Putting the enterprise into social enterprise

“Not limited by the resources currently in hand” is how J Gregory Dees, known as the father of social entrepreneurship education, describes one of the characteristics of social entrepreneurship.

He goes on to explain that social entrepreneurs are skilled at doing more with less and at attracting resources from elsewhere – drawing in partners and collaborating with others.

There are, of course, other more common characteristics: a mission to create and sustain social value goes to the very core of social entrepreneurship. This is what defines the growing number of social enterprises in the UK – estimated at more than 68,000. According to Social Enterprise UK, the national membership body for social enterprise, a substantial 39 per cent of them are concentrated in the most deprived communities (compared with 13 per cent of SMEs).

Social enterpreneurs are, as if by definition, social first.
It’s the entrepreneurship that proves evasive. For those with social values as their raison d’etre, it becomes a means to an end, part of the fight for survival in an economic climate where funding and compassion are fast drying up.

In time, it’s very likely that the difference between those social ventures that survive and those that fail will be the entrepreneurial element.

J Gregory Dees’ description above brought to mind a friend and colleague who, for me, embodies the collaborative, resource-mobilising characteristic so well. Lucy Ferguson runs a youth media agency, Mediorite, out of an office we share in Hackney, London.

Read the full article in ISBE's Enterprising Matters e-magazine.

Co-creation and how to go about it

One of the more recent terms to surface in the social sector is ‘co-creation’, sometimes used interchangeably with ‘co-production’. Organisations like Nesta use the terms to describe the process of designing products or services with the people who are going to use them. Only occasionally are the term and techniques used for communications.

What is co-creation?

Co-creation basically means collaborative creation. At Poached Creative and we define co-creation as designing creative assets alongside the people we are trying to reach.

This could be:

·      young people producing anti-crime campaigns for their peers

·      people with learning disabilities building an accessible website

·      homeless and unemployed people creating a blog about their experiences.

More than a focus group

Traditional focus groups get people together, test some ideas and usually leave it up to the creatives to accept or ignore the feedback. In co-creation the ideas and content are generated, tested and approved by the group. They retain collective oversight of the product or service through the development process.

Top creatives will be involved with the process so they can hear from the audience first-hand  and bring in the professional view..

In addition to creating something that they care about, participants will also gain or practice skills in communication, team work and pitching/presentation.

The process

1. Meet with audience members. Often this will be a mixed group of different audience members, including staff and stakeholders. The workshop looks for consensus on the following questions:

·      What do we know about the issue and audience?

·      Why does it matter to us and what matters most?

2. Find the message, media and channel. Planning is the key to any successful communications project and this stage provides the foundation for PR and distribution plans. The group explores the following questions:

·      Where will our audience be, how do we reach them?

·      What’s it about? How would you say it to a friend?

·      What does success look like? How will we know when it’s good?

3. Get creative. Often this stage will take place with creative professionals – eg. writers, designers, filmmakers or photographers in the room. It will:

·      Look at what’s already out there, research content

·      Design/write/film/create social media

4. Critical feedback. This is the point where the creative is tested  with different audience members. Participants will ask the following questions:

·      Does this work? What do other people think? Are we missing something?

·      Feedback and input from stakeholders/experts

·      Amend and seek sign off

5. Launch and promote. This stage is all about getting the product out to the right people through the right channels and enlisting the help and contacts of everyone in the group.

6. Evaluate and feed back. Involving the group in evaluating the success, based on criteria agreed in stage 2, is crucial for the learning process and also to improve future products.

Co-creation techniques

Co-creation from Poached Creative starts with an audience group and a brief or theme. We facilitate groups using a range of techniques to engage them in the creative process over anything from two to twelve sessions.

Some of these techniques include:

·      open discussion, brainstorming and mood boarding

·      creating audience personas

·      future basing

·      SWOT and PEST analysis

·      distribution and PR planning

·      action planning, assigning roles and tasks

·      presentation/pitching and critical review

·      documenting progress and building networks through social media

“Co-creation isn’t about happy-clapper brainstorms and blank sheets of paper, it’s about well-channelled creative energy and structured tasks that meet a business challenge.”
Sense Worldwide (2009) The Spirit of Co-Creation: Risk-Managed Creativity for Business

For more information visit:

Poached Creative's co-creation page
www.staying-safe.com

http://www.nesta.org.uk

http://www.innovationlabs.org.uk

http://www.forbes.com/sites/infosys/2011/12/20/co-creation-innovation-bte

http://www.thespiritofcocreation.com/about/

Reduce and reuse - have we come full cycle?

