An essay about MakeSense
Summer holiday time is a good environment to find new inspirations.
(Cliquez ici pour la version française)
One of them came as I was reading a book about CSR (well the book in itself was not that good) but there were a few very interesting pages on how IBM, in 2002, revamped its identity. Before looking for the perfect new slogan or tagline, they worked on a 5-page essay exercise to sharpen their thoughts.
Actually, it was somebody from the outside who wrote it, but who knew well the company and also had very good writing skills who wrote it. This 5-page essay led later to the famous “Smarter Planet”.
As we are working on the evolution of the MakeSense brand identity, I thought it could be a very interesting exercise to undertake, which could either inspire us and contribute to our work, or if not, just be fun to try! In addition, the amplitude, the diversity, the intensity of what we do and the evolution we are going through and building together is difficult to encapsulate in a sentence right away. And as we all love stories, why not start with a story :)
I shared the idea with Solène, the global community development coordinator, and then I asked Julie Seydoux if she would be interested by this exercise.
Julie Seydoux is an “old Gangster” from the Brussels Hotspot, she has been to many SenseCamps. She was working at a top communication agency before jobbing out, starting art studies and then joining MakeSense to become the very 1st Future of Waste community developer. She has met Gangsters all over Europe at that time. She has also contributed to many of CommonsSense, SenseSchool and SenseCube missions. Then she went back to her art studies, co-created an open movement of artists building collective pieces of art, and recently she started working in Lille helping socially-driven projects with their communication campaigns. Thank you Julie for having accepted!
Once we completed the essay and shared it within the fulltime MakeSense team, the immediate reaction in the team was an urge to share it with all of you.
So here it is! It is a 6-page essay so take some time to read it, and tell us what you think of it!
Cheers,
The essay is also available in French.
Blue heads
Youngsters started
Not too long ago, there was this thing called “MakeSense,” a kind of movement gathering a bunch of young people who wanted to put their skills wherever they could to help social entrepreneurs make a difference. They didn’t know yet what or how they would do, nor with whom, or how, but it seemed that they had some things in common.
Educated, traveling frequently, they often already had had the opportunity to come across meaningful projects or inspiring social entrepreneurs. And while meeting with them, they couldn’t help but try to come up with solutions, share their knowledge, skills, development ideas or visibility tools — in short, anything they had learned while studying — to try to help those entrepreneurs. They were getting involved as interns, as volunteers, or just while passing by when they were just travelling.
There wasn’t a core idea at the start, no notions of creating a new model for citizens to get engaged. In fact, the big story behind MakeSense was already happening in little stories at a smaller scale, the stories of individual commitments of young people in several countries — starting with France, the UK, US, and Germany. Some were students, some were looking for their first stable job, some were already in their first stable job, and some were already wandering around in the startup and social enterprise world.
Yes, they were already looking for social and environmental projects that could generate a positive impact, and they were asking to work for or to help those projects, sometimes in addition to their job, most of the time for free. Why? At this time, most of them wouldn’t have been able to tell you exactly, but they knew that they could learn a lot from it, more than what they could ever imagine. And maybe they weren’t planning on having a typical career, as they had seen how useful they could be in meaningful projects, or create their own.
None of them wanted to focus on just one project, nor get specialized in a specific topic, or replace a project with their own big idea. Curiosity was there. They were going to be moved and thrilled by multiple causes and stories. So, instead of seeking the one and only project of their lifetime, they were looking to doing something to help social entrepreneurs and to getting inspired, by helping them scale up and leverage their impact. Status, expertise, and stability would come after, but in the meantime, they just wanted to live their life fit around their convictions.
A designer angle
That’s the time when engagement of a singular crew of people (acquaintances, friends of friends, and their friends), started to take shape.
A graphic designer came up with blue heads to represent MakeSense. Since then, every manual, every story, would derive from this blue head concept. The blue heads encapsulate more than a logo. The core model of MakeSense was inside: it says in essence that when you put some people (+) simple action frames, you can produce ‘sense’ for the world (read: impact and meaning) as an output.
This designer angle was a good fit for the first members and also for the needs of social entrepreneurs who had ‘challenges’ to solve. It’s no surprise that the first event format invented by the members were workshops derived from design-thinking. It meant that business innovation was now opening itself to social and environmental enterprises, big or small, iteratively. Those workshops would as well allow people to connect in the real life.
Not just a network
During the first year, workshops multiplied in different cities and after a few months, simultaneously in several countries. That’s how the idea of community became more than just a concept. A theoretical hope had been proved right: a lot of different people who didn’t know each other before, and who had had access to different education, were drawing the same conclusion: they were ready to help social entrepreneurs and to get “on board”, whatever the board was.
