How to attract 3000 users to this site?
beachange.org is looking for people with maximum diversity of backgrounds (business, engineering, arts, social sciences, healthcare, etc.) to contribute in their own way to changing the world through starting successful social enterprises and generating innovative ideas that have potential to become one.
Why is it a challenge?
Because Be a Change has never happened before and even the concept of Social Entrepreneurship doesn't really exist in Finland yet. Basically, we need to attract a lot of users from scratch.
Whom does the challenge concern?
All Be a Change participants (competitors, other delegates, facilitators, organizers, partners and jury)
Why is it important to combat?
- Without enough users we get neither enough ideas nor enough diverse participants to the camp to reach our goal of starting at least 3 successful social enterprises and generating hundreds of innovative ideas that have potential to become one. The few participants will be disappointed and spread word about it, which will make it even more challenging to promote Be a Change 2009.
- If we get 3000 users to this site, about 300 of them will actively comment and post challenges and ideas. These challenges and ideas will serve as input for the innovation process that is gone through in the agenda at the camp. With well-prepared input, this process can generate innovations that are ready for market. That means that after the camp, much more than three businesses can start. 300 active commentators can also give valuable input for competition teams about their business plan drafts.
- Using the site will also encourage users to apply for the camp. This enables us get 140 delegates with maximum diversity to the camp. Together they can create high-potential innovations and help competitors with making their business plans excellent.
- 3000 people, who are interested in social entrepreneurship, in the same community with experts on world and business issues and companies that want to strive for societal impact is a very powerful tool for changing the world. Who/what are the most important contributors? Those who already have "bought" Be a Change and those with a lot of networks to people who are bored with their job, socially innovative but unable to start a business, searching for a meaning or otherwise potentially interested in social entrepreneurship.
Sorry for flooding the challenge with irrelevant messages. Feel free to delete, admins & Meri :)
But I want to confess I had an hidden agenda. The point I would like to make is: Would it clarify things if one would talk about responsible entrepreneurism = the good old CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility, in the entrepreneurial context? Deciding on an ad hoc basis whether a company is social or not would be difficult, unfair and would load the term with a predefined value set. The same problem as the government deciding what is social and what not. Is our (western) value set the one we should base our definition of social entrepreneurism on?
=)
Wikipedia the day once again: =)
Social entrepreneurship is the work of a social entrepreneur. A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Whereas a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur assesses success in terms of the impact s/he has on society. While social entrepreneurs often work through nonprofits and citizen groups, many work in the private and governmental sectors.
===> So any company can be a social enterprise in this sense. It is the mindset of the entrepreneur that counts, no matter what his business is. Correct? =)
Hey Tomi,
How should one distinguish between "normal" enterprises and "social" enterprises?
As far as I understand the basic idea of capitalism is to allow people make money by solving different needs instead of relying on a huge top-down governmental planning model.
Is Chiquita a social enterprise as it allows thousands of farmers earn a living? Would the Fair Trade organization be more of a social enterprise, and why or why not? Would a carpenter be a social entrepreneur if he sold good-value products at low prices for people with limited cash? How should he alter his business logic to be a social entrepreneur?
The term social enterprise seems to have millions of different explanations living in the wild world of the web!
Hello all,
I was wondering is there any chance that there would be email notifications on the forum messages, e.g. I can choose, if I want a notification when somebody answers my message.
Otherwise it is easy to forget to use the forum or read the answers.
YC
The Finnish definition of "social enterprise" (sosiaalinen yritys) is crooked. It basically states that you can have a social enterprise if:
a) you are approved to the registry and
b) (you can be approved if...) you have at least 30% disabled or long-term undemployed people working in your organization
This has nothing to do with the original idea of social entrepreneurship that is to "do good and do well" or "use business tools to solve social challenges and make money out of it (to do more good)".
My frustration written in Finnish here.
-Tomi
I think contacting current social entrepreneurs is a great idea to start. One might want to have a look at the Registy of Social Enterprises by the Ministry of Labour @ http://www.tem.fi/index.phtml?s=2567 (and perhaps more info on the finnish laws concerning social enterprises @ www.sosiaalinenyritys.fi ) This registry includes all companies in Finland that are approved as "social enterprises" by the finnish law.
*The URL above is correct but clicking on the link for some reason adds 4 extra characters at the end of the URL and therefore clicking on the link doesn't work. Just write the complete url or remove the extra 4 chars after clicking.
First priority: everybody in core organizing committee puts by the end of June some content here, so that the site is interesting for the first visitors. Second priority: inviting users who potentially have many challenges and ideas to post and who would likely be hooked to the site already on an early stage.
More ideas:
- Contacting all that can be seen as social entrepreneurs in Finland and inviting them to contribute to the content. SEs could be found e.g. in www.dodo.org
- Using the same profile-completeness feature as in LinkedIn. It shows how complete your profile is and tells what to do to get it more complete (more information about you or more contribution to the discussions)
- Making it possible to contribute from phone or laptop or a computer stand at bars or cafes, so that you can post ideas where you get them (Photoplay, Starbucks, Waynes coffee).
- Organizing live chats with different themes: brainstorming around a certain (top-rated) challenge, developing a certain (top-rated) idea
- Organizing evenings where community members can meet each other. Branding Be a Change community with bees:
-> Defining working principles for organizing, virtual collaboration and camp e.g. like this: Bee pioneer. Bee transparent.
-> Giving each community member a bee name (it could be visible in the profile and if you see that someone hasn't got a bee name yet, you could propose one), e.g. Bee Happy, Bee Sexual, Bee Straight, Bee Zee, Bee Sness, Bee hippie etc.
-> A Bee application in Facebook
-> Desktop Bee - you write a short presentation about yourself and speficy, how many presentations about other bees per day you want to randomly appear on your desktop
-> PR splash in Taiteiden yö - dressing in Bee suits and releasing living bees with small signs saying beachange.org (if possible to make so that the bees don't suffer)
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