socially marketing

You are not a bona fide non-profit in this country until the IRS says so with 501(c)3 certification… and we just got ours!  Previously we were partnered with a fiscal sponsor (our old friends at GivingNet) but that was a stop-gap measure until obtaining non-profit status on our own.

There are several advantages to being a non-profit, some more obvious than others.  The most well-known advantage is the ability to accept tax-deductable donations.  In a similar vein, there are discounts made available to non-profits to help lower their operational expenses.  While we are happy to be able to take advantage of such benefits, non-profit status means much more to socialmarkets.

We are serious advocates for increased transparency in the entire social sector, within which non-profits are an ideal place to start.  Leading by example is a great way to demonstrate this advocacy.  Aside from mandatory transparency measures such as the Form 990 the government requires each year, socialmarkets itself is a useful platform for increasing both transparency and accountability.

If we are going to walk our talk, then socialmarkets needs to be listed on socialmarkets.  Like any other non-profit claiming to be worthy of funding, socialmarkets should present its mission, programs, and expected outcomes… as well as the social returns (SROI) related to those outcomes.

Our hope is that our own work, along with the collective input of the socialmarkets community, will ultimately reveal tremendous social return on investment in the socialmarkets enterprise itself.  But no matter what the outcome is, we know that defining and measuring that return is a tremendously valuable exercise.

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.

Jeff and I took a quick trip to Louisville, Kentucky this week to look for a fiscal sponsor for socialmarkets.org. I think we've got one but we'll make an "official" announcement about that later this week. Check out some of the pics I took of the two of us going through Louisville. After all the business was taken care of, Jeff and I visited the Speed Art Museum . It's the biggest art museum in Kentucky and it's an excellent one. I highly recommend seeing it if you happen to be in Louisville.