Is there a recipe?
A weird definition of success
Whatever could be used to measure success, members knew that they were successful as the community kept on growing. Members expanded and improved the tools available for the community day after day. They started to create new branches of the organization, playing on the “Sense” brand identity, demonstrating the solidity of the model that was evolving right in front of their eyes. A bunch of guys drinking coffees with awesome entrepreneurs was about to turn into a full office loft in Paris and in several different cities around the world. No doubt MakeSense was successful, even if the criteria for success were still vague.
Indeed, the movement evolved without a strategic plan, but rather according to the members’ desires, interests in various topics, and formats of the events tested and proved successful as they evolved.
The best indicator of success of the community was the number of new Hotspots opening in distant countries and members traveling the world just to attend a SenseCamp. This meant that success had something to do with meeting new people, and it still does. For instance, every member of MakeSense has already lived an “aha!” moment, and sometimes several times:
A. On one level, when meeting other members, people just like you.
B. On another level, when meeting the first social entrepreneur that would inspire them for the rest of their life.
A. Playmates
With regards to mobilisation, talking about enthusiasm is key to understanding how the movement has spread in cities, along with formats and attitudes, that all keep on spreading today. But there is more to it than just how fast people connect, find buddies and don’t feel alone anymore in defending life choices towards impact-driven work. Enthusiasm in the community is part of the recipe.
MakeSense builds user journeys from a variety of places and causes through time. Its strength is to match engagement with skills, needs with mobilisation opportunities, everywhere. From the beginning, one of the key jobs within the MakeSense team was the “community developer,” who continuously releases new options for citizens to get engaged. Doing so, MakeSense provided thousands of sizeable life experiences.
This experience is both online and offline. Though only 1% of the users use the key features online — ideas, participation, co-organisation — it’s a multiple-impact 1%. Indeed, the one Hotspot to invent a SenseCamp format was about to make it possible for 10+ other countries to set up a similar “un-conference”, sometimes annually. Another example would be creativity workshops, be they successful or not in leading to solutions, which gather together a community of people in a city. They are replicable and are often modified by the community to generate various outputs, far beyond what the creator intended to in the first place. This has led to giving up authorship credit in the various tools created. A manifestation of this was when a community developer said: ‘just do one action, and you’re part of it’.
In fact the justification for the word ‘community’ is that any achievement at a point A unlocks another achievement at point B in space and time. It’s not a pure ‘mimetism’, but it’s based on this.
So, enthusiasm means more than coming across new buddies. Whatever the causes and economic sectors, MakeSense offers unlimited outputs for one single action. That’s why when you get engaged with MakeSense, you cannot know how big your impact will be in terms of building solutions, helping entrepreneurs, inspiring members and maybe changing their lives.
B. “Who’s your favorite social entrepreneur?”
Social Entrepreneurship is a mean, not a purpose. Most importantly, it makes members thrilled and motivated. Social entrepreneurs, no matter the scale of their project, embody a message saying: ‘It’s possible to bring social and business together, at any level’.
As individuals, we might well take a stand on this or against that (cf. climate change, poverty, exclusion…) but in the end, we find it super challenging to bring together social and economic goals when we look around us. When meeting social entrepreneurs who have taken up the bet, we can nourish the ideal that it can happen, join them in their adventure, and support their boldness.
Once you’ve met one of them, you have the living proof that combining social good and economic goals does work. Not theoretically, but in real life. That’s why each ‘first meeting’ with a social entrepreneur is unique. Social entrepreneurs force us to see ourselves in a future society that is capable of combining both. When you see a person in front of you doing so, as a citizen you feel an immediate obligation: you want to talk about these project to your relatives, and get engaged in your own way, provided that you’re given a chance to do so! You tell yourself: “I wish I had something to bring to these projects.” Because if you did have something to bring, it would mean that you too can align social and economic goals and live meaningfully!
A+B. Enthusiasm is contagious
The common denominator to initiating, hosting and maintaining mobilisation in the long run is enthusiasm.
MakeSense is not able to assess the impact its members have had on each project nor on its beneficiaries, and is not able either to rank those projects according to their impact. Impact assessment is so complex and specific as every social enterprise constantly brings a new vision, innovates on methodologies and builds its own indicators. As a consequence, how can we believe in and be convinced that those projects do have an impact? Where does our trust come from?
The only transversal measure of value used in the community is shared enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm is not a yes or no response, it’s a degree of astonishment when hearing about a project, a degree of curiosity to understand how it works, a degree of promptness to share it with our network, a degree of motivation to make it work or improve it. So, in our day-to-day lives, enthusiasm is assessable along the way, and serves us implicitly as a measure of a project’s value.
