socially marketing

There are lots of folks who aren’t excited about social capital in general, but even within the socap community, social currency can be a hard sell.  I think some of this resistance would go away with a better understanding what “currency” is.

In its most basic form, currency is simply a mechanism for capturing value.  So in theory, if you accept that the social sector creates value, it’s not a far stretch to accept a currency that captures it.

Currency is tightly associated with money, because that is the implementation we are most familiar with.  However, the SROI socialmarkets promotes is only one of many variations on the currency theme.

The city of Ithaca, New York (my home as an undergrad) has been using their own currency for years now.  That currency is denominated in HOURS, based on the value of one hour of work, and used to supplement or even replace dollars by hundreds of local businesses and thousands of local residents.  HOURS is that community’s own creation, and they are rightfully proud of it.

Like any currency that is not directly backed by a “hard” commodity such as gold (including, since 1971, the U.S. dollar) HOURS and SROI are really just collective acts of faith.  There is nothing tangible behind these currencies or the economies they empower, which helps explain why dollar bills are inscribed with “In God We Trust” and HOURS bills with “In Ithaca We Trust”.  SROI bills don’t exist (yet), but the inscription I would recommend for them is “In Us We Trust”.

SROI is as real as we want to make it.  We may never be able to accurately capture the social benefit of reducing greenhouse gases, immunizing children or feeding the hungry… but carbon credits, health care savings and calorie counts are valid and accessible pieces of their respective puzzles.

Happily, SROI is more nuanced than the relatively small set of credible outcomes data currently available.  If value is ultimately what we collectively think it is, then capturing our collective thoughts is the ultimate path to SROI.  The most significant outcome of the socialmarkets experiment would be to make that happen - to provide a platform from which our collective wisdom can define social currency.

Our initial denomination of SROI is dollars, but this is mostly a matter of convenience.  Money is a great simplifier.  It helps make SROI more comprehensible even while it vastly underestimates its complexity.  We will iteratively incorporate more and more of that complexity, and even if we can’t always be correct, we can be consistent.

There is currency in social capital, and working as a community, we can make it flow.