For those of you not on the Virgance email list, here’s a roundup on the latest news!
Hello friends of Virgance, my name is Tibet, I’m an engineer here but have also been managing the early stages of our next big project, Lend Me Some Sugar. We believe LMSS is going to create huge amounts of positive social and environmental change and I’m excited to say that we can finally reveal some more details about it. This post comes a little late given that LMSS had its coming out party at the Sustainable Brands conference in June and has since been broadcast to the world via Facebook and Twitter, but nevertheless it deserves a blog post of its own.
In short, Lend Me Some Sugar is a new way to convert the massive advertising budgets of big brands into funding for world changing projects. The basic idea is that we will run American Idol style competitions where the contestants are social entrepreneurs instead of singers. Each contest will have a theme (environment, education, poverty…) and the contestants will be competing for a large cash prize (we’re talking millions here) to fund their idea within that theme. The contests will be run online, utilizing the power of social networks to reach millions of people who will vote for their favorite idea each week. At the end of the week one contestant will be eliminated until the last idea standing takes home the dough.
Where will the money come from you ask? That’s the best part. Each Lend Me Some Sugar contest will be funded by sponsorship from a big brand. For example, a soda company, lets call them Cola-Mola, might want to sponsor a clean water competition. We would work with them to pick 16 highly qualified contestants who have great ideas for supplying the world with clean drinking water and then launch the contest co-branded under their name as well Lend Me Some Sugar’s. For the brands it is a great opportunity to run a highly engaging social media marketing campaign that associates their company with doing good, but for us it is a huge, untapped pool of money for creating social and environment change.
We are currently in the process of pitching Lend Me Some Sugar to a number of brands that have expressed genuine interest in sponsoring a contest. In the meantime, we need to demonstrate that we will be able to reach a large audience when Lend is launched. With this in mind we are trying to get 500,000 fans of our Facebook page to prove that people are excited about this idea. If anyone out there has other creative ideas for spreading the LMSS love please let us know, especially if you want to write about it on your blog.
Social enterprise and innovation is on everyone’s mind these days. The big question is how to figure out how to drive money towards it. Virgance was one of the first to bring attention to this trend and the SOCAP conference was the first of its kind to bring people together to talk about it. SOCAP09 is a gathering of the world’s top social innovators held on September 1-3rd, 2009 at The Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Last year at SOCAP08, over 600 attendees from 26 countries came to discover the landscape of the social capital marketplace. This year, members of the administration and key players from the public and private sector will explore new strategies for success in the changing financial world. Steve Newcomb is onboard to speak on a panel on “Community Driven Change.” We’re looking forward to the chance to participate in this conference and hope to bring Virgance folks along. There is a 30% discount for our networks using the code “VA30,” Register at www.socialcapitalmarkets.net by August 21st to take advantage of this offer! See you at SOCAP09!
Here’s a little update about a lot of things that we’ve been up to!
CARROTMOB
We just announced our next SF campaign…we’ve got videos of 3 businesses explaining why they deserve to win the Carrotmob, and we’re letting you go here to vote now on who the mob should reward! Vote now and spread the word! We’ll let you know the date of the event once the voting is done… We’ve also got Carrotmobs happening in 8 countries now with more coming soon! We’ve got 2 big ideas we’re working on a lot, but they are both surprises, so nothing to report on that yet….
GO MEDIA
Our blog network has circumvented the authority of Congress and the president and declared war! San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom told us that SF was going to be the leader in developing infrastructure for electric vehicles. Then Portland Mayor Sam Adams told Gavin to “bring it on,” saying Portland will be the leader. We put together a site called ElectricCarRace.org and now the mayor of Seattle just got involved…check out the site, best war ever!
1BOG
We’ve got several active solar campaigns going on right now, so if you have friends who live in these cities, spread the love: Denver, San Diego, LA, SF Bay, New Orleans, and Sonoma County. What’s that? You already have solar? Or you want to focus on efficiency first? Well luckily 1BOG is trying out a new project: home energy efficiency! We’ve made a deal with a great company called Sustainable Spaces to get 1BOG members 15% off the usual price of energy efficiency retrofitting! If you go to this page your mind will be blown by all the great home improvements that you might be interested in, and your eyes will be strangely transfixed by Dave and Brad’s video.
