The Government and Social Entrepreneurship: What Works?

Sonal Shah, the new director of the White House Office of Social Innovation, just finished kicking off the Social Capital Markets conference by laying out the agenda of the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. The stated goal of the new office is to have government help convene and provide resources to scale what works. The question is, then, what works?

While there are many ideas floating around the office, this idea of identifying and supporting "what works" is the essential core of what they're doing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Shah indicated that there is a significant emphasis on metrics, and that the group is in conversations with many different people who are thinking about how to measure and determine impact.

This is extraordinarily well-intentioned. This office does not want to just make people feel good and be a show piece; they want to actually fill a niche that's not being met and provide a valuable service. With that spirit in mind, and trying to assimilate some of the stated goals, here's my unsolicited advise about what I think will "work," in terms of the Office of Social Innovation playing a more important role.

1. Convening. I think the Office is right on to recognize it's power as a convener. Far more than the money allocated by the Social Innovation Fund, the brand power of the US government provides an incredible platform to get people in the same room and make things happen. I think that there is an internal convening - for the Office of Social Innovation to help other branches of government align their funding with innovative private sector and nonprofit social entrepreneurship - and an external convening that can bring together nonprofits, forprofits, government, academics, and all the other relevant actors. When the White House invites you, you go. That fact alone is powerful.

2. Listening (and avoiding shiny objects). In the follow-up panel, Carla Javits of REDF said that we have attention deficit disorder when it comes to our approaches to creating change. I think that's true, and I think that it's going to be vitally important to plant a stake in the ground for long-term strategies. One of the best ways for this to happen is to listen to people who've been involved for a particular space and avoid the "shiny object syndrome" where we try something new for the sake of it being new.

As well intentioned as the All For Good project is, I think that it's an example of trying something that sounds great but that consumer web folks who understand distribution channels might have been more skeptical of. The problem is that despite all of the great volunteer opportunities it aggregates, it doesn't currently have any strong mechanism for getting those opportunities to people who want them. Just creating another destination and hoping people go there seems to undermaximize some great talent and energy. Could someone get Causes' Joe Green on the phone?

3. Inspiring. Not to get meta, but I don't think perhaps the single most important role of an office like this is the image that it projects. It was really exciting to me to hear that the Office actually had a mandate for Civic Participation because I think there's an incredible opportunity to integrate service as a core formative experience of young people. As the Office of Social Innovation is hunting out what works, they should be drawing on the incredible distribution and power of the White House press machine to tell the story of those organizations and center them at the 21st century American story.

[This is part of an ongoing series from the Social Capital Markets conference].