Raised Eyebrow Blog

I’m writing this from Austin, TX, where I’m participating in one of the geek world’s biggest and best-loved festivals, South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi for short). Yesterday afternoon, I had the great pleasure of co-facilitating a session with Leif Utne, VP of Community at Zanby, that was a group discussion on how design & tech geeks can make the world a better place while making a living.

When we were planning the session, Leif suggested we use a format I wasn’t familiar with — the Samoan Circle, a modified fishbowl process that encourages listening and made room for many of the attendees to come forward and speak. The chairs in the room were arranged in the round, and we pulled four chairs into the middle of the room, facing each other, so that everyone could see and hear the folks who were talking.

The theme of the session was “Socially Conscious Geek: making money while doing good,” and we provided some framing questions, but we knew that whoever showed up would have their own questions and goals for the discussion, so we tried to move quickly beyond our introductions and dive into the conversation proper.

I’m so glad we did, because as soon as we opened it up to the room, the conversation went in very interesting directions. Some of the themes that emerged were:

• Recruiting challenges for nonprofits: Someone asked how nonprofits can attract staff when the salaries are generally lower than they are in the corporate sector. Some great responses to this question emerged, including:
  • Explore what gets geeks interested, and offer up incentives that matter to them
  • Sell the lifestyle & “sleep better at night” benefits
  • Offer other benefits that provide competitive advantage with corporate positions, e.g. keep work hours reasonable, paid volunteer time, etc.
  • Someone mentioned that in the US, if you work for nonprofit organizations for 10 years after college, your outstanding student loans are forgiven. Given the size of the average student loan these days, that could provide a tangible financial benefit in the tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
  • Recognize that nonprofits can offer more opportunities for leadership & effecting change within the organization, because nonprofits often have leaner & more democratic structures. (I want to point out that this is definitely not always the case, though I do think it’s a valid point. However, I’ve seen some highly inefficient nonprofit organizations in my time.)
• There was some great discussion of how our definitions of sustainability must include financial sustainability; this is true for both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. We need to both make money and do good; neither can be sacrificed. Some models put forward for this included:
  • Businesses can build charitable giving into their modus operandi, i.e. give x% of pre-tax profits to a particular cause or organization.
  • Design & tech agencies can offer discounts to nonprofit clients & stay profitable by engaging high-profit corporate clients.
  • Social enterprise models, e.g. nonprofits creating products & services people are willing to pay for.
  • Seed funding from progressive coalitions
• We also heard a number of people ask how we can collaborate better across movements and sectors – there is a real hunger for cross-pollination of ideas and learning from one another’s successes and failures.
• One women shared her story of working at a large, multinational corporation, feeling somewhat discouraged by said corporation’s lack of a formal social responsibility mandate, and responding by starting interest groups within her company. This has had the effect of both raising the profile of various causes, but also concrete changes in the business such as influencing purchasing decisions.
• Someone said they would love to see a crowdsourcing app that could leverage companies’ internal technical skills & resources and connect & share them with nonprofits who need them.

Those were my notes, but there’s plenty more available on Twitter — attendees tweeted their session notes using the hashtag #scgeek.