How do you create

• Learning opportunities
• Sharing opportunities
• Public space
• Informal coffee shop space
• Private space
• Informal coffee shop space

See Also:

• The Art of Hosting.  http://www.artofhosting.org/home/ for more information about facilitation / convening
• Malcolm Gladwell – NFL quarterback story – predicting contribution

Questions / Suggestions:

• Flesh out Element 3 of concept paper.  What are the activities?
• What is self supporting, what requires fundraising?

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY – How do we find the essential core of our ideas? – Find the core of your idea. This isn’t done by ‘dumbing it down’; this is done by finding what is essential to your message. Strip your idea down to the bare essential. A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. “It’s hard to make ideas stick in a noisy, unpredictable, chaotic environment. If we’re to succeed, the first step is this: Be simple. Not simple in terms of ‘dumbing down’ or ’sound bites.’ What we mean by ’simple’ is finding the core of the idea. ‘Finding the core’ means stripping an idea down to its most critical essence.” (pgs. 27, 28)

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS – How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? – Get peoples attention. Attract it. Hold it. How? Through surprise. Break people’s ‘guessing machine’ and then repair it. How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise — an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus — to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. “The most basic way to get someone’s attention is this: Break a pattern. Humans adapt incredibly quickly to consistent patterns. Figure out what is counterintuitive about the message-i.e., What are the unexpected implications of your core message? Communicate your message in a way that breaks your audiences’ guessing machines.” (pgs. 64, 72)

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS – How do we make our ideas clear? – Concrete is memorable. Abstract is not. Make your idea like Velcro. Hook them through concreteness. We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions — they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images — ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors — because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience. “Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems.” (pg. 100)

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY – How do we make people believe our ideas? – Help people believe. Honesty and trustworthiness should be glorified. Use authorities and anti-authorities. Vivid details boost credibility. If possible, use statistics that generate a human context. “How do we get people to believe our ideas? We’ve got to find a source of credibility to draw on. A person’s knowledge of details is often a good proxy for her expertise. Think of how a history buff can quickly establish her credibility by telling an interesting Civil War anecdote. But concrete details don’t just lend credibility to the authorities who provide them; they lend credibility to the idea itself.” (pgs. 138, 163)

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS – How do we get people to care about our ideas? – We make them feel something. Make people care. Associate ideas with emotions that already exist in others. Bridge the emotional gap between your idea (that they don’t care about – yet) with something they already are emotional or care about. Place emphasis on benefits! Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it’s difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it’s easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco. “How can we make people care about our ideas? We get them to take off their Analytical Hats. We create empathy for specific individuals. We show how our ideas are associated with things that people already care about. We appeal to their self-interest, but we also appeal to their identities-not only to the people they are right now but also to the people they would like to be.” (pg. 203)

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES – How do we get people to act on our ideas? – We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively. Get people to act. Use stories as stimulation (tell people how to act). Use stories as inspiration (give people energy to act). “A story is powerful because it provides the context missing from abstract prose. This is the role that stories play-putting knowledge into a framework that is more lifelike, more true to our day-to-day existence. Stories are almost always CONCRETE. Most of them have EMOTIONAL and UNEXPECTED elements. The hardest part of using stories effectively is make sure they’re SIMPLE-that they reflect your core message. It’s not enough to tell a great story; the story has to reflect your agenda.” (pgs. 214, 237)

GREAT BUSINESS PLANNING TOOLS AND RESOURCES

1.    Craft a brand position rooted in a customer benefit.

An awful lot of young companies do a good job of describing a product’s features rather than synthesizing them into a single benefit. A simple handle, either expressing what a brand stands for or declaring its point of difference, will serve you well in everything from appearing in search results to being remembered.

2.    Take your message and content to your consumer. Engineer your presence.

You may want a website where you fill orders, capture data, or simply demonstrate your product, but you shouldn’t assume your customer will instantly come to you. Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, and YouTube are all basically free tools. You need to go where your consumer lives online. If your customers, prospects, and influencers are there, you should be there: listening, engaging, sharing, and helping them.

