Why we stopped blogging: an explanation
I’m sure you’re all thinking ‘Hey Project Red Stripe, why the silence?’. To tell you the truth we wrestled a bit (not literally) before we stopped writing our blog. At the time we certainly believed that - as Ludwig said in his blog post -‘going public now would almost certainly kill our idea’. Going under the radar has allowed us to investigate a sector which is totally out of the Economist Group’s remit. We thought our business model was so different we’d instantly receive thunderbolts from on high.
Why? Because we wanted to start a not-for-profit. Then, imagine if our pitch hadn’t worked and we had to kill the site. It would have been embarassing for The Economist, we thought. This is slightly a case of bigcompany-itis - not wanting to try something new because we might look stupid. Going silent gave us time to work on the idea, making it rock solid before presenting it. We needed this time to concoct a business case for having a not-for-profit because The Economist Group - and The Economist itself - is sceptical of corporate social responsibility, reasoning, not unfairly, that shareholders can decide themselves how to spend their own money charitably.
Working under cover has given us advantages. It has meant we could engage potential stakeholders and partners without having to manage a community. It has meant we could change our direction a lot, without having to explain our about turns. We have been free to switch from a not-for-profit model to being a social enterprise, without worrying about loss of face.
Conversely, it would have been interesting to have tried to do this in the open. Instead of having to research our ideas from scratch, we could have asked for pointers from our community. Instead of having to find key partners, they could have been suggested to us. As opposed to having to torturously work out whether you can make money from doing good, we would have heard from a social entrepreneur.
Once we decided that our business could do good, without being a not-for-profit, then the only reason we would keep quiet was if someone pinched our idea. That’s a risk we are willing to take because our key asset in this is something that is unique to The Economist Group and that is our community and our content.
All I will say about the idea is that I am very, very, very excited about it indeed.
June 27th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
We’re back!
June 27th, 2007 at 11:19 pm
Hmmm. Interesting that you decided to adopt the closed approach: “As opposed to torturously work out whether you can make money from doing good, we would have heard from a social entrepreneur”. Except, of course, that social entrepreneurs tend to have the social mission as their primary aim, with the money they make going to help make that mission / objective a reality. Perhaps “making money AND doing good” might be more accurate.
Also intrigued by the sentence “We have been free to switch from a not-for-profit model to being a social enterprise”. Except that definitions of social enterprise tend to talk about reinvesting profits back into the business….just like most third sector / charity / “non-profit” organisations do to survive and build reserves. Except they tend to call it ’surplus’.
And such an old-fashioned view of CSR: frankly, any business that isn’t incorporating social and environmental concerns (internalising the externalities, as someone put it) into their core strategy in the future is destined to suffer. CSR long since ceased to be about ‘which charity to give money to’. The more forward thinking private-sector organisations know that they need to learn from the third sector because of many converging issues: regulation, (graduate) recruitment, consumer pressure, new ’social’ markets, and so on.
Again, and I’m sure the idea is very exciting…(although if it is a groovy new social networking-related site, as a previous post tends to suggest, it’s one of a coming wave….), seems like an open approach might have helped puncture a few myths, and pin down some detail.
Personally, I’m delighted to read (I stumbled across this post by accident) of these sorts of debates happening at an Economist initiative. Your post also says interesting thing about being ‘entrepreneurial’ within an existing organisation with all its cultures, reputation and process. So I will be intrigued as to the idea that emerges, and wish you the best of luck with it. With such a powerful brand behind you, I’m sure there’s every chance of success.
June 28th, 2007 at 9:34 am
What a brilliant idea - congratulations. Looking forward to seeing and hearing more about it in due course.
Matt
June 28th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Yeah, looking forward to it.
June 29th, 2007 at 5:35 am
I hope I can be excited about your project or idea when you decide that it is ready to be publized. If I may be direct, while I can understand your team’s concern of “someone pinched our idea”, it should not be your overriding concern.
Although I don’t have stats to support my claim but I don’t see a lot of ideas pinching from cambrian house’s monthly idea competition (ideaWarz).
I hope your project will do well. I am interested to see how an essentially closed and internally developed system or idea will fair in a Web 2.0 world.
Best of luck,
Kempton