3p Contributor: Amie Vaccaro
Recent Articles
What’s Next Interview with Mike Del Ponte: Building the Silicon Valley of Social Entrepreneurship
As part of our partnership with the Social Capital Markets Conference 2010, we are featuring a series of interviews with key conference participants. Don’t forget to get your 30% discount by using the code “3P30″ when you register!
I sat down with Mike Del Ponte, Founder and CEO of Sparkseed. Most recently Sparkseed ran the most adventurous, non-conference like conference I’ve ever had the pleasure of attending. Dangerously Ambitious brought together 64 young, ambitious entrepreneurs for 3 days of action packed bonding and learning, sans panel discussions. The conference reinforced my view of Mike as someone in the space who is really moving the needle. So I was excited to interview him prior to Socap about his thoughts on the field.
In this interview, learn about:
- Sparkseed’s 3 pronged strategy for creating the Silicon Valley for social entrepreneurship:
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- Leveraging the venture capital model to find deals
- Creating a world class social enterprise accelerator program
- Investing in social entrepreneurs through Sparkseed
- Sparkseed’s goal to launch 1000 ventures impacting 1 billion lives in the next 10 years
- The support that has been critical in Mike’s success
- How Mike sees social enterprise taking off and recent trends
What’s Next Interview: Accessing $120B Money for Good
As part of our partnership with the Social Capital Markets Conference 2010, we are featuring a series of interviews with key conference participants. Don’t forget to get your 30% discount by using the code “3P30″ when you register!
Hope Consulting‘s Money for Good initiative identified that wealthy Americans would like to invest $120 billion in impact investments, an extremely encouraging finding. My question is, how do we make that happen? I sat down with Hope Neighbor, Founder and CEO of Hope Consulting, and Greg Ulrich, Project Manager for the Money for Good project to find out. Watch the video to learn:
- About the Money for Good report’s field-changing findings
- Why financial advisors are key to unlocking the $120 B impact investment opportunity
- What’s being done and what needs to happen
What’s Next Interview with Nick Ellis, CEO of Job Rooster
As part of our partnership with the Social Capital Markets Conference 2010, we are featuring a series of interviews with key conference participants. Don’t forget to get your 30% discount by using the code “3P30″ when you register!
I spoke with Nick Ellis, CEO of Job Rooster, as well as his outlook on social enterprise. Job Rooster allows anyone to learn about and apply for jobs from a mobile phone.
Watch the interview to find out:
- About Job Rooster as base of the pyramid mobile job hunting tool
- How Nick has managed to get funding and the broader climate for fundraising
- How entrepreneurs are getting more sophisticated and why you can’t fundraise on a feelgood idea anymore
- Why crowdsourcing and mobile are the next big things
What’s Next Interview with Amy Benziger, Co-Producer of Socap 10
I sat down with Amy Benziger, Co-Producer for the Social Capital Markets conference (Socap), which is in its third year. I’ve attended each year and have enjoyed watching the business for good or social enterprise space unfold and grow. Leading up to this year’s conference I’ll be interviewing a series of thought leaders and Socap speakers and attendees to find out what’s happened in the last year and what’s the next big thing.
As Co-Producer, Amy has a uniquely insider perspective. Hear what she sees as important, why she thinks design thinking could be the next big thing in social enterprise, and more.
Please chime in. Besides leaving comments, here are 2 ways to weigh in.
1) I recently highlighted the related Impact Challenge competition: Submit 500 words on “What’s Next for Social Enterprise” for the chance to win a free ticket to Socap. Learn more here.
2) If you will be at Socap and would like to be interviewed for this series, email me at amie [dot] vaccaro [at] gmail [dot] com. Be sure to mention why 3p readers would want to hear from me.
Graffiti PR’s 12 Tips for Reaching Your Audience
Last week Graffiti PR hosted a PR Summit Bootcamp in San Francisco – an action packed day of successful PR folks revealing their tips and tricks for navigating and leveraging media. Even social change needs good media coverage. The more I’ve dived into social entrepreneurship, the more I realize how crucial some of the things I used to perceive as “fluffy” or even just “nice to have” are: that includes branding, PR, messaging, social media, and overall marketing will make or brake any good idea. Here are some of the most meaningful morsels from the event:
- Let your brand have a personality. Make sure you’re not only talking about your product and selling your product with your communications on Facebook and Twitter. Give value. Have fun. Give your brand a persona. United Airlines on Twitter is a perfect example of what not to do.
- Don’t forget traditional platforms, like direct mail. Mix it up. Surprise people. People now expect that email newsletter, that Twitter account. Stir the pot with an unexpected medium.
- Shaking hands is underrated. Social media is amazing and all. But don’t forget to meet your audience in person. This particularly applies to campaigns for political office, but I think it applies beyond that. Companies that I’ve had face to face contact with are by far my favorites out there. I will almost never become an evangelist without meeting the CEO or someone else involved (maybe I’m odd that way?)
