Open Source Social Innovation
Last week Bill Gates entered the digital publishing world by establishing the Gates Notes - an online evolution of his now annual January letter sharing his thoughts and learnings on the progress of the issues central to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It’s interesting and symbolic that the next chapter of his life story would include an “open source” platform for sharing IP on social innovation.
It’s not that he’s such a great writer or that this will yield hints for the release of a revolutionary cause-related software program. But rather he’s put out there an experimental platform for sharing insights that might be absorbed and advanced by others.
Refresh Everything
It’s been a number of years since we have seen any initiative lead by a power brand in the arena of corporate social responsibility. This Wednesday, Pepsi launches one of the biggest corporate social responsibility efforts that we’ve seen since the launch of (RED) in 2006 with the Pepsi Refresh Project.
Good CSR takes strategic development and an early glimpse tells us that Pepsi has hit a home run. Why? Here’s ten reasons Pepsi looks to have gotten it right.
- Brilliant name leveraging what Pepsi is and what the initiative suggests (an innovative, short term experiment). It creates expectations for the new and unthinkable. It allows for evolution of concept. It feels lively and substantial all at the same time.
- Beautifully executed. The allure of the web site demonstrates this was no Q4 afterthought. Great colors, great graphics, modern, polished and very navigable.
- Simple. They’ve managed to take a rather complex process and reduce it to content that makes sense and leaves you without questions. Make no mistake, this is really hard to do.
- Momentum builder. This isn’t a one-time effort. They have invested US $20 million to support this initiative over the course of 12 months. This will create visibility for the brand and will generate hype for the process, the brand and the winning organizations, well beyond campaign time.
- Understated. Pepsi is doing this instead of a Super Bowl ad spend. Do they fall all over themselves telling you that? No, they focus on the opportunity. That’s finesse. Confidence. Leadership.
- Scope. This isn’t simply focused on an area where you’d expect Pepsi to focus their CSR efforts. Going beyond water and community issues, the Pepsi Refresh Project paves the way for six different avenues of social impact. Your issues. Your ideas. Your choice.
- Smart messaging. Consumers are inherently optimistic and respond to positive messages. Yet we are living in difficult times and marketers need to be careful. With “Refresh Everything”, Pepsi manages to communicate a uniquely appropriate brand and product message that aligns with a believable promotional effort that is spot-on relevant.
- Digital advocacy. Presented online, promoted online, managed online - this campaign will be endlessly sticky with infininte opportunities for leveraging social media. Participants will be given the tools to promote it. There is transparent tracking. This campaign marries the best of social media and entrepreneurial advocacy.
- Urgency. It is not one giant long-running campaign. It is twelve individual months of contests. There is a stopwatch on the main page that is counting down to launch, to enter, and to vote. And grant winners will receive their funding in an astounding four weeks from each month’s announcement of winners. Pepsi means business!
- Appeal. This isn’t drippy do-goodersim. This is about Pepsi as the facilitator of actionable ideas. This is about the consumer using Pepsi as the platform. This is relationship building and brand leverage at its best.
Rent your way out of global warming
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The best inventions make our lives easier. Often so simple in concept as to be beautiful and brilliant, these break-through ideas become an “overnight” success when a confluence of factors intervene to create a perfect storm of benefits to the customer. Is Rentcycle on the verge of such success?
Rentcycle officially launched in October 2009. The brainchild of founder Tim Hyer, their mission is to facilitate the business of renting “stuff”. Recognizing that the process of renting equipment is both painful to customers and highly inefficient to business, Rentcycle developed a model that creates efficiencies through online scheduling, tracking and inventory management. Customers can get info, pricing and check availability of the equipment they want to rent while niche boutique business owners are finally able to create a streamlined rental process that has been up til now, a giant time suck due to the laborious manual processes of every step.
The Greenest Big Companies in America
This week Newsweek’s cover story promotes an exclusive ranking of “The Greenest Big Companies in America”. This is an important moment in time. In 2006, Vanity Fair was among a few high profile publications to introduce entire annual issues to the green movement and their readership was reported to have been the lowest of the yearly issues.
Fast forward three years and six months later, the introduction of Newsweek’s list marks an important moment in time. Joining the annually released lists of the Best 100 Companies to Work For (Fortune), the 100 Best Global Brands (BusinessWeek) and The Largest 500 Companies (Fortune), the (presumably) annual list represents a palpable and permanent shift in business ethics and operations. Transparency is a leading value of those engaged in the green movement but it is still interesting to read that 70% of the companies participating voluntarily provided the data necessary to compile the list (otherwise utilizing publicly available information).
The HUB Bay Area - a place for change makers
The large gathering at HUB Bay Area’s pre-launch gathering last night at the Brower Center in Berkeley was impressive.