3.    Find inventive ways to create or gather content.

For starters, make your website into a blog. Fresh content, the ability to post comments, and pages that get linked to will add to your online visibility. No doubt it’s challenging and time consuming to generate enough content to populate your network and blog, but there are smart ways to go about it.

First, whatever you’re doing, write about it. Report on your progress. Second, come up with a daily question you’d want someone to ask and respond to it in a blog post or video. Third, save time by collecting content from others. Place your product or service, even in beta form, in front of people willing to blog, make videos, and tell stories about it. Aggregate this content to your blog or video channel. Fourth, conduct polls or ask questions about a related topic and turn these results into future posts as well as “news” you can release to both bloggers and press.

4.    Get on Twitter and use it actively.

It takes time to build a large Twitter following, but it’s a quick way to connect with industry influencers, bloggers, and press that might matter to you.

No matter what you sell, someone on Twitter is having a conversation about it. It’s your chance to listen, respond, and engage with potential enthusiasts. More importantly, on Twitter there’s a willingness to help each other that you just won’t find anywhere else. Perhaps it’s because re-tweeting information is virtually effortless, or that people practically vie to share new finds, or that users feel a sense of obligation to those who follow and promote them, but for whatever reason, you’re likely to find people who are willing to help promote your brand on Twitter, presuming you learn Twitter protocols and give more than you take.

5.    Connect your customers and prospects to each other.

One of the best things you can do as a young company is to foster word-of-mouth conversations among your earliest customers. Whether you do it on Facebook or on your own site, it’s important to invite your customers to talk to each other and share ideas. Allow them to guide one another on how they use your product or service. Not only will you have the opportunity to learn what people like and don’t like about your product, you may end up with a bunch of people you can ask to help you.

6.    Develop relationships with the right bloggers.

Every start-up in the world wants that article in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.  But the fact is, the right bloggers might be more influential for a number of reasons. They have loyal readers. Their references or links to your site will drive up your search results.  And these days, it’s more likely that ideas will bubble up from the blogosphere to the mainstream press than vice versa.

7.    Start Crowdsourcing.

There is no shortage of services – companies like crowdSpring (design) or Tongal (video) — to help you source affordable content from designers, videographers, writers, and others. But there’s an even better reason to crowdsource. You allow your customers to participate in the creation of your brand. If you want a great example, take a look at how HBO seeded True Blood. Instead of advertising, HBO shipped samples of synthetic blood to popular videographers and bloggers, who, of course, couldn’t resist making videos or posting pieces about the mysterious liquid. You may not have anything as cool as fake blood, but you can still learn to think this way.

8.    Read Brian Halligan’s Inbound Marketing Book.

Even if you have a product with enough mainstream appeal to justify paid advertising, consumers today spend more time searching than watching. You want to be found. Inbound Marketing covers all of the basics you’ll need to know to make your content Google friendly.

9.    Give stuff away for free.

Take a look at what HubSpot does: free tools (Twitter Grader and Website Grader); free webinars (How to use SEO, Blogging for Business); free eBooks (Facebook for Business, Getting Found Online). If you sell food, give away recipes. If you’ve invented a sleep monitor, offer free tips on better sleeping. Free content generates awareness, builds loyalty, creates newsworthy topics, and spreads word-of-mouth. Remember, in this day and age, what a brand does is far more important than what a brand says.

10. Make the time, build in the role, or hire the right partner.

As folks like Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk have proven, you can do all this yourself if you have the right time, energy and commitment. If you can’t muster that, give this role to one of your first hires. If you’re less than comfortable identifying that person within your own company, (hint: it’s not an intern or a kid right out of school; Digital Natives may know all the technology, but they often lack the strategic chops and the ability to create truly compelling content) retain the services of a public relations agency with real experience in social influence. Make sure that if you go this route, you ask for case studies as evidence that the PR team assigned to your business actually practices what it preaches.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t

Key Points

“Level 5 Leaders” – leaders who have both “personal humility” and “professional will”. These are not rock-star leaders whose companies go into decline when they move on. They are diligent and hard working – more bite than bark. Celebrity leaders often work for a time, but appear to be damaging in the long run, because they don’t create sustained results.

