8 Takeaways from #StartingGood Social Enterprise Virtual Summit 2019
The #StartingGood Social Enterprise Virtual Summit is an annual event that brings together social entrepreneurs and experts to share strategies and stories about creating social change. This year’s summit was free to access from March 21 to April 14, but the interviews/presentations can still be accessed here for $129.
As I was finishing up my capstone project/undergraduate thesis during this period, I only managed to watch about half the videos, and at 2x speed, but I thought I would share what key takeaways I got for those of you who might have missed the free access period and are too strapped (for money or time) to purchase access. However, if you are able to, I would definitely recommend it, as the speakers and material are amazing and the money will be going towards the work that StartSomeGood is doing!
Here are the insightful or inspiring lessons I took away from my scrambled viewing of the summit (apologies to speakers if I am butchering some of your content/ideas 😅):
Quick links:
- On dealing with impostor syndrome (and resulting nervousness)
- On finding mentors
- On building a self-organizing community
- On how to best use social media (for social impact)
- On creating good content
- On old and new power
- On building a movement mindset
- On the compatibility of selling and social impact
Founder Journey — Holly Ransom, CEO of Emergent
On dealing with impostor syndrome (and resulting nervousness)
To feel nervous is to be selfish, as it means you are focused on yourself. What you have to deliver should be focused on your message and audience.
Self-talk is a powerful tool to combat your negative uncontrolled internal narrative — the story you choose to tell about yourself influences whether you interpret something as excitement or nerves. (This reminds me of Schachter & Singer’s two-factor theory of emotion, which suggests that our emotion is constructed through our cognitive appraisal of the physical arousal we experience. Additionally, stress is not necessarily a bad thing, but can be productive as well, as illustrated by Alia Crum’s research on mindsets and stress.)
Remember who is watching and practice what you preach — if your message is about empowerment then you have to show it prefiguratively!
On finding mentors
Never go seeking mentors, but look for answers and learning, which will help you indirectly get mentors. This makes it clear what you hope to learn from someone else, and this mode of inquiry can help develop better relationships than if we approach them with a formality or stiffness.
Make sure you have a good enough question for someone before reaching out to them, and if there is a synergistic experience, you can ask them if you can reach out to or meet them again when there are more questions further down the line. You will then have mentors for different areas of skills or experiences, whom you can reach out to frequently as questions come up or as infrequent as even once a year with saved up questions.
Decentralized Organizing — Joshua Vial, Co-founder of Enspiral
On building a self-organizing community
There is a need to move people beyond adult-child relationship structures to adult-adult relationships, through nudging and inviting people to step into them. It isn’t about ignoring or pretending that there are no asymmetries in power, but about managing them consciously.
Decentralization doesn’t mean zero structure. Informal hierarchies rise out of moving beyond traditional hierarchies , and it is good to have formal structures for things like decisionmaking. (In my experience, it seems like there is actually more structure in self-organizing communities, as different aspects of community organization that are traditionally taken for granted become more intentionally designed and considered.)
What becomes important in decisionmaking is training people when to give or retract consent. (This reminds me of Karen Litfin’s research on ecovillages, where decisionmaking in some of the communities are consensus-based, but people use their objections very sparingly so that things can keep moving, and that objections are taken seriously when given.)
Social Media Community Building — Brook McCarthy, Director of Hustle & Heart
On how to best use social media (for social impact)
Recognize reasons people are on social media (procrastination, socialization, entertainment, trend-watching, crafting public identity), and understand how they differ from and overlap with the reasons changemakers are using social media (raising awareness, rallying people around a cause, driving people to your campaign, distributing content, engaging people in general). Social media marketing must balance these reasons in order to be effective.
Identify who are your perfect-fit people that will form the core community, and understand their psychographics (beyond their demographics) — how do they think, what do they value, what is their relationship with your cause? This will help focus messaging to cut through the social media clutter.
Be on at least to channels (in case one goes down), but any more than three and it becomes laborious to manage.
On creating good content
Think about the bare minimum that can be made to allow for consistent content. Think of yourself as curator around a specific area — you don’t have to create everything from scratch, but always give your perspective on the content.
Only 5–10% of your content should be directly promotional, as any more and people start to switch off, engagement dips, and the platform lowers content visibility.
Headlines are very important and should content the entire gist of your message/story. Try to use visuals, and if using only text, make sure it’s well laid out and tidy. Make sure brand personality is consistent and coherent. Include call to actions, and make sure to respond to comments.
Communication is not what you say it’s what people hear. You need to be repetitious — to say the same thing 10 different ways, from 10 different angles, in 10 different formats. Different people respond to different things.
You must be enthusiastic about your cause; don’t be conservative about it and don’t be afraid of haters — you’ll miss out on attracting equally passionate people. Also, people will only want to share things that they identify with, not something that makes them look bad. People want to share posts that elicit anger and happiness, as opposed to sadness and relaxation. (A good example might be “100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions” versus “Climate catastrophe is inevitable”.)
Founder Journey & Building Social Movements — Jeremy Heimans, Co-founder and CEO of Purpose
On old and new power
It’s important to look at power instead of technology in studying and designing social impact. Old and new power are different ways to get things done. Old power is power as currency; for example, to reward friends and punish enemies. New power is power as current — it gets stronger the more people participate; for example, platforms or movements based on mass participation.
One insight related to new power was regarding the limitations of something like crowdfunding. When you are accountable to millions, there is more accountability in some sense, but at the same time, no one has enough of a stake to make sure things happen, which traditional models of governance can ensure. It is important to not see old and new power in simplistic good-bad model, but recognize their respective strengths and limitations.
On building a movement mindset
There are benefits to building the crowd into the model and structuring for participation, as opposed to building something and thinking about how to involve the crowd as a separate stump. There is greater engagement when the crowd is able to lend their expertise for or give input into the design of a service or product.
Don’t create cumbersome, highly process-obsessed, semi-professionalized branches in organizations, but keep things more decentralized, and digitally grounded. Use different models depending on whether you want to achieve specific goal (more structure) or to generate ideas and energy (less structure).
Sales Secrets for Social Entrepreneurs — Rianne Klein Geltink, Impact Business
On the compatibility of selling and social impact
Our perception of sales and money can be have been shaped by modern capitalism, but we can choose what meaning we want them to carry. Social entrepreneurs want to be distanced from the image of being a salesperson. There is a resistance to want to be selling for social entrepreneurs, as they feel they shouldn’t be allowed to ask money for their services. There are communities social entrepreneurs want to sell to, and communities of service they want to see uplifted — it becomes tricky when they overlap. However, selling can be serving as well.
There are also a lot of assumptions made of the buyer — “they cannot afford it”; “they think I am a sleazy salesperson”. Don’t make these assumptions; your responsibility to just authentically share the social impact of your product or service as enthusiastically as possible. It is the responsibility of the other person is to say yes or no. (I think a caveat is persuasion techniques can affect the recipient’s agency and choices and you have to be mindful of this.) This empowers the communities of service as well.
There is often a blurry line between identity and your product/service, especially when you are a founder or the only one doing the product/service, which might create a fear of personal rejection and of not being worthy. Separate yourself from your product/service and view it as a scientist looking at what works or not.
I hope this has been helpful! A big thank you to StartSomeGood and the featured speakers for the wealth of insights and knowledge. Please feel free to direct any questions, comments, or feedback to me at jerald@u.yale-nus.edu.sg
