So what does socialmarkets.org look like anyway?
Click on the image above to get a better view. What you’re seeing is our front page wireframe. I’ve removed all the colors for clarity. These features are not necessarily going to be what you see in our alpha release. </p>
June 12th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Allen and Jeff,
Excellent conversation last week. Yes, I had fun visiting the *Old Country.
Yummy yoghurt at Yonah Shimmel. http://www.knishery.com/main.htm
If you haven’t already, take a look at a McKinsey article, Measuring what matters in nonprofits.
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_abstract.aspx?ar=1053
While impact or outcomes are the key metric, looking at activities provides insight. “Do they have a shot at reaching the goal?”
Wanting to learn more about the way you conceptualize SROI I found these:
http://www.redf.org/publications-sroi.htm
I suggest adding this to your links.
I’ve put you in my RSS reader to keep tabs on you.
Catherine
Catherine Carey
Evaluator
Practical Research
July 12th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
Thank you for your kind words and… you’re our first poster! Surely, something for the record books, no?
I haven’t read the McKinsey article but will do so now. However, I’ve got a telephone call with one of the three people who wrote the original SROI paper at REDF. I’m very excited about it. I figure talking to the original source should be a lot more fun than just reading the paper!
July 13th, 2007 at 1:45 am
Its looking good. How long till its up?
I think that the best thing abou this idea is that it levels the playing field between the Big Boys who can buy TV slots, and the local, start ups who have the energy and the good ideas.
Couple of points:
1: SROI is one measure to use, but gives only a partial picture and is open to manipulation by not-for-profits with decades of experience pulling outcomes out of the hat for funders. I’d also include quality measures, like having tick boxes whether user-engagement, quality management systems, and such things are in place.
2: You’re probably thinking of this already, but have it very much project oriented, so one organisation can list half a dozen projects, and then once funded, reports on those projects to the donors. Linking NFP (not-for-profit) with lender would be a great way to make lenders really FEEL the benefits they are achieving.
3. Carrying on from 2, this creates real accountability, that will be a great incentive for NFPs to do what they say they are going to do. (like in the financial markets) Currently, projects often disappear once they have been funded, but no one asks too many questions!
4. This is an idea of mine to deal with the chicken-and-egg problem that sites like this often have. You’ll only get buy from NFPs for this (doing the work on Lender Relationship Management and calculating SROI) if there is a good flow of cash, and you’ll only get a good flow of cash if there are NFPs willing to put effort into it. When we are talking good flow of cash, probably a couple of million or so would initially do it. You would definitely have NFPs flocking if there was that sort of money up for grabs by the best project.
Now how do you get a couple of million?
Hook into a corporation’s Social Responsibility Programme. Currently they give a couple of million to either Breast Cancer Awareness (yawn) or to that community thing the bosses’s daughter was involved in last year.
What you tell them, is that you have the infrastructure to enable their customers, individually, to have a say in which local causes get funded. That way, Mega Corp gets much greater credit for the work because it stops being abstract in the minds of customers. Customers log on to you (probably through a corporate portal) and votes for one of the programmes. At the end of the month, the two million gets divided proportionately according to votes. Genius eh?
Initially, to get an attractive selection of NFPs, it would probably be worthwhile doing some good old traditional real-world leg work, and recruiting some attractive local NFPs, and helping them put together some good projects. That would be a bit like consultancy (that you could probably sell to them once your honey pot got nice and fat)
So there you have it. That’s how you could drive your traffic. I’m giving away all my best ideas (I was planning on doing something like this) but I’m a NFP manager and not a web guy, so I feel like you’ve saved me the trouble!
Talking of driving traffic: If this works for Corporate customers bases, then it will also work for any membership based organisation. You can put your database inside the front page of churches, schools, sportsclubs. They all raise money, why don’t they use you to decide how its divided up????
OK, now you have my thoughts. Can you do me a favour? I would like to make this go live in Melbourne, Australia. I have some contacts with a group of major city corporations who want to re-vamp their corporate social responsiblity programmes, and this would go down sweet. What do you reckon?
July 13th, 2007 at 7:51 am
Thanks for your enthusiastic reply!
However, I’m not sure you want to put personal information up on the site. If you don’t mind, I can delete that info for you. I’ll keep it in my address book though.
You’ve pretty much outlined many of my thoughts about how to market socialmarkets to both nonprofits and corporations. However, that’s only one angle. There are many many more possible revenue streams that we have yet to discuss on this site only because we’re still preparing other documentation for you all. You’ve also targeted major opportunities for us and yes, we have thought about them A LOT. However, we want to ensure that a quality product rolls out before we sell it to people. The worst thing that could happen to us is to be called vaporware. Having a great product right now is of higher priority than marketing although you can certainly say that what this website is about is relationship marketing a la Seth Godin.
We are doing the legwork to get good NFPs but I don’t believe that we have to get them to sign off a tick box about their quality procedures. Unfortunately, there’s no ISO 9000 quality control regime for nonprofits and until we have some set standards internally within the sector it’s not a good idea to impose onerous requirements. We’re always trying to strike a fine balance between accountability and letting nonprofits make good decisions for themselves. After all, nonprofits are the people on the ground actually doing the service and we don’t want to get in their way unless we absolutely have to.
And yes, the whole point of socialmarkets is to get case listings or projects from nonprofits so that they can post many if not all of their work on the Web. It would be an indicator of much success to have thousands of cases or projects up on the site.
If you’re REALLY interested in a socialmarkets for Australia, then e-mail me at allan@socialmarkets.org.
July 13th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Can you take my personal details down?
Also, that email address doesn’t seem to work for me?