Volunteer and past trainee Richard Bastian is blogging for our clients Healthy Planet and has had a piece featured on the Independent website. 

Fifty years ago the British wartime ‘make do and mend’ attitude may not have leapt to mind when considering the environment, but in 2012 the principle of reuse is experiencing a revival.
London residents alone throw away 20 million tonnes of waste each year according to the London Community Resource Network, which estimates that recycling or reusing these resources could stop 150 million tonnes of annual carbon emissions.

Consumer companies are forever selling us new goods and the rise of cheap fashion in high street stores had reduced the incentive to mend old items. However, designers such as Wayne Hemingway, who has turned old cola bottles into umbrellas, and From Somewhere’s Orsola de Castro, who turned banned Speedo swimsuits into designer dresses, are making reuse more fashionable.

Read the full article on Independent blogs.

The value of social value

Even though the words 'social enterprise' have been removed from the final version of the Social Value Bill, which has now passed through Parliament and is set to become law, it is undoubtedly good news for social enterprises like Poached Creative.

Falling awkwardly between charitable and commercial (like many genuine social enterprises), we're ineligible for a lot of funding. What's more, our philosophy is confusing for business people and charities. "So, you work harder and your profit margins are lower because you're training people as you go?" asks the business person. "I don't get it. Charities pay you for communications?" says the charity worker. Yes to both!

Our video trainer Adam oversees a young camera person, Ondre, reporting for
Discover Young Hackney. Photo by Emma Gutteridge.

We're providing a service that charities and public bodies need and are willing to pay for. And my argument is that because we're closer to the people they're trying to reach (we work alongside homeless people, people with mental health issues, people with criminal records, long-term unemployed people and young people to co-create communications) we're better at it than the big agencies.

Recognition of social value, rather than just competing on the lowest price for government contracts, will help us a lot.

Yes, there's the need to more clearly define 'social value' and social enterprises will need to be clear and transparent about how they deliver additional social value with any public sector offering. But I hope this will give us the foothold we need to step up our public sector delivery.

If it works the public sector, business and society will be better for it.

Read more about the Bill on the Civil Society website.

Find out more about what Poached Creative can do and how we deliver social value.

Interviewing - it's a juggle!

Writers and journalists on our training courses often struggle with the art of the interview. There's no doubt it's a difficult beast. No longer is a grubby notepad and half-chewed pen all you need. If you're lucky enough to have time to do a face-to-face interview you'll probably be wielding a flip camera, digital camera and smartphone for starters. However you're conducting it, there's a jumble of things you need to think about before, during and after your interview.

A checklist seems like a sensible option. Here's what we've come up with.

Interviews checklist

Whether you’re the interviewer or the interviewee, interviews are nervewracking. This handy checklist will help you put your interviewee at ease and get a good story or case study.

Before the interview – be prepared

If you can meet the interviewee in person that’s best but if not you might need to settle for a phone interview. Make sure that you’ll have somewhere quiet where you can freely have your conversation. If you’re meeting them in person, try to go to somewhere they’ll feel comfortable and where you might pick up some more information about them.

· Think about how and where you’re going to do it.

· Research the person and their organisation.

· Find out the facts of the story.

· Write your questions beforehand.

· Make sure your camera/dictaphone batteries are charged, make sure you’ve got a pen and notepad.

· Start with something easy.

· Build on it, reflecting back some of their answer in your next question.

· Put the tricky questions in the middle.

· Try to have a ‘wildcard’ question that will be different from everyone else’s.

· End on a light note or ask about the future.

During the interview

· Introduce yourself and say what the story’s about and who it’s for.

· Build a rapport, look for something in common.

· If you’re going to record, tell them you’re going to record it.

· Turn camera/dictaphone on.

· Ask your first question and LISTEN

- nod, use open body language

- make eye contact

- Make positive noises (but only if you’re not recording).

