socially marketing

The social capital driving socialmarkets and similar agencies is only as real as you make it. It is not hard to sell the idea of value in educating our youth, housing our homeless or cleaning up our environment, but it is not easy to translate that value into concrete terms.

The concepts and even the vocabulary we use to describe social capital is largely borrowed from “real” capital markets, which makes the translation easier. This suggests an accounting system that mirrors, but is separate from the ledgers that define the bottom line at all but the most avant-garde organizations.

I don’t know if we will ever see (or even need to see) this separation disappear entirely, but I do know that less of it is more better - and that the winds of change are blowing in that direction. Carla Dearing (disclosure note: she is CEO of our fiscal sponsor GivingNet) talks about this on PhilanthroMedia.org, which in turn references this recent Fortune article on how the carbon trading market is helping farmers literally turn manure into money.

Carbon trading is perhaps my favourite example of the ‘new accounting’, where the scope of the bottom line is growing. Not long ago it would have been downright silly to include greenhouse gas emissions in your business plan, let alone on your balance sheet. Now, an increasingly viable carbon trading market has turned silly into savvy, and is drawing in participants from the public, private and nonprofit sectors.

This leap from social to “real” capital is just the tip of the iceberg, and arguably an arbitrary tip at that. Increasing alarm about global warming combined with an increasingly desperate search for new energy sources and myriad other factors to make carbon trading a reality.

But every social ill and issue has its own unique DNA, and is potentially just waiting for the perfect storm of political, social and economic trends to take them off the back burner. I can’t wait to see what market response is induced from a perceived crisis of illiteracy, homelessness or similarly sticky social problem.

The idea of applying market savvy to the social sector is still a pretty young one, but is growing up fast. We can now see social entrepreneurship, one of the more enduring labels attached to this idea, becoming institutionalized - for example, in our institutions of higher learning.

The Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation is sponsoring a Program in Social Entrepreneurship, which they define (rather nicely I think) as

“a form of public leadership that maximizes the social return on public service efforts while fundamentally and permanently changing the way problems are addressed on a global scale.”

Reynolds offers full scholarship and other support to the most promising future social entrepreneurs it can find at the two universities it endows: The Kennedy School at Harvard University, and The Wagner School of Public Service at NYU.

I know a good deal about this program, since I am a proud and active alum of Wagner myself, and was pleased to serve as a judge for selecting the 2008 Reynolds fellows earlier this month.

This was a tough gig - largely because by the time we judges came along, the huge number of applicants was whittled down to the most promising four score or so. Such pre-screening guaranteed that pretty much all the candidates we saw demonstrated a clear vision of their future as social entrepreneurs, on top of a history demonstrating their clear ability to walk their talk.

I see a trend, and I like it. In just a few short years, social entrepreneurship has migrated from the fringes of social science to its very core. As a result, some of our most promising young minds are incorporating its ideals into their own plans for their place in the world - and from what I’ve seen of those minds, the world will be the better for it.

Back to the harsh reality of limited resources, only a few of the candidates I saw made the final cut to become Reynolds Fellows. This is of course sad, but there is this consolation: who better than these budding social entrepreneurs to tackle this classic problem of too many worthy social causes and not enough money to support them?