Yearly Archives: 2011

Oh! Mr Porter, what shall I do?

There has been much talk since the election of the Coalition Government about the role of social enterprise and what a good thing social enterprise is in general. Some of this debate has centred on social enterprises working with the private sector to deliver services in such a way that delivers valued social as well as economic outcomes. This approach fits within the concept of ‘shared value’ currently being promoted by Michael Porter of the Havard Business School who argues that private companies can enhance their competitive advantage while at the same time advancing the societies they operate within. Many large companies have been toying with this kind of idea over the last few years, rebranding their CSR policies into new sustainability ones. The more innovative policies have already moved away from ‘old style’ approaches to CSR that tended to be paternalistic and ‘charitable’ in their ethos to programmes that deliberately seek to deliver ‘community benefit’ as part of their core business. A recent report by the United Nations even reckoned that some of the world’s largest companies are focussing less on short term shareholder value and more on the value provided to customers as well as to the environment and society at large. As social enterprises we all have to be enterprising in delivering our social purpose whilst at the same being hard headed about running our businesses. It’s not surprising therefore that an increasing number of social enterprises are finding themselves in conversations and relationships with much larger private companies about how they could work together to create opportunities for ‘shared value’ through new approaches to delivery. For the companies involved these kinds of conversations can be hard as they will often challenge the normal patterns of thinking and working.

Here at Renaisi we are engaged with a number of very large companies having these conversations.  A purist may not label them all strictly ‘shared value’ approaches but each is clearly aimed at delivering greater community/social benefit through the development of a new or existing service, while at the same time enhancing the competitive advantage of the company involved. All of these conversations are on-going and could lead to a range of joint ventures and services – or not – such is the process of innovation! But even at this point it’s worth sharing what we have learned so far and what we would pass on to those who may be thinking of boarding the ‘shared value’ express. The next line in the song by Marie Lloyd: “I want to go to Birmingham and they’re taking me on to Crewe” is a timely reminder that without careful planning and hard work you could easily find yourself somewhere you didn’t want to be!

We’ve been lucky I think in that the people we are working with at the moment are all motivated with the very best of intentions. They understand that in delivering additional community benefit in the areas they are seeking to deliver services gives them a competitive advantage and a better product – in short they get it. They may not fully understand the complexity of achieving it but they share our view of trying. In our experience not all potential partners share these motivations and it’s worth testing these out before you leap.

Getting to the right person

However even if the company, or the person from the company, shares your vision about what could be done, actually getting it done is no easy feat. This is where, what I’ve seen elsewhere called, the ‘social intrapreneaur’ is important. It’s the individual relationship that is vital to moving things forward. It’s someone on the inside of these large organisations who will promote the idea and approach and has the authority to make things happen.  The larger the organisation the more difficult job this person has particularly if it has to challenge long established views and prejudices. Even if the company has a written strategy that supports a ‘shared value’ approach it doesn’t meant that everyone else will have either heard of it or support it. You need to give this person all the support you can. They often will become the connecting person introducing others into the conversation and making sure the initiative is supported as it makes its way through the corporate bureaucracy.

Having a clear vision

Whatever project you are embarking on you have to have a clear destination – at the outset anyway! If you have a new service idea that needs a private sector partner you have to make sure it can help them reach their destination a bit quicker and in a bit more style whilst getting you where you want to be.  This means understanding their language, their pressures, their targets and business culture as best you can so you can make sure your project develops ‘with the grain’ and its benefits to the company’s objectives are clear. You’ll have to accept there will be a few twists and turns on the way and the final destination may look a little different to what you expected but as long as it delivers the outcomes you wanted that should be ok.

Size matters

You should always understand that this usually is a ‘David and Goliath’ relationship. More often than not the social enterprise, like Renaisi, is small while the private company involved is often global. This is not an equal partnership in many ways. The large private company will not understand or appreciate that your development resources are limited and you have no vast pool of management trainees or interns to support business development.  You may sometimes find yourself introducing one part of a large private organisation to one of its other parts. Very large corporations, often themselves made up of numerous individual companies, have very little in the middle designed to join things up. Do not get frustrated by this. By acting as a ‘connector’ you are adding value and understanding.