· Try to get your next question to flow from the previous answer.

· Be natural.

· Probe – if they haven’t answered fully, ask again from a new angle.

After the interview

· Check their details – full name and spelling, name of organisation, job role (if appropriate).

· Get their contact details (mobile, email, website) in case you need more information.

· Tell them what’s going to happen next. When and where can they see the story?

· Think about the most interesting/exciting thing. What was the one thing that stood out or stuck in your mind – this is what you should lead with.

· Write it up/edit as soon as possible, while it’s still fresh in your mind.

· Check any facts and get any missing information.

Good luck!

Find out more about Poached Creative's training and communications services.

Does small social enterprise have a chance in the Work Programme?

The Government launched its much-talked-about Work Programme today - "probably the biggest payment-by-results scheme in the world" according to Employment Minister Chris Grayling - and one that aims to help 2.4 million unemployed people back into work over the next five years.

The big idea is for what's been described as a giant dating agency, where people who are out of work will be matched to suitable employers. The focus, we're told, is on specialist provision and sustainable employment.

The money has already been allocated to the tier 1 and 2 contractors who hold the risk if they are unable to match the required number of candidates to jobs to make ends meet. See today's Telegraph article and Thursday's Guardian piece, which does a good job of explaining payment by results.

And this is where it gets interesting. It is up to these big players to decide how best to achieve the results that will win the more lucrative payments, such as more than £13,000 for getting an ex-incapacity benefit claimant back to work.

Some of them will, no doubt, try to build success with these clients in-house or with a small range of preferred providers who they've worked with before. How much of it filters down to the small specialists, like Poached Creative, will remain to be seen.

Where are the jobs?

Results would be all very well if there were jobs enough for everyone. But the two main areas where Poached Creative works - Hackney and Haringey - have been name checked by the Work Foundation in the top 10 areas of the UK where it is likely to be difficult for the Work Programme to be delivered profitably.

Hackney has the second-highest ratio of out of work residents to job vacancies in the UK, an unemployment rate of 19.6 per cent and one of the highest rates in the country of entrenched long-term unemployment. According to analysis published on Touchstone Blog it is also one of the areas that has been hardest hit in the recent round of government spending cuts. Even if the Work Programme manages to reach and help these people, it could be that the jobs simply aren't there.

Taking a chance?

The creative sector is one of Hackney's growth areas and, as a specialist service helping long-term unemployed people to get jobs in media and the creative industries, organisations like Poached ought to be the perfect candidates for Work Programme subcontracts.

But Rob Greenland at The Social Business is sceptical.

"There is potential for difficulty when a big company (the Prime Provider) is tasked with collaborating with lots of smaller providers. Government would have us believe that they’ll all play happy families, nurturing the young’uns and small’uns so that together they can share the proceeds and make the contract a success. I’m afraid I just don’t believe that it will turn out like that in a lot of cases."

It's worth reading his full blog.

I'll be happy to be proved wrong, but my fear is that we're too small, too untried and, frankly, too innovative to prove an attractive partner for providers trying to make ends meet in a difficult economy.

Find out about Poached Creative's training and work experience and read the concerns about how the Work Programme might affect people claiming benefits from In My Shoes.

Ten tips for effective writing

“Writing, to be effective, must follow closely the thoughts of the writer, but not necessarily in the order in which these thoughts occur.” Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, 1979.

The tips below are mostly drawn from Strunk and White’s brilliant little book, The Elements of Style. Its language seems archaic now but the principles it sets out are still spot on. I took the liberty of translating these principles into today’s language for my colleagues at the NHS Confederation.

They've served me very well in my communications career (first as a journalist and later as a writer for charities) and I firmly believe that every writer who aims to be read should apply these simple principles to their work.

1. Put your audience first.

2. Plan before you write.

3. Introduce only one idea per sentence/paragraph.

4. Use active voice.

5. Use concrete language.

6. Make every word count.

7. Say just the right amount.

8. Avoid jargon and complicated words.

9. Express similar content in a similar way.

10. Be wary of opinion and speculation.

I plan to expand on each of these points, with examples. Keep an eye on this blog and feel free to post questions in the comments field. I’ll do my best to answer them.