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.

I’m proud to tell you all that our fiscal sponsor is GivingNet , formerly known as the Community Foundations of America. We were able to transform a chance meeting with a GivingNet manager, Doug Yeager, over at the Salesforce.com Nonprofit Roadmap Summit into our fiscal sponsorship. Carla Dearing, the President and CEO, and Caroline Heine, Chief Operating Officer, has been instrumental in helping us get socialmarkets off the ground because they’re not just our fiscal sponsor but they’re handling our back-end operations as well. What is amazing isn’t that GivingNet is our fiscal sponsor, but that socialmarkets so clearly fits into their strategy . Sometimes, I’m in awe of the kismet of it all.

And even more good news, Tate Hausman of the Integration Proclamation, is now our landlord. As of September 1st, we’ll be in our new office over at 18 West 27th Street in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. Yup, we’re getting less and less virtual as time goes on. We’ve got ledgers, desks and what not going on. And it means that I won’t to have to be in what passes for my computer office here at my home. Who knew that the prospect of air conditioning could be so sweet?