So I spent the day today clearing seven years of shit out of my office…
We’re moving office next week, just around the corner in Brixton, and I’m behind in preparing for what is proving to be one of the most significant acts of our company life.
But going through, filing, archiving, reviewing, getting distracted by pictures, plans and proposals, many long forgotten, was cathartic, insightful and grounding and left me considering the consequences of the various points along the journey that have led us here, and there’s only so much ruminating a boy can do before realising this is probably the time to start my Social Enterprise Ambassadors Blog.
I found some of our first company promotional literature, when we first launched, trying desperately, and sometimes confusedly, to espouse virtuous ideals, social ambitions and positive outcomes to the weird and wicked world of marketing.
When we started in 2001, we were in a recession, had never heard the term social enterprise or Corporate Social Responsibility, and all we had was just a belief that the influence and effect of marketing on young people could and should be put to better use that selling fizzy drinks, computer games and trainers.
It’s taken a long while to perfect that pitch.
This week I presented to the World Advertising Research Council (or WARC as they are unfortunately abbreviated to) about our work and were met with the sort of puzzled expressions that we might not have been surprised to see seven years go when we started on the Social Enterprise part of what we do.
“But how do you reconcile best value for money”, “How can this work for brand objectives and the bottom line?”, etc… the WARC-ers demanded to know…
But these days we’re ready for them, it’s not seven years ago anymore, and in part being part of the Ambassadors program has helped equip us with the answers, with the proof that a Social Enterprise approach can compete on the open market and can actually deliver increased value for money, increased ‘cut through’, brand loyalty, ‘stand out’ in the market place and all the other wank marketing terms needed to reassure, and when you then attribute a value to real social impact that can be reported to clients, colleagues, employees and shareholders you are in a proverbial ‘win win’. They liked that. A lot.
We won them all around, and they were a tough bunch, but now we have the case studies, the client base and proof of the business and social benefits of our approach, seven years ago we just had some really crazy folding, flapping cardboard props we’d produced in a moment of madness that I had managed to block from my memory until today.
I also found a picture of Michelle Clothier (my business partner), myself and Aziza Francis, one of the first young people we ever worked with, receiving a Civic Award form the Mayor of Lambeth.
When we’d met Aziza she was in need of a place to live and some serious direction in her life, an articulate and confident 15 year old from Brixton who had more on her mind than finishing school. She became the editor of LIVE Magazine, our by young people, for young people vocational training programme, and her incredible ability, tenacity and success in our environment led us to that award.
Aziza’s a grown woman now, completed college, completed 2 years full time work advising the local authority on youth engagement and is now at Westminster University and well out of the lifestyle that she was once in, I’m taking her for lunch tomorrow, she’s going to be more successful than any of us, but we still meet up every few months just to make sure she’s on track.
And even though it was an honour to be with Aziza back then for that award, I remember that still no one quite understood what it was we did, ‘a marketing agency that works with young people?’ ‘a business that’s out for profit as well as social and community returns?’ The Mayor still looks very confused in the photo.
Contrast that back to this week, and Michelle and I were at a surreal evening drinks reception and ‘speed interview’ session, as we’re London finalists for Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award, in the Social Enterprise category. Which is nice.
We’re interviewed by E&Y heads, by CEO’s of Private Equity firms and more, and these boys (and girls) totally get it, see the value, see it as a future business model, get the principle of a multiple bottom line and can comprehend the various business benefits.
Funny thing is, they included the, then, ‘Social Business’ category to the awards the same year we were with Aziza winning the local Civic award, we just didn’t know about each other back then, it’s just taken us this long to all learn the same language.
I also found a letter I’d written to the head of marketing at the BBC, seven years ago, we thought we’d be really smart and unique by relying on written letters instead of emails (so passé!) What a genius strategy that was!?, what a pair of precocious twats we were!. And there we were suggesting our fledgling agency of two people could help the BBC re connect to a youth audience! We were never anything if not optimistic.
