Social entrepreneurship has a home on many websites on the web, so why are entrepreneurs still sleeping outside? If we really believe they have a role to play in changing development and reforming how we conceptualize philanthropy, then we have to respond to the dangers of being internet homeless.
Can you spare some change?
I mean it’s cold out and I can’t even buy a retweet.
Do you know what it’s like trying to keep these ideas for change warm while you walk by overlooking me?!
Enough is enough.
LISTEN UP! Hands off the keyboard and where I can see them.
You MUST create a place where our community can thrive.
Don’t allow change to be held hostage. Here are my demands:
- Balance Content with Community – If we really wanted to encourage good, we would not only equip people with great content, but balance it with peer to peer interaction. Writing a blog and inviting users to comment does not constitute a discussion. We need more dynamic content shaped with and for the participants. This means creating places where people can meet, collaborate and complain. Instead, the over emphasis on content leaves us buried in reading and hurting for connections with fellow change makers.
- Let Me Plug & Play – We’re social entrepreneurs. Why isn’t it easier to plug into your site and promote what I’m already doing offline? There should be a framework we can use to celebrate our ideas, discuss our cause, and utilize tools to better our enterprises. Furthermore, sites should be more social media friendly. We have blogs, the obligatory facebook, twitter, flickr, youtube, and endless other accounts we can’t remember we signed up for. Remember entrepreneur is also slang for over-worked. Updating all of that, enacting a business plan that saves the world, and transferring our content to your site isn’t realistic.
- Be Less Trendy & More Practical – Everything trendy is not helpful. I’m all for promoting social entrepreneurship, but we have to evaluate and balance the content we’re publishing. Why is there so little content that gets us from point A to B? We can’t overlook the process. I’m sure I’d get internet famous if only wrote blogs with titles like, “Top 10 Books on Social Entrepreneurship” or “Top Reasons To Spend Your Startup Budget on a Flight to Our Conference.” Sure the site gets traffic, but I’m not any closer to finding funding for my project or bringing my design to the market. Nope. How can I progress when most of my resources are telling me, “What you’re doing is cute, but read the required reading and pay to come to our conference—THEN you can be one of us.” As strongly as we promote the field, we should be making sure we’re ready to nurture newcomers by helping them understand the process required to make their social venture successful and ushering them into the community mentioned above.
- Keep It Real–Real Inclusive – People who are successful already are NOT the only ones who deserve your attention. Focusing only on success stories neglects that we’re a motley crew of everything from PhDs to wikipedia degrees and doesn’t necessarily reflect all the realities of entrepreneurship. Sometimes being an entrepreneur sucks. Who can you expect to help when you can only grasp the puffs of lint in your pocket and the smell of ramen makes you nauseated? We should be honest about struggles and failures as much as we flaunt the triumphs. When you make a place for people to be honest about their experience, your online community will thrive.
Spare change. Don’t let “friendly little startups” like mine, turn into “friendly little stickups.” Help us change the world and I promise nobody will get hurt.
~Dwight
Twitter Updates
4 August 2009 at 5:53 pm
Hi Dwight,
Thanks for this great post! I love the tone in which you wrote it. I even did instinctively take my hands off my keyboard!
I think one of the most challenging things I face in my work is to combine the online and offline components. As you can see from my FB, Twitter and FS profiles I post A LOT of information. This is because I feel limited as to what I can actually do with the information except participate in viral communications and spread the word about what I come across. But you brought up a great point with balancing that with actual tangible work on the ground. This is something that I feel really challenged by and I am sure so do loads of other people.
One of the things that we are doing to try and combat this is to create OMSEI- Online Marketplace for Social Enterprise Investing. This is ideally going to be a site that connects people and facilitates interactions (both financial and non-financial services) to help connect people who need support with those who can offer support.
While Twitter and Facebook and Youtube and so are are limited, applications such as Sharaholic for example, are emerging that help to bridge some of the gaps with this.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about proposed solutions for this in a practical way?
Thanks again for the post, Dwight!
5 August 2009 at 7:59 am
OMSEI is a definite need and I appreciated the discussion on this in the forum. I didn’t really address this in my post. Mostly because there seems to be a sort of push for this with what changefusion is doing and groups like beunreasonable. What worries me is I haven’t found a comfortable place for social entrepreneurs to have a community. The closest I have seen is futureshifters. I must say I log in very frequently and I’m not a fan of ning sites. So I’m all about stirring this place up and making more connections here and we’ll keep discussing more ways to do that. The potential to connect with other people here is what makes FS attractive to me. The great content is a plus, but there’s already so many sources for that on the web. I would like to see FS have it’s own hashtag and have some forums about people who’d like to share content via twitter etc. So we’ll talk, I have a bunch of ideas and I’m beginning to work on some info products to make joining the conversation easier for beginners.
7 August 2009 at 7:19 pm
Your lovely post points directly to the ripeness in the Better World Building sector for a new project I’m planning to start working on in September. I look very much forward to reading more about your ideas, and invite you to follow me on Twitter @ChristinasWorld as I set about unleashing some of mine.
8 August 2009 at 12:43 am
Hey Dwight! As I’ve told you before, I love this post – thank you for it! I can identify with just about everything you’ve said in your post. I definitely agree that the social entrepreneur community needs to be more open, and organizations, individuals, and/or websites need to be more encouraging and guide those who do care to actions that cultivate their skills. Hopefully this message will resound with others and this can be changed.
8 August 2009 at 5:00 pm
@Christina Thank you. I’d like to hear more about your project as it develops and look forward to following you on twitter.
@Roz Thanks for all your feedback. Connecting with you has helped a tremendous amount to solidify some of my ideas. I hope we can collaborate on somethings in the future and setup something to encourage the type of discourse to give social entrepreneurs a great community to build from.
9 August 2009 at 10:58 pm
Great post. Reminds us that we ARE still part of a community, even in the absence of all the usual trappings that surround one. Personally, I find it uplifting to open my head up to other free thinkers. I’ve thought outside the box all my life and that has often led to problems.
I’m tired of the hype — I’m exhausted from being accosted on all sides by the scams and shams folks try to run on the internet. Let’s be honest here — survival is not easy. Everyone needs to make a living. Don’t sit there and offer me the “secret to life” and then just feed me drivel from your personal Cuisinart — I don’t want to feed the world on drivel. I threw out my Cuisinart! Give me something useful. Help me climb my own personal mountain and I’ll help you scale yours! That’s the way it works, folks.
Staying connected is not nearly the challenge it was even 10 years ago. I wonder what it will be like 10 years from now. It’s that sense of joy that comes with exploration that makes getting up in the morning worthwhile. If you don’t have it in your life, you should — and there are (obviously) many of us out here who’d love to help you. It’s a platitude, but true: either you’re part of the solution or you’re part of the problem. Pick a side — any side. Then pick up a (virtual) shovel and get to work!
11 August 2009 at 5:06 pm
Thank you Karalyn for the great feedback and congrats on getting rid of that cuisinart. Can’t get bogged down with all the trappings the world is trying to sale us to distract us from being unhappy. I appreciate your honest sharing too. I keep reading it over and over it again, it’s so encouraging!