was key: he referred to "triple devolution", a concept we’ve bandied around and discussed here previously, which means devolving power beyond councils to other local, community-led institutions and organisations. This is something SSE is in favour of: that "empowering" local people should mean "giving them power", which means devolving money to them and the organisations they lead and run.

What was missing from David Cameron, if anything, was the practical ways in which this would happen. As he himself said, a culture change is needed at local government level to trust third sector organisations and bottom-up innovation. But when questioned on this (by, for example, London Civic Forum, BASSAC and DTA, who were all in attendance), he could only say that we "need trust in the third sector from local government" and that they needed to be "encouraged" and that the "Compact hadn’t really worked". There was little practically to try and create that culture change, which, in many people’s experience in this field, means that triple devolution is more likely to stop at local government level and not find its way further down: a problem that will become of acute importance if even more considerable powers are devolved to councils.

So, whilst welcoming the overarching vision (his call for a "flowering of local organisations beyond local councils" very much fits with SSE’s long tail, for example), it would be interesting to know what practical steps and policies the Conservatives would employ to ensure this triple devolution, this true empowerment, takes place in the future.