When big business backs social enterprise and the country wins
Corporate sponsorship has traditionally been seen as a form of advertising, but the rise of social enterprise provides new ways for businesses to back those doing good.
It can be harder to get started because we all have to learn how to think about and value things differently, but the result can be huge impacts at a scale not seen before.
Numbers are a language that hold stories about our country. They tell us how many cities are in New Zealand (14), how many Labradors (42,000), or which region has the most hectares of kūmara (Northland, by a long shot!).
Although these numbers are valuable for understanding the world around us, most people don’t use New Zealand’s numbers, and most of New Zealand’s numbers aren’t used.
Figure.NZ was established to make it easy for everyone to find and use our country’s numbers, and to get people using them. We do that by taking thousands of inconsistent spreadsheets and files spread around hundreds of websites, and using the software we’ve designed and developed to turn this into something future-proof, consistent and useable — all free for everyone to take and use from https://figure.nz.
You can find out more about us there but to sum up, we’re a charity — and that’s unusual in the data space. We don’t fit the criteria for traditional supporters like philanthropic foundations, and investment or R&D grants are closed to us because we don’t tick the business box.
This means we’ve had to think differently.
In the search for solutions I didn’t give much credit to the idea of corporate sponsorship, because I thought it would mean too much compromise. But that changed when I met ASB Bank execs, Steve Jurkovich and Russell Jones.
During a pitch to Steve about an idea that would eventually become Business Figures, he stopped me mid-speech and said: “Look, great idea, let’s fast-track it. I totally get what you’re doing and I’m thinking the big win is really just backing this for New Zealand”!!
One year in I’ve been reflecting heaps on what the partnership has done, such as:
- It’s why we can go to schools around the country and run classes at no cost to anyone.
- It’s why we can say yes to so many of the talks we get invited to do.
- It’s why we can drop everything and answer a question when the media contacts us or someone tweets us a query.
And the awesome consequence of being able to say yes to this really visible stuff is reach. It means we are seen, which is critical to our mission of getting people to use numbers.
Other things ASB Bank have contributed is giving us a home in their office for six months, and enabling me to give my team security as employees rather than contractors.
It strikes me actually that through this support, we’ve been freed up to operate in a completely different way. It feels like we’re entering a new era — one in which a corporate entity can do good by backing a social enterprise to make a country even better. And as CEO and Founder, the key thing for me here is getting the headspace to keep dreaming big — for me and for my team.
Saying that, it’s not all sparkles and unicorns. When we first got more security in 2016 we had to learn to operate differently, and it was really hard. We all shudder when we remember it as it was really confusing to change pace and not need to sprint and take short-cuts.
But, having the ability to take the time to go deep and get the Figure.NZ house in order before moving forward is why things feel so solid now. On a practical level this allowed us to take the time to document many things about Figure.NZ openly on http://tohu.figure.nz/, which people are now able to copy from, for free, and use as the basis of their own health and safety or remote-first policies.
One of the other cool things it’s enabled us to do is work on the formation of a group called Figure’s 20. Think Ocean’s 11, but with New Zealand public and private sector organisations (and minus the larceny). This group of 20 organisations are each committing some funds for three years to Figure.NZ to provide practical support for the future of New Zealand. Without having a foundation of support already in place, we simply wouldn’t have been able to invest the time required to make this happen.
The first year of working together hasn’t been about ticking off a list of 20 things the bank needed us to deliver on. This has meant it’s been difficult to know when we’ve achieved success, but the high level of trust has allowed us to get our foundation strong and lift our focus from the small things. And I absolutely believe we will deliver substantially more value to ASB Bank than they could have ever sponsored us — in the traditional sense — to do.
One year ago we asked a big business to take a leap of faith, to back our efforts for Aotearoa, in a way that saw everyone in the country benefit — knowing full well that this was going to be difficult to measure.
They have changed our world and yet in the scheme of theirs we are tiny. Sometimes this worries me — what are the effects of such disparate positions in a partnership? And then I remember — we might be small, but our impact is huge. And in a bunch of ways it’s the perfect symbiotic relationship. Because when big business backs social enterprise, the country wins.
