Category Archives: Web/Tech

Friday round-up: Ferrero Rocher, Facebook, and Fellows

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It’s Friday, it’s 6pm, it can mean only one thing: the weekly round-up of news….

– On Monday, the Ambassadors will be announced…watch this space for Ferrero Rochers etc.

– Here’s a big catalogue of measurement and evaluation tools and guides and kits and blah for the 3rd sector

– What are the top 12 nonprofit Facebook apps? These are. Now you can clutter your Facebook page with worthy stuff as well as pirates and zombies.

– If the entry before didn’t make sense, SSE Fellow Jude Habib is running a web 2.0 seminar (pdf) for third sector orgs…

– Apparently, there was some shenanigans in the world of politics this past week or two. Amongst the copycat and namecalling antics, the sector remained pretty much as was.

– Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize, don’t you know…..

– Good books and magazines for social entrepreneurs? Any suggestions? Happy to add to our SSE Links / Resources pages…

– I missed this article about SSE Fellow Michelle Baharier’s Cooltan Arts project the other week. Great stuff.

– Inheritance tax isn’t the big property issue: estate agents’ (realtors, US readers) carbon footprint, that’s the issue. Which makes Pedal to Properties a work of genius.

On which note I bid you farewell and a happy weekend……

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Do you do the green thing?

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I met up the other day with Rod Schwartz of Catalyst to chat about social entrepreneurs, his trip to the Balkans and SSE. Having taught in a school for the blind in Bulgaria back in the dim and distant past, I was interested to hear about social business / social entrepreneurs in Eastern Europe, and the potential for the movement over there.

In the course of our discussions, Rod mentioned that he was involved with an initiative called ‘Do the Green Thing‘, and that it was launching today….I vaguely remembered signing up to something and, sure enough, got an e-mail through today encouraging me to, well, do the green thing. Which this month is: walk more, drive less. It’s kind of a We Are What We Do meets iCount meets GlobalCool meets TipThePlanet. With extra advertising savvy and web (2.0)-usability thrown in.

They describe it as: "a not-for-profit online community uniting people to act against climate
change. Green Thing’s basic principle is to tempt people to do one
delightful thing a month and so build up a programme of green behaviour
one easy step at a time".

I like it, mostly because it has a sense of humour, a bit of personality and engaging content. Whether it gets (drum roll) critical mass and really takes off remains to be seen, but there’s some smart, plugged-in people behind it. And good use of the blogs/videos/podcasts/audio/wiki stuff out there, without it seeming chaotic (a challenge in itself).

Worth a bit of your valuable time.

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Friday round-up: non-profit web toolkit, bad (micro)credit, Hazel Blears, business plans…

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Before we head out for the weekend, the normal Friday round-up of relevant news and views, hints and links.

– ReadWriteWeb has a non-profits web toolkit; a touch US-centric, but useful nonetheless

– Hazel Blears gave a speech about ‘Confident Communities‘ at the recent DTA conference. Worth a read: she’s been a supporter of SSE ever since an early pilot in Salford, and has a genuine passion for local, community-led change

– The ever-reliably-readable Lucy Bernholz reports on why microfinance isn’t always good

– Lots of blogged reaction to Anita Roddick’s life and work; see also this week’s issue of the Big Issue for more.

– Intelligent Giving cover the Northern Rock fallout, and how it might affect their charitable foundation / work

– A social enterprise trade association is being piloted in the South West….

– Socially Responsible Investment: if you don’t know what or how, this new website should help

– It has been a momentous (political) summer for the 3rd sector, according to one sector commentator

– [also via VolResource] Big Lottery’s version of what is a business plan: useful intro; many more out there…

– this American article from the SSIR newsletter (Stanford Social Innovation Review) acts as a useful adjunct / support for the Young Foundation report we discussed recently….all about creating "high impact non profits"

– [slightly offf-topic] in blog world, there’s what is technically known as a hoo-ha brewing, after some high-profile UK blogs were taken down by their ISP for things they’d written about Uzbekistan / one billionaire in particular….check out the huge amount of comment this has generated

–  Occasionally at SSE, we work with and support not social entrepreneurs, but serial social entrepreneurs; those who, according to this article on the Secrets of Serial Entrepreneurs, "ha[ve] a higher propensity for risk, innovation and achievement; [are]
less scared of failure. And they [are] more able to recover when they [do] fail."

Have a great weekend…..

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Craigsfoundation and grant proposal advice

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Well, you learn something every day…and today’s is that Craigslist has a foundation which "produces events and online resources that help emerging nonprofit leaders". Don’t get too excited, it doesn’t do direct funding, and the events seem to be of most use if you are in the San Francisco area, but there’s plenty of stuff worth sifting through here, particularly (as you might expect from such an organisation) in the online resources.

The NonProfit Boot Camp Online is particularly good; obviously, US-focused, but still useful podcasts to download and listen to. There will be more coming, because there are two more ‘boot camps’ coming (see Britt Bravo on this, and the Foundation in general).

Britt also links to a post, via a Craigslist event, about the "10 Flaws That Doom Most Grant Proposals to Failure". It provides a useful checklist even for those with a huge pile of applications / investment proposals under our respective belts….

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Social enterprise zones and tax breaks

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Listening to Radio 4 on Sunday night, my non-work thoughts were broken by social enterprise featuring on Westminster Hour. The Conservatives are releasing their Social Enterprise Policy Group report this week, the recommendations in which will include social enterprise zones (in deprived areas) and tax breaks within those zones for investors (to allow more equity / patient capital), as well as some planning exemptions for brownfield development for social enterprises. No great surprises there for anyone who heard Oliver Letwin speak in January at Voice 07 where he talked about, well, zones and tax breaks (and patient finance). But it keeps it on the agenda, and the ideas neither massively excite nor appal me. So they’re probably quite sensible.

The programme is worth listening to again, not least because after speaking to the Conservatives (Greg Clark), it then speaks to Cherry Read of the Social Enterprise Coalition, and then the new Minister for the Third Sector. She said the Tory plans were unambitious, and that Labour were yet to really grasp that social enterprise was about changing mainstream business, not just about charities breaking even. Phil Hope, the new minister, then came on to say that, well, they did understand that, dismissed the Tory plans ("uncosted tax breaks", "no new money" social enterprise viewed by Tories as "cheap alternative") before talking about procurement, Futurebuilders/Capacitybuilders, voice as well as delivery and a bit more procurement (3rd sector orgs should bid jointly or bid to be subcontractors etc for big contracts).

Nothing revelatory to any sector-heads, with the usual 55,000 figure trotted out, and the usual arguments (Labour are bureaucratic, paperwork-heavy and centralist, Conservatives are  promising without costing and looking to abdicate responsibility for public services; sector demands more from both…). It was interesting to hear SeedCo being rolled out to question the whole social enterprise concept. Regular readers will remember various people (including myself) putting them to the sword in previous posts (here and here); to quote one US blog, "Seedco [are] one of the least informed and most inept players to have dabbled in the nonprofit Social Enterprise field". But they have featured in a Wall Street journal article, so that’s presumably why Radio 4 picked them. Hey ho.

It’s not a podcast, so you have a week to listen to the programme; if you miss it, why not try out some of the snippet 3 minute Social Enterprise podcasts available from Kibble. Although there is slightly irritating ambient music behind all of them (at least the ones I’ve listened to), there’s some decent people they’ve picked up at various events: Ed Miliband, Tim Smit and US legend Jerr Boschee.

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