socially marketing

It’s a fair question: why bother with socialmarkets when you can donate directly to the non-profits you like?

We can think of lots of reasons (of course!) but have narrowed the field down to this top 5 - hopefully one or more of them speaks to you:

1.  Because socialmarkets is a better way to give… and receive.
One of the foundations of socialmarkets is the belief that more informed investors make better investment decisions.   When it comes to donations, socialmarkets offers information about your options that you will not find anywhere else.  Our input on where you can get the most “bang for your buck” can help you realize the greatest possible social impact.

socialmarkets works on the other side of the donation transaction too: at non-profits.  For starters, our social returns (SROIs) and user inputs offer potentially useful insights to non-profit managers too.  In addition, we help level the playing field, because visibility on our site is the reward for good social returns - irrespective of an organization’s size or marketing budget.

2.  Because socialmarkets is an interesting experiment.
socialmarkets is venturing into new territory in the field of charitable giving.  We are bringing social capital, outcomes measurement and crowd-sourcing together on the virtually limitless scale of the internet.  We believe the results will be exciting.

Our users are an integral part of the experiment.  Aside from being a source of donation dollars, our users are a critical source of data in the valuation of our project listings.  User input on the outcomes they feel are most important directly affects our SROIs.  The more user input we have, the more credible our SROIs become, as a reflection of the true social value of non-profit work.

3. Because socialmarkets is a critical piece of the social capital  model.

Social capital is not just different than ‘regular’ (financial) capital - it’s better.  It includes finance, but also the other dimensions of life that have value.  Good health, clean air, personal happiness… there is a long list of things in our lives that bring us more wealth than any bank balance can.

socialmarkets is a critical piece of this model.  By focusing on the value of non-profit work, socialmarkets promotes the social sector, and raises the visibility of the formerly fuzzy social capital it creates.  Ultimately, we can help bridge the gap between rich and poor, by any metric of wealth.

4.   Because socialmarkets is fun.
Social investment is serious business, but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be fun.  Our rate-o-matic was designed to be an instructive and entertaining way to gather your input on social values.  We encourage our users to engage with us and each other, on socialmarkets and on social networks like Facebook.

We also encourage our users to track their own portfolios of social returns (SROIs), and to get into the spirit of competition that lands the top social investors on our leaderboard.

5.  Because socialmarkets doesn’t cost you anything.
Finally, you can enjoy all these benefits without cost.  We don’t charge donors or non-profits to participate on our site.  We certainly welcome your financial support, either by funding our own socialmarkets listing, or by an optional commission when you fund others.  However, socialmarkets’ funding model is built on the honor system.  We are counting on enough users seeing enough value in what we do, to offer enough voluntary support to keep us going.  In this way, we are being the trust and transparency we want to see.

A recent post thread at Tactical Philanthropy on the topic of measuring nonprofit effectiveness caught my attention. It discusses the issues related to recent (and possibly over-enthusiastic) efforts to apply scientific measurement techniques to help evaluate the work of nonprofits. I could not resisting throwing in my $0.02, which is reproduced below (and can also be found in the originating post here):

It seems to me a recurring theme of the ‘metrics mania’ debate is that it involves both art and science. If the ‘art’ position is that non-profit value defies objective analysis, and the ’science’ is that non-profit worth can be reduced to equations of input and output, I expect I’m somewhere in the middle.

This is surprising, since in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I am co-founder of socialmarkets.org, where donors “invest” in nonprofit projects based on their SROI (Social Return On Investment.) This sounds like pretty hard science, but there is actually quite a lot of room for art to soften the edges.

The stock market analogy already seen in this thread is spot on. Apple’s stock price is influenced rather than defined by the financial science that slices and dices its cash flows. The beauty of a market is the marvelous job it does boiling down a large, complex set of valuation inputs into a single output called “price”. This number is useful on both an absolute scale and relative to other offerings in the market.

In a testament to the wisdom (or lunacy) of crowds, Apple’s stock price reflects the collective opinion of financial analysts, status-conscious teens and everyone in between. The potential to harness the same power to “price” The Red Cross or your local community foundation seems both possible and useful to me.

There are plenty of donors looking for a “best-bang-for-the-buck” (i.e. maximum SROI) approach to non-profit investment, and right now there is not much useful data out there for them. The success of sites like Charity Navigator are a testament to the need for metrics, but they only tell potential donors about what nonprofits spend, rather than what they accomplish. Surely we can do better than that.

Those with a less scientific approach may not find metrics like SROI as compelling, but still potentially useful. Consider Albert Ruesga’s story of the high-risk, low-return homelessness project that he presents as an argument against metrics. This is where the difference between the sectors becomes significant.

For starters, unlike the for-profit model, there are often donors willing to invest in hard-luck nonprofit cases - as they ultimately did in Mr. Ruesga’s example. More importantly, since nonprofit metrics is still a new field, we can - and should - redefine the notion of return to more accurately capture the total social value being added. That seems to be the most constructive cross-product of art and science in this space: a more artistic approach to the science of metrics.