VIRGANCE HQ
The team is growing! We’ve hired a couple more engineers (Grant and Tibet), some more people on the 1BOG team, and a huge swarm of summer interns! We had our first real offsite which was fun, and helped mold us into a graceful and coordinated team.
Since the last email 3 months ago we got some more good press, including a great Union Tribune article about 1BOG in San Diego and a piece about Carrotmob in Time Magazine. Also, our company just challenged the few employees among us that actually drive cars regularly to take Zipcar’s “Low Car Diet“. If you see any of our employees driving to work in the next month, let us know so we can publicly shame them. Mark your calendar for the next Equinox event on September 15th!
Love,
Virgance
David and Clayton sent out this excerpt from Van Jones’ book which we thought was pretty relevant to what we’re trying to do at Virgance…you like?
Editor’s Note: Originally posted on GreenOptions.com. Also see today’s post on TechCrunch.
It is an important day for us here at Green Options. Today we announce our acquisition by Virgance, another Bay Area startup which has generated incredible buzz for its novel approach to creating change.
Virgance is based on the observation that sometimes, campaigns for change can be scaled most effectively with business models behind them—an assumption that GO Media was originally founded upon.
Although my personal realization of this idea was based on my experience working at a nonprofit before starting Green Options, this assumption is not intended as a slight to the nonprofit world. Indeed, there are many functions which only nonprofits can reliably and independently perform. But the double- and triple-bottom line movement proves that there is also room for human activity that does good AND sustains itself financially.
People will do anything for money. Virgance is betting that “anything” includes making positive change. That’s a bet that I can get behind.
Those who follow GO Media blogs know that I’m not much of a blogger. I’ve always worked behind the scenes to keep our little blog network humming, while other talented and knowledgeable writers built our reputation for interesting, useful, unique content.
Over the past two-plus years, more than a hundred writers have made their mark somewhere on our network. But it all started with just a few. Jeff McIntire-Strasburg (founder of Sustainablog, a green blog that predates even Treehugger) and other professional bloggers provided GO street cred in the blogosphere in the early days. Jeff in particular brought a professional editorial voice and a strong sense of corporate conscience to our young venture.
After less than a year of blogging, we realized that normal people access ‘green’ topics most effectively through niches that they already care about, such as cars or family care. There was an obvious opportunity to create a blog network which would address each of those niches more consistently. GreenOptions.com relaunched as GO Media at GreenFest 2007, and we spent the early part of 2008 building out the network, which would soon become 15 blogs, covering everything from craft-making to eco-politics.
That’s how startups go, evolving constantly in features and business model. And that evolution continued throughout 2008 as GO Media’s reach continued to grow. Along the way, there has been no shortage of challenges: maintaining a virtual newsroom, training green experts to blog, matching writer payments to advertising revenue, and countless others.
But there have also been many, many amazing accomplishments by those involved with GO, and proud moments for me. To name a few: multiple stories on the homepage of yahoo.com (including one yesterday), literally hundreds of items on the frontpage of Digg, and syndication deals with major newspapers, magazines, and web media. Smart college grads and amateur journalists who started writing with GO Media have used what they learned through our writer training and support to start their own popular, sustainability-focused blogs and have gone on to blog for the likes of the New York Times, Fast Company, and the Sundance Channel.
Throughout the journey, there have been many dedicated writers who’ve taken on additional editorial duties for little or no extra compensation. This commitment (by Alex Felsinger, Ariel Schwartz, Tim Hurst, Nick Chambers, Jennifer Lance, Gavin Hudson, Reenita Malhotra, Lucille Chi, Jeff, Mark Seall, and many others) helped GO continue to grow through a period where many online media outlets were failing outright. It’s my hope that those who worked so hard when GO was on its own will have even greater opportunities to make a difference under the aegis of Virgance.
Part of the reason joining Virgance felt so right is that the stories of those who helped make Green Options Media what it is absolutely mirror those of the crew at Virgance. Every early employee at Virgance has sacrificed financially and personally in order to play a part in scaling a sustainability revolution. I know this firsthand because my role post-acquisition is to handle Virgance’s operations and HR, and I’ve already seen the same extraordinary commitment in the people at Virgance that the people at Green Options have been displaying for over two years.
But the most compelling thing about applying the value created by GO Media to Virgance’s broader mission is the amazing potential for yin-yang-style synergy (I know, I hate that word too) between what we’ve built and what Virgance is building. GO Media specializes in giving people interesting, accessible information, and Virgance specializes in enabling individuals to take action in an effective, collective way. Connecting information and action seems like a no-brainer, but effective, scalable examples of this are somewhat few and far between.
