Do-Gooders With Spreadsheets
by Michael HoffmanTuesday, January 30th, 2007
Nicholas Kristof has a piece in today’s Time’s (subscription required) with the headline, “Do-Gooders With Spreadsheets.” He’s talking about us!
Actually, he doesn’t mention me by name or DoGooderTV. But he is talking about many of us “social entrepreneurs,” people who are approaching the needs of our world from the framework of sustainable business. For us, this means helping nonprofits expand their support through the smart use of media. We are doing it with See3 production and consulting services, and through DoGooderTV, a kind of YouTube for nonprofits, which I will be writing a lot more about soon.
In his piece, he talks about the most interesting thing at Davos not being the billionaires and kings, but the social entrepreneurs who give him hope that the world’s problems are being addressed in a new way. He mentions Gillian Caldwell, who is the director of Witness, a Brooklyn-based organization that trains human rights workers to use video cameras to document abuses. Gillian and I are both speaking this week at the Make Your Documentary Matter conference, put on by our good friends at the Center for Social Media at American University.
I am sorry that Kristof didn’t mention Daniel Lubetzky, the consummate social entrepreneur. Daniel is the founder of PeaceWorks, a company that sells food products produced by Jews and Arabs in Israel/Palestine. Daniel is also founder of the OneVoice Movement, the organization that presented at Davos the voices of average Israelis and Palestinians.
As I have written before, what is interesting to me is the convergence of doing good with the profit motive. Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Prize for his micro-lending institution Grameen Bank, distinguishes between two kinds of business. He says that there are businesses who exist to maximize profit and “social enterprises,” business that are sustainable and profitable but exist to do good. The difference in reality is the lens to which management thinks about what they are doing. I am not so sure how easy it is to distinguish one from the other and whether we should even try.
Someone recently told me the story of a guy who founded a business of buying up the unused medication from American AIDS patients and then selling this medication in Africa at a deep discount. People have criticized him for making a profit. His reply, I am told, was something like, “Should the only ones making a profit be those who exploit these people?” Should he be penalized for making a living because he is doing it in a way that helps people? I think not.
On DoGooderTV we are going to have advertising and corporate sponsorship, which can sometimes rub some of the older more established organizations the wrong way. And while we are taking steps to make sure the advertising is appropriate to the content, and while we will give organizations a way to turn off the ads, we believe getting American companies to subsidize nonprofit work is a good idea.
A discussion of social entrepreneurs should give some props to Paul Newman. His food business, Newman’s Own, operates as a profitable concern that then donates those profits to charity. This structure ensures that management will make sound business decisions, even though their goal is to give the money away.
For us at See3, we want to be able to look back at our emerging nonprofit video empire 
and see something that is able to sustain itself while making a measurable impact on the ability of nonprofits to attract supporters and fulfill their mission.