Get the right people on the bus – that has to happen before the “what” decisions are taken. That can change if you have the right people, but the wrong people will certainly make the enterprise fail.

You must always be willing to “confront the brutal facts”. Don’t ignore reality in favor of what your hopes reflect it to become. Only by having accurate information can you achieve success.

The “Hedgehog concept” means having a simple, extremely clear concept of what their business is. That business is something they can

1. Make money at

2. Be passionate about, and

3. Be the best in the world at These are also known as “The Three Circles”

A culture of self-discipline is critical, because it creates an environment where people work within a defined system, and yet, because the confines of the system are known, gives them more freedom to act within that system.

Technology is an accelerator, not an agent of change. Good companies use it to execute better, but it won’t save a mediocre company.

“The Flywheel” refers to the idea of momentum – keep pushing in one direction and you’ll build up a lot of it that will help you to overcome obstacles. Momentum is built a little bit at a time – it’s not a dramatic, revolutionary change, but constant, diligent work.

Ashoka Since 1981 Ashoka has been dedicated to developing models for collaboration and design infrastructure needed to advance the field of social entrepreneurship and has specifically invested and supported over 2,000 social entrepnreurs world wide. Today, we are working with Ashoka on their Changemaker Campus Initaitive: dedicated to developing a network of campuses that foster a culture of innovation and social change, and a generation of students who will be empowered to tackle today’s toughest global problems. The best and brightest from the Changemaker Campus Initiative will serve as a perfect pipeline into the Institute!

The Hub

The Hub – The Hub is a social enterprise with the ambition to inspire and support imaginative and enterprising initiatives for a better world. The Hub is a global community of people from every profession, background and culture working at ‘new frontiers’ to tackle the world’s most pressing social, cultural and environmental challenges. With such an imaginative, brilliant, and truly global network, The Hub is an incredible Pipeline Partner.

ChangeFusion

Change Fusion (CF) group, is a provider of social innovation design, investment and incubation services with a specific focus on catalyzing high-impact, scalable and sustainable social innovation through fostering uniquely robust innovation networks of idea leaders, implementing partners and financial resources.

StartingBloc

StartingBloc educates, empowers and connects emerging leaders to drive social innovation across sectors. StartingBloc is most famous for their signature fellowship program – The Institute for Social Innovation. Each year, the Institute brings together between 300-360 Fellows over a two month period to develop and incubate thier bold ideas and social networks. Following the Institute for Social Innovation, Fellows will have the opportunity to apply for the Unreasonable Institute!

Fast Forward Fund

Fast Forward Fund Pioneering youth-driven, investment activism, FFF mobilizes young social investors to shape the global agenda and direct capital to youth-led initiatives. As an innovative social venture fund, FFF addresses the most pressing global challenges we face with young social investors as leaders. Unreasonable Fellows will be given the great opportunity to pitch to the investors at FFF to be nominated and selected into their investment portfolios. Furthermore, FFF will host an intensive workshop at the Institute on social investing and portfolio management.

Sparkseed

Sparkseed is a nonprofit organization that invests in the top social entrepreneurs of tomorrow as they lead social ventures today. Sparkseed provides guidance, funding, and tools to college students who will change the world. Specifically, Sparkseed offers a comprehensive 2-year program for collegiate social innovators. It goes without saying that their best and brightest entrepreneurs will serve as a great pipeline into the Unreasonable Institute.

Intellecap

Intellecap is a leading social investment advisory firm serving companies, non-profits, development agencies and governments working in developing markets. A globally recognized pioneer in the social investment arena, Intellecap leverages deep industry knowledge and operational experience in building innovative social businesses across a number of sectors in the development space.

FYSE

The Foundation for Youth Social Entrepreneurship (FYSE) is a regional organization focusing on building an entrepreneurial environment for young people in Asia. Our program, the Asia Pacific Future 100 as a regional youth entrepreneurship campaign aims to raise awareness of entrepreneurship among young people in the region and to inspire them to follow suit on an entrepreneurial venture. We believe young people in Asia have the passion and potential to succeed as entrepreneur, all they need is further encouragement and support to turn ideas into successful ventures.