The idea that Green Options Media can play a role in keeping people informed and changing attitudes toward sustainability has been a primary driving factor for all involved since its inception. We hope to amplify those effects by exposing our readers to actionable options provided by Virgance.
I believe that we are truly entering a new season for business, which is why the ‘coming-out party’ Virgance is having in San Francisco next week has been dubbed ‘Equinox‘ — even though it’s coming a few weeks after the actual beginning of spring. The event is hosted by SF Beta, and if you’re in the Bay Area, check it out to see what all the excitement is about. If not, keep an ear to the interwebs for more rumblings over time.
Thank you to everyone who has been a part of this odyssey. I can’t wait to see where we go from here.
-David Anderson, Founder of Green Options
1BOG partnered with the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce to launch an exciting new program, 1 Block Off the Grid Small Business Edition!
On Friday February 20th at the annual SF Chamber of Commerce luncheon we announced this new exclusive 1BOG program for Chamber small businesses and all of their employees. The Chamber Chairman, Wade Rose, mentioned the 1BOG Chamber partnership in his speech to over 1000 attendees. This program is a great way for the business community to work together to reduce energy emissions, while saving money too. Businesses get solar on their properties, employees get solar on their homes, all at a special 1BOG reduced rate, and everybody wins.
We’re excited about 1BOG Small Business Edition and hope to get as many chamber businesses and their employees involved! We want San Francisco small businesses to step up to the plate, make this program a huge success, and be a model for other cities and Chambers of Commerce across the county.
We’ll be selecting the installer for this program in the next few weeks. Stay tuned for updates and go to www.sfchamber.1bog.org for more info on the program or to sign up.
Also, check out the VentureBeat article talking about Virgance in general and 1BOG Small Business Edition.
http://venturebeat.com/2009/02/20/virgance-gets-funding-deal-to-install-solar-for-businesses/
Hey, so we haven’t yet done much work on developing the whole new section of our site that is going to be FULL of info about what we’re doing here at Virgance. We’ve got big ideas for transparency but we’re not putting our time and money into building up that stuff yet. But that doesn’t mean we can’t start sharing more about what we’re doing with you guys. Sometimes we blog or tweet, but we’re not always sure exactly what you guys are curious about. Leave comments if you have questions that you’d like us to answer, and Steve and I will try to make a video at some point to answer your questions….
Check out this post about our own Dave Llorens from 1BOG being interviewed along with Van Jones by Gavin Newsom… It’s pretty good news for us, but now Dave is so bigtime it’s like we can’t even get the time of day from him anymore. You’ve changed, Dave.
New York, you have been waiting, and we are happy to report that this Sunday is the first ever Carrotmob event in NY! Megan Dietz has led a team of volunteer organizers to create an awesome homegrown event right in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We are all about experimenting with new ideas to explore the Carrotmob concept, and Megan’s team came up with some very creative ideas…. This event is focused on getting hardware stores to become more sustainable. They’ve negotiated with Tarzian Hardware to take 22% of everything we spend at their store THIS SUNDAY to make their store more energy efficient. So it’s time to stock up on your holiday decorations, housewares, cleaning supplies or straight up HARDWARE. And if you don’t need any of that stuff, don’t worry, you can buy supplies to donate to Materials For The Arts.
So seriously, let’s see what you’ve got, NY. I’m not going to lie and act like there’s not a huge rivalry between San Francisco and Brooklyn. We threw down, didn’t we SF? Yes we did. There’s a video of it. So Brooklyn? You may be bigger, but do you have the heart? Can you throw down like we threw down? Rise up, Brooklyn. Take this hardware store that has bravely committed to a new level of sustainability, and show them how Brooklyn treats its own. Also, there will be a film crew there, so be prepared to become internet-famous.
Step 1: Get more info at http://www.carrotmobnyc.com/
Step 2: Check out the new Facebook Event, RSVP, and invite your friends.
Step 3: Tell everyone you know who could get to Park Slope in one day on horseback and tell them to mount up, and bring a reusable shopping bag and a boatload of cash.
Here’s a post that Megan wrote about her experience planning the event so far…time to get out and support her work, and give Tanzian Hardware an experience they will never forget…