But this imbalance does throw up challenges. Any enterprise has to innovate to prosper. Innovation requires investment in terms of time and money so for small enterprises this is an expensive but crucial activity. It’s important to lever in resources where possible to make sure you can do this – you cannot be in a position of relying on the private partner to make all the running in terms of development – nor should you want to. As ideas turn into action and action turns into concrete proposals the focus will turn to the form of commercial structure best suited to take the partnership forward. This is critical. Making sure that you are seen as an equal partner and risk and reward is shared proportionately is hard work. A small risk to a very large partner may be a huge risk to a small social enterprise. Making sure you have a sound and credible business plan, that is shared between partners goes without saying.

It’s a slog

Finally, you must be prepared for a lot of hard work most of which you will not get paid for – but that is the nature of entrepreneurship – the pursuit of opportunity without recourse to resources. I’m not sure what Marie Lloyd, the Hackney Music Hall singer famous for singing ‘Oh! Mister Porter’ would have made of the Havard Professor’s theories or he of her rather scandalous reputation. But the song does provide some timely advice for social enterprises involved in ‘shared value’ conversations with private companies. If you don’t want to end up in the wrong place – knowing your destination, making the right connections, having a copy of the timetable and getting to know your travelling companion well will mean you have a fruitful and enjoyable journey and greatly improve your chances of success.

By Rob Pearce, Director of Strategy

By Clive Tritton

SHOCKED is a word I’ve seen more than any over the past few days.

And whilst I agree the scenes of looting and people intent on destroying their own communities are shocking and disturbing, these actions really don’t come as a surprise.  We all know there’s a small minority of people out there who are so detached from their communities that they have no regard whatsoever for the impact of their actions. Normally, this manifests itself in nothing more than petty crime and we can tut and move on. Now though, these individuals have raised the stakes.

The questions being posed in many arenas is whether the week’s events are only the beginning given the cuts in public funds for projects geared towards bringing the disengaged back into society. Similarly, many of the people interviewed in recent days have talked of blaming the parents. The point they’re missing is that, in the most deprived parts of London, many families have been excluded for generations.

That is why the work of organisations at the heart of our communities is so important. I am reminded of an impressive young man who came to talk to a group of professionals about his experiences with a social enterprise that Renaisi works with. Having been in trouble for most of his life and part of a local gang, he was persuaded to take up an offer of training in a social enterprise restaurant. As a result he obtained a job at the Savoy. His presentation was impressive to say the least. When someone asked what his friends thought of his new job at a fancy hotel he went very quiet before saying, ‘they’re not really my friends any more’. I suspect he hasn’t been rioting over the last few days – I can’t speak for his former friends.

Of course it’s not all been doom and gloom. From the now iconic image of Hackney resident  Pauline Pearce publicly standing up to and condemning the actions of hooligans, to the rise of ‘Riot Wombles’ determined to help with the cleanup and the numerous fundraising campaigns set up by every day people, there’s a sense of community spirit across London that can only be applauded.

So what will come from all of this?

With Eric Pickles’ announcement today that £20million will be made available to help get businesses back on their feet again and a further pledge of £50milliion from Boris to make long term improvements to London’s town centres and high streets, it is encouraging to see the suggestion communities will be supported to re-build themselves from within. (See my colleague, John Hitchin’s thoughts on the advantages of this approach at the end of his blog here).

The concept of communities coming up with their own solutions for how to improve their neighbourhoods rather than having it done to them is one we are currently applying through the National Lottery’s Big Local programme. It will see £1million invested in 150 local areas throughout the UK in the next ten years and local people will be at the forefront of the process when deciding how the money will be invested.  More on Big Local here.

Finally I’d like to end with a statement posted on Facebook yesterday by Karen Homer, a resident living in south Islington where Renaisi managed the 10-year EC1 New Deal for Communities programme:

“Just heard youths in Manchester saying they are hard done by as they can’t get a job etc. Well nor could i for years! I got off my arse though and done a course and passed 5 exams and got a diploma and I became a volunteer which I love and still do and I now have a job that I also love.”

We’ve all been in them. They’re nice. Friendly. Warm. You can feel it when you walk in. Maybe it’s your child’s primary school, or the local library. A great community centre has it too. It probably has friendly and helpful reception staff, and the other people in there will invariably seem relaxed and happy. They might smile at you – even in London.

With apologies to Justice Potter Stewart, a great community institution is a bit like pornography. You know it when you see it.