Therefore, a project’s value is not fixed according to one system or person, but is measured by a collective judgment. So if we take enthusiasm as a measure of value, it means that the community collectively values projects according to:
1. Their immediate and potential responses to existing social and environmental issues (a concept more likely to be fairly judged by citizens close to the impact);
2. The consistency of the models and actions taken by their founders, for now and in the future;
3. The capacity of the entrepreneurs to co-produce answers and associate citizens to their entrepreneurship dream (understanding that it matters to them in the first place), as we call it, offering a “challenge”.
Therefore, enthusiasm serves us both implicitly to evaluate social entrepreneurs’ projects and as a mean to demonstrate his/her ability to mobilize citizens. Enthusiasm is our musical instrument. It can be played everywhere in the world by whoever wants to.
Multiplied sense
New generations
The years have passed, and despite this, there is still the same enthusiasm from newcomers. Yet relationships, as well as the context, have changed.
Relationships have changed because they have multiplied, along with sectors, countries, for-profit and not-for-profit MakeSense entities. We could sum this up by saying there’s a professionalization going on.
Looking at the user paths, the model is still valid: it seems that on a regular basis, there are various generations of members getting involved and getting to know each other at the same time, sharing the same level of curiosity. Of course, compared with the first few years, there are fewer direct links between all the members, but there is still a strong group identity and recognition. This is like in a family: generations of friendships amongst the members build an infinite family with different interests, personalities and levels of mastery.
But there’s a turn to take
Today the blue heads look naïve and even stupid. Not only the pitch is not understood anymore, but also the keywords don’t fit anymore.
Because now ‘design’ is used in all business fields like never before. Old crocodiles think Steve Jobs was proved right, and even technocrats worship design. To them, it’s no surprise anymore if two dudes in a garage powered a revolution. And design thinking sounds ‘so 2010!’ So, how can we now guarantee that MakeSense is special?
Moreover, community is the new word for saying that you have a very pretty brand. Collaborative economy is the buzzword of conferences, and people now implicitly refer to ‘user communities”. It doesn’t mean open-source, nor rigid, bottom-up, etc. So, not everyone now understands that by community we mean real people, lives behind timelines, and singularities in the multitude.
Blue heads don’t work anymore!
MakeSense is waving goodbye to a very strong identity made of blue avatars, Gangsters and Hold-ups which had created such a strong spirit and sense of belonging.
‘Gangster’ is not very used in Mexico, nor promoted in Africa. And ‘hacking’ today can be derogatory. In fact, the term ‘Gangsters’ now refers to the ‘bunch of friends’ at the start. We have seen that the first members gathered around an opportunity to act and have built friendships along the way, and not the reverse. Yes, MakeSense is far more than a bunch of friends. What relates us to one another is the urge of doing, not of friendshipping! Friendship comes along with it.
Besides the blue heads, there is a real demand to clarify the user experience and the message. How can such a big organisation, with such big projects with governments, large companies, and high profile consultants, stay that unintelligible?
What do we do?
- “You can organize a Hold-up.”
- ”Sure! …Wait, what am I supposed to do?”
Democratization
The community and the internal teams of MakeSense have set in place efforts and worked day in and day out to overcome this impression of ‘nonsense’ (#paradox). We still haven’t achieved a clear message to make immediately understandable WHAT people can do with MakeSense.
This created a break between old members and new members, which should not be happening. Why are old members getting bored? Why are new members getting lost? From time to time, the crew of oldies are sometimes just going through the motions and newbees are forced to invite themselves in, worm their way in and accept a form of chaos. The demand of reassurance from the members and non-members addressing the community developers mostly concerns what they can do to get involved. That is to say, the question mark is about activity more than identity. So, talking about activity is a collective challenge, but it’s the core of the brand which is an action verb!
Empowerment
One of the axes of solutions is that members are supposed to empower other members with everything they have learned. But it’s true that this should come from the members themselves, and not only from the tools. If today it is clear for the members that we treat each other as teammates, we value kindness and empathy, celebration, collaboration, “upload as much as we download”… it is not as obvious that it’s the responsibility of every member to empower and train the others.
Lurking UN Sustainable Development Goals
The UN and its SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) are elements remote from daily life and unintelligible for most people. People aren’t involved in large NGOs decisions nor operations. Advocating for the UN’s objectives, is useful in institutional conversations but does not demonstrate what citizens at a local level can do. In the meantime, plenty platforms have kickstarted citizen engagement. How do we bridge the gap between global goals and local audiences?