AllDayBuffet

All Day Buffet is dedicated to building a new business model based on the power of investment in people. All Day Buggest invests in the creative misfits and entrepreneurs who believe that business is founded on both purpose and profit. They believe that investing in talent and passion first will lead to the best ideas and profits, and the place to start a successful business is with the people who will be running it. These very same people will become an invaluable pipeline into the Institute.

Beyond Profit

beyond profit is a new social enterprise magazine. It’s mission is to bring you the most interesting and unique stories, people and ideas from the social enterprise sector. Learn about the individuals who are working to change the world through social entrepreneurship and find out how they are doing it.

Orbis Institute

Orbis Institute is a nonprofit educational leadership organization working to introduce youth to their peers around the world. The Orbis mission: Global Leadership Development for Youth. By bringing students from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds together to learn and engage in dialogue, Orbis aims to create an environment in which all participants can develop their unique leadership capabilities.Their network of Fellows and participants is expansive around the world and will serve as a great pipeline into the Institute.

Educate!

Educate! empowers students across Uganda to become socially responsible leaders who will drive their society’s social, political and economic development. Educate! teaches a two-year curriculum on how to lead social change, provide long term mentoring and create an alumni network geared at equipping students with the skills and confidence necessary to start and scale social enterprises, financially sustainable initiatives that address community problems. We are very excited to attract and Educates’ leading social entrepreneurs to the Institute.

Sprout

Sprout is an e-course for aspiring social innovators and environmental entrepreneurs who want to grow their project ideas and learn to create lasting changes that take root in their communities. Sprout provides innovative young people all over the world with a way to learn, grow and connect with like-minded leaders in a supportive environment that encourages their hard work to create a better world. Sprout is going to make an excellent Pipeline Partner and is proud to share their best and brightest talent from all over the world with the Unreasonable Institute.



Vision and Mission:  We believe that practitioners, policy makers, academics and the media need solid information and tools that can help them understand and support the expansion of community wealth-building institutions.

http://www.community-wealth.org/

Posted October 7, 2009.

America is in the midst of a new revolution. But this revolution is quiet, incremental, nonviolent and traveling beneath the mainstream media’s radar.

The new American revolution challenges the current notions of dog-eat-dog capitalism — through the building of a parallel economic system that shares, co-operates, empowers and benefits fellow workers and community members.

The CSI Sandbox Series kicks off with three events at the Centre for Social Innovation through the fall of 2009. Each event is meant to provoke and engage, as we investigate what social innovation looks like. We have been doing, thinking, convening and collaborating around social innovation, but haven’t had a lot of time for reflection and sharing… The Sandbox Series is our first foray into some of the ideas that are changing the world. We are starting with some of the ideas that we have been working on, but intend for this series to be about stuff that we are doing, you are doing, ideas, models and prototypes… a safe place to play, experiment, explore and just have fun thinking about how we can make this world a better place. We would love to have you join us!

http://socialinnovation.ca/blog/csi-launches-sand-box-series-playing-exploring-experimenting-with-new-ideas-that-are-changing-w

Evolution progresses through flexibility and least effort.

- Develop concept paper – Fully develop the idea (i.e. what would you need to have in place to apply for a grant)

- Assemble core team

o To invite: folks who “might be interested” Arthur B., Mickki L., Drew O., Matt N., Rebecca S., Aaron M., Dace W., Cindy K., Be Unreasonable folks, Green Space folks, A developer?

o Identify who wants to be a supporter vs a core team designer.

Analyze MTNPC data

Matt’s personal notes

What do I need to get rid of?

- NNE project

What do I need to re-channel

- Data Initiative – Could the whole DI be frame around social innovation? See New Orleans

o Civic Indicators as an evaluation, need identification tool

o Seek out local social innovators and offer services

o Knight Foundation grant proposal

o Support MHBA

Evolution progresses through flexibility and least effort.