But what does it do to be that? Some of the positives are about being good at what it does. It’s an excellent school or an excellent library. The management has a good relationship with the staff, sets a clear and exciting vision for the service and thinks creatively about its partnerships. The front line staff know their pupils or users well, and have brilliant relationships with them. The students get good results and the users have a positive and relevant experience. But the best institutions in a community seem to have something else too. They’re about more than just service excellence – even though excellence is what they strive for.

Some recent work we did in libraries with the Big Lotteryand the MLA suggests that another factor might be how well that institution works with and engages their community and local people. In the initialbaseline work that was commissioned to try and understand what a library that ‘did’ community engagement would look like, the line ‘busier and buzzier’ was used. I liked that, and it was possible to see during our fieldwork for the research we did. The libraries that had gone furthest with engaging their community did feel ‘busier and buzzier’, and that made them nice places to be in.

So in practice, what did community engagement mean? Our report found several things that mattered, but a lot of it was about understanding the community (and that’s the whole local and user community, not just the typical users) and actively going out of your way to get them into the building. Them being there and doing something – even if it had nothing to do with books – was a real positive, and it often led to them doing something else. So in Toxteth, Liverpool, the library worked with Refugee Action to run weekly walks around the area for newly arrived asylum seekers. This introduced people to their new area, and the tour also finished in the library. People tended to stay and use other services and engage in the service landscape and community positively. We found that every library that was part of our research sample had an increased usage as a result of their work – and that usage increase was much greater than the increase in book loans (explained by the fact that new groups wanted to use the library for non-traditional reasons).

Often there would be new staff or individuals that would help the libraries change their approach to become more outward facing and engaging with the local community. It would work better in some places than others. Many places found it hard – how do you engage people in service design and delivery over a sustained period of time? We found that the biggest changes seemed to be around attitude and power. The killer line that one library manager used to describe the change from service led to community led was: “It’s not our library anymore, it’s theirs”. Those that embraced this change seem to be very successful – and on top of that we found that positive, stable involvement in the services was creating further impacts.

We were seeing health and wellbeing outcomes, learning and skills outcomes and community outcomes that were seen as qualitatively and quantitatively different by stakeholders and users as a result of that involvement. One project in Sandwell, Make Friends With a Book, was seen by users, the PCT and the local MIND has having incredibly positive impacts on the mental health and happiness of the participants. It was creating and sustaining bonds between individuals, and it was creating opportunities for people to talk openly in a relaxed setting. We used an SROI analysis for that project, and found a large range of outcomes and value that the project was creating for the users. People also talked about how their involvement in the library felt like they were giving back to the community as well as the service. They saw great value in the added extras that libraries were delivering as a result of the community engagement approach. Involving people in the running and activity of the library, therefore, meant for a better library service – but it also delivered a range of outcomes that are of interest to a range of services and commissioners, and also were of very little direct interest to the library service. All this hard work may actually result in big wins for mental health outcomes, and not the library service. Essentially we found libraries that were producing much greater amounts of value for their community as a result of this approach, but they weren’t necessarily cheaper.

So, a great community institution is excellent at what it does – but it also involves the people who use it, in what it does, and finally it cares about outcomes that matter more to the community than the service.

Matthew Taylor refers to this in his recent post, and we’ve been finding it in a whole range of projects recently. That engagement process which the libraries undertook required a lot of upheaval and change, and some admit they would have given up had it not been the pressure from the funder, and gone back to focussing on service excellence alone. But it was worth it.

It was worth it because of the virtuous circle that involvement created:

Where, however, is the pressure coming from now to do this?

My proposal is this. Service excellence should still be the domain of individual services. Community engagement should be something all frontline services and institutions have an interest in. But not everyone can do it well, so they need help – hopefully Locality and others will support this with their work. But it also requires another institution to focus on the outcomes. This is firstly the job of the local authority or another part of the state: they should care about and track ‘learning outcomes’ in an area, rather than running a really great learning service. But many of the services that are seeing the cuts are the intermediary roles, so as to protect the frontline services the state provides. Who will make sure that the great library, which runs a wonderful mental health project, is tapped into all the networks of an area, and that it is not overlapping with the equally positive class that is run at the community centre? As budgets recede, and more organisations fight for their chunk of what’s left so as to continue to provide their excellent services – who will be pushing the engagement in all services and who will be focussing on outcomes? I have a feeling it won’t just be the state in the future, and that opens up some very big questions about self-interest, governance and accountability, to make sure that we get busy and buzzy places, rather than those just fighting for their survival and compromising value as a result.

By Kirby Swales, Director of Research, Renaisi