Jeffrey Effendi & Angel Chen: ‘Prototyping, pivoting and community engagement are everything’
We spoke with Jeffrey Effendi and Angel Chen from DrawHistory, a social enterprise that uses technology, design and art to amplify the story of change-makers. DrawHistory has worked with over 75 social good organisations ranging from grassroots community movements to multinational nonprofits.
Jeffrey is a social entrepreneur using the power of human-centred stories to deepen empathy and spark positive change in the world. He is the Founder and Head of Creativity at DrawHistory, and has advisory roles at the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community and Conscious Capitalism Australia. He is also a Fellow of the HIVE Global Leaders Program.
Angel is the Strategy Chief at DrawHistory, recently helping to launch 250 nonprofit internships, kick-start the first West Australian social impact co-working and events space, and raising $100,000 for people seeking asylum. She is also extremely passionate about working on solutions that empower women to reach their full potential.
What is DrawHistory and when did you launch?
DrawHistory is a brand agency dedicated to creating social good since 2015.
We work hard with nonprofits, social enterprises and purpose-driven entrepreneurs to activate change through storytelling.
These organisations exist to address some of the world’s most important social issues and we believe that stories — whether through brand or design — can spark change, redefine social conversations and strengthen human connection.
What did you set out to achieve when you founded DrawHistory?
Stories have the power to shape the conversations we have every day. It can rally people around a cause, change the perception of underserved communities and foster a culture of empathy. Many social good organisations unfortunately rarely have the resources and expertise to scale in this way.
We built DrawHistory to make sure all purposeful organisations are heard. In bringing their stories into the mainstream, we hope to make doing good as accessible for people as it is to purchase a can of Coke or pair of Nikes.
What kind of impact have you created to date?
It will always be challenging for a service-based business like DrawHistory to directly tether our work to the end impact, even though we’ve empowered our clients to do just that. However, a few milestones we’ve been able to achieve alongside them include:
- raising around $100,000 from crowdfunding in Australia’s largest campaign for people seeking asylum
- launching 200+ nonprofit internships that contributed almost 30,000 pro bono hours to community services
- kick-starting the first West Australian social impact co-working and events space
We also facilitate our flagship internship program each semester. The internship has been created to run more like an experiential course on storytelling for change. It’s designed to expose students from all faculties to social issues and broaden their approach on change-making. Over 85% of our interns have gone on to contribute in other community initiatives after their time with us.
How do you measure your impact?
There are many frameworks social enterprises use to measure their impact. We’ve used the Logical Framework Approach to primarily measure the work we do with our clients. The framework is intended to capture outcomes like increased resource mobilisation, presence and advocacy.
How could you more effectively measure this impact?
The success of a brand’s implementation depends on a number of things, one being the clients themselves who are driving it within their workplace. This is an output that we try to measure qualitatively over time (versus much easier quantitive monitoring of digital media engagement or increased proportion of funding raised from a particular activity like crowdfunding).
Measuring things like workplace culture and brand ambassadorship means that we would have to have the client’s approval on periodic check-ins after the final handover. This isn’t always ideal for clients and makes data collection challenging. Clients will also have different workflows or degrees of confidentiality, and that won’t always align with the set of documents we have in gauging their brand’s growth. We are, however, looking into ways to improve the standardisation of our qualitative indicators.
What is currently stopping you from being more effective?
Most businesses go through growing pains, and we’re seeing that now as we try to scale up in a saturated industry as a socially conscious studio.
It’s one thing to compete with traditionally larger agencies on things like RFP, team capability, resource availability and freelance creatives on pricing and flexibility. However, it’s a different challenge when you’re also unwavering in anchoring the business on creating good for the world. Your market size gets considerably smaller and much more unpredictable as you work with nonprofits that experience funding constraints and are subject to public policy.
What challenges have you had to overcome since you launched?
There are a couple that come to mind.
As social entrepreneurs, we initially thought that goodwill would get us through the door with tri-sector stakeholders, which obviously isn’t the case and reality runs contrary to that assumption. Corporates saw us as a ‘charity provider’ and nonprofits viewed brand and marketing as a footnote in their budget to prioritise service delivery. Trust was a major hurdle for us at the start and we had to prove ourselves early on. We now make it a habit to apply outside the box thinking and international best practice, using frameworks from places like Harvard and IDEO, to make sure we’re pushing the boundaries rather than relying on our ethos to do the selling.
The second major challenge we experienced was in educating the nonprofit sector on storytelling, particularly where we’re based. There’s not a lot of local precedent on nonprofits that have been catapulted to success through brand here. We realised that as one of the first agencies to adopt a social enterprise model, we had to first do the groundwork in educating and informing our clients before we could work with them. Brand projects like the recent Social Impact Festival at UWA have made it much easier for us to showcase the tangible value a cohesive design strategy can do.
What do you know now that you wish you knew when you got started?
Prototyping, pivoting and community engagement are everything. There’s a lot of guesswork in entrepreneurship. We would’ve saved ourselves a lot of time if we demystified our key audiences early on.
Having mindfulness and a posture of gratitude also helped to extend our run. I personally didn’t practice this when I first started, doing 14–16 hour days for months. It’s a surefire way to get burned out quickly. DrawHistory is only as good as its people and we can only make good decisions when we’re happy and healthy.
Do you have any advice for other social entrepreneurs hoping to start a similar venture?
If you’re an aspiring social entrepreneur, take the time to understand business. We’ve seen a lot of people set up their own ventures with good intentions only to return into full time roles a few months later due to lack of cash. Bring advisors in, consult mentors and build a team that is not only passionate about changing the world, but making that goal financially sustainable. There’s two components to social entrepreneurship: the outcomes you set out to create and the finance that’ll help you thrive in your pursuit of those outcomes.
For those who specifically want to start a similar venture, practice empathy. We have worked with almost 100 clients to date, from grassroots social enterprises to a global nonprofit, and in every engagement, our team could not have delivered successful strategies without first understanding the clients on the other side.
