socially marketing

I’m going to try to answer the question in the headline today as part of a deal I struck with Britt Bravo. Britt is serving as an alpha tester for socialmarkets and in return, I’m writing this post for the Net2 blog. Frankly, I’m not comfortable with this question because I’ve almost always hesitated to give people fundraising advice. So… take my advice with a grain of salt. Be aware my advice is really useful only to the very small nonprofit and not some humongous one like Red Cross. I’m going to put on my Executive Director hat now and tell you how I use it for socialmarkets. To tell you the truth, I don’t really use the “Social Web” if you define it solely in terms of Facebook or change.org. I don’t even use Causes on Facebook.

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If you’re interested in a career in social finance… The Forex Blog has a great list of educational opportunities for you. 

Jeff and I believe that socialmarkets would write an entirely new chapter in the world of social finance, linking market-like activity to the work that nonprofits will allow for the creation of new data that social financiers can pore over and discuss. It might even lead someday to the creation of a branch of financial engineering devoted only to nonprofits, sociofinancial engineering anyone? There’s no doubt that if we can create a large historical database for analysis we can tie outputs to outcomes to market activity to expected returns. There’s got to be a PhD thesis in there somewhere, right?

Well, we’re entirely open in helping researchers go over our data in the long run and in building our database for the needs of researchers. Help us start the virtuous cycle of research and data collection, e-mail allan@socialmarkets.org.