Share — a seamless social innovation
When reflecting on the prompt, I was keen to share a social innovation that seamlessly integrates into my (and probably also your) everyday life. That is why I picked the company Share, a German-founded social business.
What is Share about?
In a nutshell, Share makes donating simple. No need to fill out forms, no need for extra effort. To be more precise, Share builds on the buy-one-give-one principle: Every time someone buys a Share product, a person in need automatically receives a vital donation.
The goal is to finance relief efforts through the sale of everyday consumer products. To deliver the aid, Share collaborates with organisations such as the UN World Food Program or the Eden Reforestation project. Currently, Share has more than 120 products in its assortment. These can range from cereal bars to sodas and even hand creams.
How and why does it work?
Overall, Share focuses its donations on four key pillars representing people’s basic needs: Drinking, food, hygiene, and education. To make donations very tangible to consumers, Share links one of their four product types to one of the donation pillars: e.g., drinking water is donated through drinks such as mineral and sparkling water; food is donated through foodstuffs such as pasta, rice, and cereal bars; hygiene products are donated through equivalents such as hand cream and soap bars; school lessons are donated through stationary such as coloured pencils and sticky notes.
This logical linkage of products to type of donation allows Share to give consumers a feeling of being an active agent when supporting the causes they care about through their daily buying behaviour. This is one of the major success factors of the company.
Since its inception, Share has donated >38M days of clean drinking water, >23M meals, >21M hygiene products and services, and >2M of school lessons.
By 2025, the company has set the goal of achieving 1 billion donations through its products.
Personal reflection
Share inspires me because of three reasons:
- Sustainable business: The founders were able to develop a social innovation with a sustainable business model that is not dependent on external funding.
- Seamless integration: There is no extra effort needed from the consumer to contribute to the broad social causes they care about besides buying Share products from the respective categories. From my perspective, this is also the key innovation.
- Tangible impact: One of Share’s priorities is to be transparent with regard to donations. On the one side, they share how much goes to what product, and on the other side, they are transparent about how much of the selling price per product is donated.
One challenge I still see revolves around the transparency issue. Share has not openly shared its financials since 2019 which begs the question if there is something (negative) to find. Potentially, their profit margins post donations may be higher than expected. This would bring up the question of what the funds are used for instead.
What are your thoughts on Share? Did you know about their social mission and have you bought some of their products? Do you think their approach is sustainable to effectively alleviate the social issues targeted? Let me know!