Within the short one hour window that I was there, I met someone from Global Issues Network – an organization dedicated to introducing youth to the power of networking and conversation to solve the world’s most pressing issues; from the Global Micro-Clinic Project – an organization helping economically depressed and conflict ridden areas form partnerships to prevent and manage disease; from Silicon Valley Bank – banking for innovative ideas; and from Solutions – an enterprising LEED certified collaboration of architects offering “new thinking” to help re-architect problems and find solutions.
Change Starts with your Underwear
PACT underwear launched this week with a campaign that demonstrates choosing wisely doesn’t have to accompany images of melting ice caps and flooding deserts. In fact the message of humor may just be it’s ticket to success - that and a potentially irresistible fit and feel.
With an underwear expert on staff and Yves Behar on the team, mastermind of the Fuse Project a widely acclaimed industrial design firm with products to its credit including One Laptop Per Child and the Jawbone headset, PACT may have the product to back up its initial appeal.
A quick read of the web site reads like many start-ups - casual, fun, informative. 10% of each sales goes to non-profits. And in a nod to the transparency indicative of the category, they tell you what they’ve figured out (just about everything) and what they haven’t (how to “recycle” the underwear when you’re done). They say there’s a video coming in September. Watch for more revealing information on PACT underwear then.
image credit: PACT
Sustainability: Government, Business and… Brands?
There are many cynics out there that critique and question the future of sustainable products and businesses. It’s easy to side with them, mostly because it’s difficult to understand what comprises a “sustainable” product which in turn creates a domino chain of skepticism about achievability. We don’t endorse what we don’t understand. The industry is in self-defining mode and most of us lack the degrees in chemistry, biology, natural sciences or any other course of study that might support our inclination to trust what marketers tell us is “safe” and what is not.
Mobilizing Change
It was a trifecta of inspiration for all social entrepreneurs this evening. The founders from three bay area start-ups gathered in HUB’s first bay area home in front of a sold-out crowd to talk about their origins, give the audience - and each other - advice and insights on the “secret sauce” for creating impact.
Set up as a “201″ panel discussion, the moderator asked the audience and participants to be honest, avoid soliloquys and “pitches” and stick to the business of user-worthy advice. Matt Flannery, co-founder of Kiva.org, Steve Newcomb, co-founder of Virgance (new owners of this blog), and Ben Rattray founder of Change.org then answered questions designed to help fledgling business idealists through the realities of what it takes to rally social change.
Testimonies of a Culture in Transition
Chip Rees is a storyteller. With his firm Witness The Way We Live, he uses both audio, video and other forms of multi-media to help clients better understand their customers and share the stories of their lives for the purposes of creating better brand relationships. He does this for a living.
What he does “for fun” is use these same storytelling techniques to record history and facilitate conversation on the very real and complex issues of our day – struggles that have become storytelling lore but have real implications for inspiring change. He calls this experimental effort The Dilemmas Project, a multi-media platform for engaging citizen participation around the ongoing dilemmas ordinary people are facing every day.
Composting: inspiring behavior change
Last week, San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom passed into law an ordinance that requires all residential and commercial building owners sign up for recycling and composting services. Composting services?
Yes, joining other similar programs in Seattle, Boston, San Diego and Pittsburgh, residents will be required under threat of fine to contribute their yard waste and food scraps. The fines aren’t meant to aggravate, rather Mayor Newsom is interested in incentivizing compliance.
On the face of it, the composting effort seems a bit complex in its implementation and infrastructure. Or is it? In actuality it’s fairly straightforward, it simply requires a mindset shift with an extra few pieces of equipment at the homestead and office. Of course we all groan when we think we might have to throw our banana peels into a separate bin. But once we’re used to it, and our city is at 90% waste efficiency with community gardens, urban parks and micro-farms benefiting, what’s to deter us from making a little extra effort and re-train ourselves now?
Herein lies the challenge. The opportunity for San Francisco will be to imaginatively engage us in a herculean effort to educate AND motivate compliance.
The “Reduce Reuse Recycle” campaign has gained some strong ground, thanks not the least in part to its proficient use in elementary school these days (what parents have not heard their kid come home chanting this?). It’s a catchy phrase with an easy icon that we all recognize. And the three descriptive words help us understand at a base level both our actions and the big picture. No small feat.
And there have been other more entertaining efforts. The “Got Milk” campaign introduced by the California Milk Processor Board in 1993 has been credited with increasing milk sales nationwide. The San Francisco based ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners created that one. And remember the California Raisins? Introduced in 1986 by the California Raisin Advisory Board, another top agency Foote, Cone and Belding created that one.
This is not to say that all campaigns need professional-grade characters with narratives to entertain us. The digital world has actually provided us with a rich array of channels that may be employed. And companies like Virgance have shown us that there is no limit to creative methods of employing social activism.
San Francisco, like many cities, is not exactly rife with cash to employ a hot ad shop to devise its strategy, but hopefully this trend-setting city will get resourceful and seek creative solutions and partners for engaging and motivating positive behavior change.
