It’s been a whirlwind following SoCap08. Due to the overwhelming response of the market calling for events based around social capital, we are moving forward as a new company: Social Capital Media (SoCap Media for short). It’s an interesting position to be in a start-up company focused on what some might deem a start-up sector. We are making choices based on a newly evolving constituency that will continually grow and evolve as new players come into the field. We are putting together our online strategy for a new website, discussion forum and events schedule and we want to hear what you are looking for and what would be most beneficial. What sectors are we missing in looking at the social capital landscape? Who else should be at the table? Here’s the list we have so far:
- Beyond MFI: Bringing transparency to microfinance and MFIs. Taking microfinance to the next level (microinsurance etc)
- Impact Analysts: Setting standards and common terminology around measuring organization and program impact across sectors of the social capital market space
- ICT: Bringing Information and Communication Technology to the developing world: Bridging the digital divide
- Family Office/Wealth Managers: Making the wide array of screened portfolios and socially responsible investments more widely understood among family offices and wealth managers
- Screened Portfolio/Public Equity: Giving individuals, sustainable businesses, nonprofits and foundations knowledge about socially responsible investing in public capital markets, community investing and shareholder advocacy
- Young Social Entrepreneurs: Young millennials changing the world
- Clean Tech/Policy Influencer: Representing advances in tech agriculture, sustainable food production/distribution, local & state farm policies
- NGO/Nonprofit: Those nonprofits who are working to effectively stabilize the developing world and build ground for the development of a social capital marketplace
- International Government: Gov’t institutions venturing into SRI and funders who work with them. Research being done by the gov’t to realize the space
- Social Connectors: Individuals who disseminate information online, act as symbols of their field and bring people together to discuss and partner
- Landscape/Mapping: Showing where all constituents fall on the social capital landscape to give a visual picture of the work being done
- Domestic Government: Showcase how public and private institutions are working together to further social enterprise and funnel needed investment dollars to the social capital domestic market
-Foundations: Moving foundation funds towards SRI and screened portfolios
- Fair Trade: Showcasing how fair trade products are sound investments and the proven success record of fair trade organizations
- Corporate Social Responsibility: How corporations are taking the triple bottom line into account
- Infrastructure: Organizations putting in place metrics to show that the social capital marketplace is real and growing and safe to invest in
We’re excited to be working on this project and look forward to collaborating with the community.We hope to put together events that will breed effective partnerships and advance the social capital sector. We hope to act as a hub of content generation and pathological collaboration. The future looks very bright from here.
“When the water starts boiling, it is foolish to turn off the heat” - Nelson Mandela
This entry was posted
on Monday, November 10th, 2008 at 6:05 pm and is filed under SoCap Constituency.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
November 11th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
what about intermediaries - those organizations working to link capital with social entrepreneurs? Many people want to invest in social enterprises but lack the skills and experience to do efficiently and confidently. Intermediaries make it easy for them, and thereby help move money to the space.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Related to the Landscape/Mapping, I believe it would be good to have a discussion on what is a Social Business.
I have seen all kinds of definitions for a Social Business, and often times quite narrow ones specifically focusing on the issue of poverty in developing countries. And while this is important, there are many other issues we need to deal with, and this is why I prefer the broader view:
To me a social business is any business who is focused NOT on maximizing profit BUT RATHER on maximizing Social Capital within the ecosystem it exists in, using the broad definition of Social Capital to be the credibility you have within your community.
I believe that this is the kind of business we need to change the world beyond the focus on poverty and to resolve the broader set of economical and ecological challenges we are facing today.
And then related to Infrastructure, I like the idea of trying to come up with an index that would help us evaluate the social capital of people or organization. One simple measure that you can try to optimize (because this is human, we like to optimize things and competition is healthy). I am exploring the idea with the Vindex (http://www.venyo.org/content/?help=what_is_vindex) and there may be other possible options, so definitely this is another good discussion to have.
The main issue at this point is lack of focus on the investment side: people know how to invest in general to maximize profit, but when it comes to social businesses, everybody has their own view of the world and their own goals to fulfill and matching demand (social businesses looking for cash) with offers (social investors with very precise ideas of what they think is wrong and a mission to change things) is hard at this point. And it will stay like this until there is a way to focus everybody or enough people involved that the lack of focus is compensated by shear volume (as it is in regular financial markets).
I think the 2nd is what we should try to push for: when people realize that what has gone wrong with the world is because we try to maximize profit, and when they will agree to move to maximizing social capital (=sustainable capitalism), and they start using an index that allows everybody to compare despite the lack of focus from one mission to the other, then we will have a good story to tell.