Regarding NGOs, MakeSense has always kept some distance from traditional NGOs but collaborations seem to happen more often lately. We promote social entrepreneurship not as a purpose but as a mean. Most NGOs have an expert approach by theme. At MakeSense we have a combination of advocacy, development, volunteering, etc, for each cause or track.
No need to be a super-activist to understand! Activists might not find their way around at all in our model! But maybe, the very reason why we tend not to draw activists is the same reason why MakeSense can be successful as a brand : It’s more about you than you could ever imagine!
Prototyping your life
There’s the journey of the project. And there are other journeys, much more complex and even longer: the individual journeys of getting engaged.
It’s as if people were emerging alongside the projects, the workshops, the meetings. From the skills point of view, it is true that MakeSense helps find landmarks in an individual’s journey for skills such as creativity, business, design, communication but also self-trust. But the individual journey of getting engaged consists mostly in knowing how to turn one’s environment into a play field of challenges.
We see that engagement here is synonymous with a capacity to switch perspectives. It has nothing to do with putting forward the most effort, skills, or finding the best solution, but rather being able to react at the appropriate moment along with other people, and align your life with these reactions.
Once you consider your environment as a playground with limitless challenges to solve, there are no limitations, people, expertise, speed, or politics, to prevent you from trying to change things around you. The problem is that the following is obvious when you’ve changed your perspective, but not for other people:
- You can start anywhere: there is no universal goal that can provide you with directions and a starting point.
- The system you are in and its limitations should not prevent you from getting involved : there are challenges to be found, enthusiasm to be shared, stories to contribute to, people you can help — and that you are now sure of!
- And as you decide what to do, you will have more and more opportunities to jump in: you can’t anticipate what it will be about or who you’ll meet, but you know that you may “get on board” at any moment.
Knowing all that, experiencing it, feeling it, might change your journey of getting engaged for the rest of your life. You know you’ll have options for years to come. You recover a sense of possibility.
MakeSense changed the life of some members by providing them with a mirror of their professional and life choices, and tools to build them.
Because at the end of the day, we’re all asking for ourselves: By the way, what is “getting engaged on issues I care about” supposed to mean? MakeSense enables me to find an answer ‘for me, in my city, with my abilities’.
It starts with you
Take the example of social enterprise
Social entrepreneurship is the most challenging model for now in certain regards. It’s two opposites, making profit and benefiting all, united in one model. This model to grow businesses aligned with social issues, is also a framework that any member can apply in his or her life, job, company, eventually leading to some deep transformation.
MakeSense offers an implicit guarantee to its stakeholders: every action MakeSense develops, commits to or promotes is designed to create and/or support social and environmental impact in the long run. This collective line of conduct can be found in the community of members through their commitments, profiles and projects; and in the various MakeSense activities with the challenges they work on.
In the community, what we are sure of is that at MakeSense, we won’t do things if they don’t make sense (#no_bullshit): from meeting someone to solving a challenge, we are sure it is meant for really do something, at least for one of us. But how can we explain that?
Maybe like yoga did. Yoga used to be this hippie thing that turned real. Once you had experienced and understood it, you can explain it. An implicit confidence comes with auto-transformation. Once you understand this social engagement, you can navigate the whole MakeSense ecosystem. So how to achieve Yoga 2.0 for social engagement?
Making the most of barriers
It’s true that activists don’t find much room for their way of getting engaged with MakeSense. Because in a way, activists are already strongly positioned on what to do or not to do.
The audience we talk to is not familiar with such strong statements or does not identify itself to them. This audience is astonished about what social entrepreneurs want to accomplish, something cool and meaningful. There is a real surprise when acknowledging that such a model exists.
Solutions to the world’s issues are being cooked up by social entrepreneurs, who make them emerge and make them viable. Challenge-solving events are the leverage point to creating more innovation and social engagement. More democratization has been achieved by more communicative tools and events.
But we are now sure of the fact that solutions not only emerge from one side or the other but from the bridges between all of the sides.
The importance we give to social entrepreneurs says something about our vision of the world. About what we want to bring as a change. But social enterprise as such is not the good entry gate in this world for the curious ones.
What should we tell to this audience to make them ask ‘what should I know if I want to make a difference?’. The answer will be getting to know what exists, your qualities, your skills and how you connect with others. As an invitation, the response could be: “you don’t yet know how much you are able to do!”
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We are currently assessing MakeSense’s impact on volunteers and social entrepreneurs. If you have been or are a MakeSense volunteer or a social entrepreneur who received some support from MakeSense, your feedback is so important to us! The survey takes only 5 minutes!
Survey for a volunteer -> https://tinyurl.com/surveyvolunteermks
Survey for a social entrepreneur -> https://tinyurl.com/surveysocent
