Social Design Canvas — the non-profit equivalent of Business Model Canvas
A novel design tool that helps map, analyse and design social cooperative processes and systems.
TL;DR
- Social cooperative projects rely mainly on non-monetary motivations which are hard to measure or quantify, thus we need new tools and methods to account for such motivations.
- Social Design Canvas is a novel design tool that helps map, analyse and design key ingredients of social cooperative processes and systems: contributors, contributions, motivations, enablers, rules and tools.
- The canvas is presented in Social Design Cookbook — an engaging, inspiring and beautifully designed book 📘 co-authored by designers and researchers from Finland, Hungary and the Netherlands.
- You can order Social Design Cookbook here.
Having organised and led dozens of co-creation projects, events and workshops I was always interested in collaboration. More specifically, I am interested in the culture and technology that let collaboration and social cooperation happen. When I recognised that certain social cooperative formats, like PechaKucha Night, Meetup, Complaints Choir or Restaurant Day are increasingly replicated globally, I started The Format Project in 2013 at Kitchen Budapest. In this research project I looked at how such initiatives were started, how they work, how they spread and what other factors, I called them ingredients, contribute to their success.
While doing my research, I recognised that social cooperative processes are hard to assess or analyse because we lack the framework for it. Such processes are mainly based on motivations that are not financial, therefore hard to measure and plan for. Thus I started to develop a tool, Social Design Canvas, that helps account for non-monetary motivations and map them along with all other types of key ingredients of social cooperative processes.
The non-profit equivalent of Business Model Canvas
Social Design Canvas is a novel design tool which can be used to study, analyse and design new forms of social collaboration and cooperation. It is best described as the social and non-profit equivalent of Business Model Canvas. The main difference to Business Model Canvas is obvious, it derives from the difference between the nature and goals of businesses and social projects.
The most important characteristic of any business is whether it is profitable. Profit is not the only value a business creates — yet it is the primary metric to evaluate a business. No surprise then that Business Model Canvas ultimately comes down to cost and revenue.
The most important question we usually ask about a social and non-profit project is whether it is sustainable. Whether people participate and contribute to ultimately make it happen. The value the project creates is also important, but only as much as it is motivating participants to contribute. If the only value a social initiative creates is the joy of participation, it can still successfully engage participants and be sustainable.
Participation in and contribution to social cooperative projects is less straightforward then it is for businesses: employment. There is a solid literature of leadership and management but the core principle behind employment is simple: employees are financially remunerated for their work which is the primary (though not the only) incentive to work for a specific company. Social projects, at the other hand, rely on participants who are not paid to contribute and who are driven by non-monetary motivations.
We are asked a lot about the revenue or business model, but I always replace this with the rewarding model. You have to think about the way people can find their rewards and about what keeps them motivated.
— Harmen G. Zijp, co-founder of Fab Lab Amersfoort
We* developed Social Design Canvas to help engaged people initiate and elaborate cooperative processes from the ground up. It can also be used for analysis and reflection to help improve existing social cooperative endeavours.
The Social Design Canvas
Social Design Canvas maps the key ingredients of social cooperative processes on a single page.
The ingredients of cooperation are: contributors + contributions + motivations + enablers + rules + tools
Contributors
Contributors are participants who actively and intentionally contribute to the collective effort by enhancing the value created or improving the process itself. They can be best grouped by their respective contributions at various levels of involvement. In general, there are a great number of participants who contribute little, and a few who contribute the most.
Contributions
All types of contributions by participants to the value output or the collective process itself. Contributions are as diverse as social cooperative projects can be. They might be physical goods or digital content, money or voluntarily offered time, skills, knowledge, and expertise, including help in organising and communication.
Motivations
Their personal motives cause participants to get involved and contribute to the cooperative process. Motivations include what participants expect, perceive or experience as a value or benefit deriving from participation.
For example, people are more prone to engage in social processes that are directed at some shared, positive goal or which promise a tangible output.
Enablers
Enablers make participation and contributions by key participants easy, effortless and affordable by driving the cost of participation down, removing obstacles and reducing the risks involved in participation.
This might sound too obvious, but when participation is easy and free, it does not require long-term commitment or prior experience, more people can afford to join.
Rules
Rules are explicit operational rules that define the framework of the cooperative process. They define all kinds of things: who, where, when and how we can contribute, what happens to participants’ contributions and what the organisational, technical or logistic prerequisites for the smooth running of the cooperative process are.
The best rules are simple and specific. They are non-restrictive, combining freedom with structuring the mode of involvement in the cooperative process. Think of rules as creative constraints: they delimit and guide your efforts by offering space for your free creativity.
Tools
Tools help you realise the project, they facilitate communication among the involved parties and support both participation and organising efforts.
It is a common mistake to start with the tools. Start with who (contributors) would do what (contribute) and why (motivation) for the success of the process and then figure out how tools can support this. Tools (and rules) only matter as far as they motivate, enable or help the involvement of specific contributors.
The Book
We will present Social Design Canvas in the upcoming book Social Design Cookbook. The book will include a dedicated chapter to explain the canvas in details, with examples and step-by-step instructions on how to use it.
Along the canvas, the book will feature 18 case studies of a broad, international selection of social cooperative formats that have not only been successful in their local communities but also replicated to other locations and contexts.
The case studies include: Restaurant Day, the one-day food carnival that has spread from Helsinki to cities in over 30 countries; Critical Mass, an urban cycling event reclaiming the streets that has brought 80,000 (!) cyclists to the streets of Budapest; PechaKucha Night, a global network of events for young architects and designers which is now active in more than 1,000 cities worldwide; Fab Lab, a workshop for digital fabrication that has been opened in over 1,000 cities globally; OpenStreetMap, an open source, collaborative digital map project enabling millions of volunteers to contribute to mapping our planet.
Social Design Cookbook, co-authored by designers and researchers from Finland, Hungary and the Netherlands, is an engaging, inspiring and beautifully designed book.
It was published in July 2019, after a successful crowdfunding campaign on Mesenaatti, Finland’s largest crowdfunding platform.
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P.S.
I personally believe that the social systems and institutions we have today to effectively participate in democracy — national elections, referendums, demonstrations — are very limited and rather outdated. In the book I point out that replicability of formats increases citizens’ ability (= social systems literacy) to create social systems for and by themselves. As Kevin Schawinski, co-founder of Galaxy Zoo, asks in the Social Design Cookbook: “What is democracy other than crowdsourcing the political process?”
We have to make this crowdsourcing happen, and my ultimate goal with this project is to help readers of the book to organise social cooperative processes around the cultural, social, political and communal issues they care about.
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*The canvas was co-created and tested by over 200 workshop participants at events including Lift Conference in Geneva, Digital Bauhaus in Weimar, Personal Democracy Forum in Gdansk, Democracy International Happening, the OFF Biennale and Brain Bar in Budapest. Key contributors include Agnes Muszka, Balint Ferenczi, Judit Boros and Lilla Toth. Special thanks for Vanda Sarai for reviewing this article.
