innovate big

Echoing Green’s feedback

Second only to the sense of exhilaration I get from bringing a new idea to life, I love hearing what the world has to say about those new ideas. In a previous post, I emphasized the importance of not being afraid to share your ideas with the world. This openness means taking the good with the bad. And I have always found it to be “all good” one way or another.

As you may have already heard, in January, Echoing Green selected dotherightthing to advance into the second phase of evaluation for their prestigious annual fellowship. Although the second phase is where our journey ended, it was an honor to have been selected and a valuable exercise for our team.

I congratulate this year’s Echoing Green Fellowship Finalists. This is a seriously accomplished group of socially motivated individuals. I can’t wait to hear more about what they will accomplish with Echoing Green’s network of support and resources.

After requesting additional feedback from Echoing Green, today I received an e-mail with some of the notes from the second phase evaluators.

In hopes that it may be helpful for others, I have included the most interesting bits (quoted straight up) below:

“Clearly, Rod and Ryan are social entrepreneurs. They are passionate and determined and I believe will be successful at what they set out to do. Yet, I don’t know that I believe the project itself fits with EG’s model for social change. For example, they say that their one population that best fits their constituency is “economically disadvantaged”, and yet their website will in no way directly impact the economically disadvantaged nor do they ever mention again that target audience in either their outcomes or impact statements.

“I find the idea interesting and applaud them for having a functioning site up and working. That said, I think their budget is unrealistic. Seems like a conflict of interest to take money from sponsoring companies that the site is evaluating. And I doubt if companies would pay as much as they are estimating. Also seems like users of the site are limited up till now. And, unlike evaluating hotel rooms, I am not sure that everyday people have the knowledge and skills to evaluate the degree to which companies are being responsible. That may need to be a job done by analysts and/or experienced NGOs.

“Great use of the emerging social networking technology. The use of an expert driven evaluation metric will be instrumental to the validity of the results. The development of the business model is critical — they are following a failed build it and people will come approach without a clear understanding who the customer of the model will be and how to involve the customer in the development and design. As I see it the most likely custom will be foundations that have this as an interest or business wanting evaluatory data — either way, those voices need to br brought to the to be sooner rather then later or dotherightthing will be another abandoned facade on the internet landscape.

“
Their applications reads much more like a business plan, which isn’t necessarily a problem if they are an overt social purpose business and yet neither their language nor their budget says that in a transparent way. The one indication you have is that they anticipate significant earned income (although given what a high percentage of their revenue they are anticipating from that revenue, I would want a much clearer explanation of those earned income streams).

“I also don’t understand why they are positioning their budget as only having expenses in the first year that are covered by the EG fellowship. Why don’t they believe they can raise philanthropic support, corporate support, etc? It also is implied but not clear that they are putting their own resources into the project (e.g. to supplement their income or to develop the website?), and yet that is not listed. So…lots of questions!

“Project is approaching an extremely difficult problem with an approach worthy of trial. Though it appears to be operationally doable, questions remain on whether it will be able to drive the change desired.