We won an Award - Competing as a social enterprise with the private sector

Competing with private business

This is not a self-congratulatory post but a call for organisations to consider diversifying into different ways of financing the work that the sector does.

Noise Solution was a winner this week at the East Anglian Daily Times newspapers business awards. The paper operates across the whole of the Eastern region. What I think is interesting about this is not that we got a shiny thing given to us, which was nice, or that we got a bottle of champagne, which was nicer, but that as a social enterprise we were seen to be operating on a level playing field with private business....and winning. In fact our legal set up as a social enterprise wasn't even mentioned. We were a business operating as a business and winning as a business.

There is a vital difference though, that is fundamental to our ethos. As a social enterprise, you have to do twice as much as private business. You have two bottom lines not just a financial one to make successful. Your financial and your social outcomes are, or should be, equally important. Where business can cut corners to make sure that finance bottom line is healthy we have to balance that against getting those social outcomes..and that is often expensive.

Within the sector we are starting to see private organisations come into fill the space left by cuts to youth services or mental health - I believe we need to fill those gaps in a way that means the people we work with (and the outcomes we often help facilitate) are kept as the focus, not the money. People shouldn't be a distraction from balancing the bottom line. But as a sector we need to seriously up our game to operate sustainably and compete with those private organisations, as Noise Solution did this week. That takes money.

Noise Solution has operated from day one without recourse to grants to deliver our work. One hundred percent of our income so far has come from delivery and is earned income. That is unusual and I would suggest that the majority of work in the sector is underpinned by grant funding. The landscape is changing and organisations need to be aware that if you are wholly grant funded from local authorities or Arts charities then I would be looking over my shoulder right now because 2 years down the line from now  it's entirely possible that you as an organisation are probably not going to be around. Cuts are really starting to bite. Those grants are getting rarer and competition is getting fiercer.

Can you prove that what you do is effective? Does your service get results? As an organisation 92% of organisations that have commissioned us for work over the last 6 years (40 of them) have come back to use us again. Do you have this sort of data? Your impacts and statistics are your currency, It's going to be vital you have them when you are pitching. We might not like the fact that it's going to get competitive and lots of those decisions are based on economics but if you believe you are helping to transform lives in a meaningful way (better than other services may be able to) then it's a case of adapt now or wither. If you're just getting grants to justify your organisations existence (and that does happen) please stop.

Noise Solution is starting to think that we should be applying for core grants as well, a panoply of funding sources is safer than reliance on one type of funding. We are coming at it from the opposite end (from no grants to some) but I'd urge people to seriously start factoring in ways of diversifying where the money comes from. 

We won an award - that's nice but it's far from being a guarantee of work in a climate that is tough and getting tougher. But you know that right?