But, again, fast forward to this week and we’ve just secured an ongoing contract for the work we now do for the BBC, where young people get a brilliant experience as ambassadors to the Beeb as part of an online community informing and influencing programme makers for BBC3 as part of the broad model of citizen journalism we’ve created through LIVE, the money from which all goes into expanding LIVE. Seven years to win a contract, shows determination!
I also found lots of documents belonging to the various young people we’ve worked with over the years, birth certificates, NI details, immigration papers, the kinds of things parents might normally keep safe, if our kids had those relationships, and it was edifying to see so many names of so many boys and girls who I know are now on the ladder, either in education or employment. Last week we saw the ninth young person we work with directly go into full time employment, and that’s just this year, since January, ( that’s nearly one per fortnight of the year!) all of whom were classified as NEET (Not in Education Employment or Training) this time last year.
And even in a week where we’ve had a very significant business win for a two year marketing campaign for that will also see £2m raised for the Teenage Cancer Trust and our campaign for the DCSF win a European Excellence Award at the SABRE awards for promoting sexual health messages to young people, there isn’t a any business or financial win that beats the ‘win’ of telling Greg, Daniel, Tayo or any of the other four that last week ‘got the job’ that they’ve… ‘got the job’.
And this is what I reflected on, sitting in a office full of old documents, folders and mess, wondering what to throw away and what we need to take with us, how much we’ve achieved in seven years, how much we’ve learnt, how much we still have to learn, how much more there is still to do, but also how much opportunity for change there is, and whilst there was no mention of ‘Social Enterprise’ in any of the old papers I was going through, the ideals, the ambitions and the emphasis of everything we were trying to achieve was clearly all heading towards the place we know are in.
And the final irony, or seven year update, was looking at some of our early business plans, and remembering how fiercely we’d resisted being pushed to become a charity or CIC or whatever other entity, having this total mindset of wanting to prove a business could profit financially whilst also profiting society and community and yet, last Friday our new charity, the Livity Trust was approved by the Charity Commission.
The Livity Trust is a charity we’ve launched to underpin our values, that will be the beneficiary of a percentage of Livity’s profits (which already go into the good work LIVE and Livity do) to make bursaries and payments to kids who struggle with the costs of entering employment, to cover the cost of the first months travel and rent, a decent interview wardrobe, child care, a trial internship, etc.
And for Social Entrepreneurs committed to not being a charity, to start a charity that opened it’s doors with £50kin the bank from the UK music industry to fund disadvantaged kids to take on work placements at independent record labels was yet another seven year lesson that being ‘flexible’ makes business sense.
So there I was, surrounded by paper, realising that there are many lessons to be learnt by filing properly, by saving the right things and binning the rest, by looking back sometimes as well as looking forward.
We’re moving for practical reasons, one of the things that makes Livity so special is that young people get to work in a professional environment, that their projects are housed within the offices of Livity, and that their work takes place alongside Livity’s work for Penguin, Red Bull, DCSF or any of our other clients, but what’s happened is that as we’ve grown and taken on more business units, is that young people now run and manage their own offices within the building, separate form some of the adult professional, which is great for the kids, but means we’ve lost some of the symbiotic, ‘learning by osmosis’ experience we’d created.
So next week, our 15-ish full time staff, and rolling staff of up to 40 kids, all move to one big open plan office, an old Piano Warehouse in Brixton, which is why I had to sit through so much paperwork on memory lane today.
It’s either going to be brilliant, and make a unique working environment where all of us will benefit from the mutual exchange of so much experience, cultural and knowledge transfer... or it’s going to be the craziest, noisiest, most highly charged office ever seen.
I hope it’s a bit of both.
Either way, the experience of going through the paper trail of the last seven years made me realise how much we have achieved, how proud I am that Livity has stuck to it’s original principles, has proved them, and has grown to include a not for profit enterprise another limited company AND a charity, how much we do now know and ho much we still don’t know and have yet to learn and how exciting it is to be one of so many brilliant and inspiring Ambassadors and organisations, defining what Social Enterprise is and what it can become, and that if just us have done this much in seven years, that in the seven years to come, with all of us in the program, we can really, and truly, change the world.
Sam Conniff
UK Social Enterprise Ambassador