- Don’t push the same updates to all channels. Seeing hashtags on Facebook is like speaking English in Paris, one speaker suggested. It’s frowned upon. Consider who you are talking to and craft your message accordingly.
What’s Next in Social Enterprise? We Want to Know Your Ideas
Hope Consulting recently identified a whopping $120 billion opportunity for impact investment “hiding in plain sight,” that is, in people’s bank account. Impact investment (made by investors that are not only seeking financial return, but positive environmental and social impact) is a field we are just starting to identify and quantify. As we begin to dig deeper, we uncover untapped potential for social entrepreneurs (those of us running or looking to run projects with a positive impact on the world).
This Money for Good initiative identified an appetite for investing in socially and environmentally driven projects that is, as of yet, totally untapped. 90% of Americans with incomes over $80,000 surveyed expressed an openness to impact investing. Money for Good estimates that there is $120 billion in capital sitting in bank accounts that retail (that is non-accredited) investors would like to invest in good projects. And wouldn’t those good projects like to access this funding?
Create Young Entrepreneurs With Social Gaming
As a small child, Jason Young was given a rare opportunity: his mother opened a bank account in his name and gave him a $5 weekly allowance. One dollar was for savings, one dollar was for church and the other three were his to spend. At an early age, Young learned a key concept: budgeting. At the age of 13, Young had started his first business, J.W. Young and Associates Travel. Hence began his entrepreneurial career.
But not everyone is as lucky as Young. According to JumpStart, 95% of high school seniors are financially illiterate. To rectify that, Young is now building Zindagi, an online tool with mobile interactivity that combines social gaming with the use of real money to teach kids financial literacy, thereby empowering Americans to achieve their life goals.
“We’re trying to influence behavior over the long term,” Young told me, “We’re not just trying to build another application.”
Three core aspects of Zindagi’s design are the use of real money, incorporation of social gaming elements like points and incentives for meeting goals, and leveraging real life exercises. The game, which is still in development, will be comprised of several difficulty levels.
Community Based Marketing: Lessons from Harley Davidson and Zipcar)
Lara Lee, principal at Jump Associates, led one of the best panels of Sustainable Brands 2010. During the session, Lee divulged how to build successful community based environmental marketing initiatives and new product adoption.
Five rules to speed adoption
Lee noted five things to speed adoption of a new green product, service, or idea:
- Relative advantage: Discuss benefits to me, not the planet. Zipcar famously changed its advertising from “green-focused” to “people-focused” to much success.
- Compatibility: Relate green to familiar values, not sacrifice. No one wants to sacrifice to be environmentally friendly. Zipcar refers to the freedom it provides.
- Complexity: Simplify green decision-making through shared narratives. In Zipcar’s example, it related the service to a gym service, which people understood readily.
- Trialability: Engage people to give green a try. Zipcar offers trial memberships.
- Observability: Increase visibility of the product or service by sharing it in shared spaces. In Zipcar’s example, you see Zipcar all over, making it appear to have reached critical mass.
15 Cool Things I Learned at Sustainable Brands 2010
Reporting from Sustainable Brands 2010 is a daunting challenge – most speakers are given 15 minutes to state their case, and their presentations rival TED talks. Imagine 4 days of rapid-fire, high quality content. So, I figured I’d share with you some of the coolest things I’m learning – the things that I would want to share with folks that didn’t get to attend.
Open Innovation
- Not all the smart people in the world work for you. Open up the innovation process to include ideas from the outside world. Myoo Create, who presented in the Sustainable Brands Innovation Open, enables just this with a crowdsourcing platform to solve sustainability challenges. We are smarter then me. (Disclosure: Myoo Create is a client of mine.)
- To inspire creativity and innovation, ask open-ended questions rather than limited requests. For example, ask for at least 3 suggestions rather than only 3 suggestions. Responses will double.
- When brainstorming in a group, if individuals take a few minutes to step away, think alone, and come back to the group to continue discussing, new ideas are generated faster and develop further.
The Semantic Web Comes to Social Change
Imagine if when you searched for “oil spill,” you got not only the most relevant links, but also the most relevant videos as well as ways that you can help through online action. Now imagine that for each video you watched about the oil spill, you were served up more highly relevant media absent the junk we all wade through when searching online. This is exactly what Link TV, in collaboration with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, aims to do, leveraging the latest in semantic web technology.
“Visual media can change how people think and act. How we find and use stories is changing” explained Wendy Hanamura VP and General Manager at Link TV, speaking at the recent inVision 2010 conference hosted by See Change. “But you can’t find the stories you want – the signal to noise ratio is bad.”
Hanamura is working to create a tool, Viewchange.org, which helps consumers of media find exactly the stories they want. The Gates Foundation commissioned Viewchange.org to solve the problem of story telling around their work. It will be focused on telling stories of social progress and challenges, but will be applicable more broadly.
So what? How is this different than a normal Google search?
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