How do you get voted as ‘the world’s second most influential communicator in social innovation?” (being beaten only by Bill Clinton?) TEMPO asked the man who that did just that: Jon Duschinsky – a towering figure in global philanthropy and social innovation.
TEMPO: Jon you’re known for championing the idea of companies integrating social profit with financial profit, and giving back to the community. Take us back to the start of your career: how did you develop your ideas, and what were the influences that shaped your thinking?
JON: I began my career as a humble fundraiser, standing on street corners shaking the tin to get people to donate to causes. As mundane (and very cold, especially in the winter) as this may sound, it gave me an opportunity to learn what it was like to stop 3000 people a day and ask them for money to make the world a better place. I learnt a huge amount about the psychology of giving, how people relate to causes, and where charities were succeeding and failing in engaging people to make change.
Over the course of my career, it became clear to me that philanthropy, whilst important, represented only a very small piece of the puzzle. In most countries, no more than 2% of GDP is channelled towards philanthropy, and in many countries it is much less. I became fascinated with how we could develop innovative new ways to leverage the remaining 98% to achieve greater impact on issues of social change and social justice. Hence much of my work today focuses on helping businesses put the agenda of conscious capitalism at the heart of business.
TEMPO: You’ve dedicated your career to promoting the need for people to get engaged in positive causes to make this world better. What would you say were your biggest successes and the entities you influenced the most?
JON: After the fall of the Berlin wall, I was lucky enough to be very engaged in helping many Eastern and Central European countries rebuild their civil societies. In countries like Hungary, the Ukraine, Georgia and the Czech Republic there had been no notion of civil society for nearly half a century, and they had to start right at the bottom of the ladder – empowering citizens to influence the social, political and environmental future of their countries. These were times of incredible effervescence and creativity in this region, and the results were nothing short of remarkable. I take huge pride today when I look at the blossoming number of foundations and NGOs in these countries that are engaging their populations and achieving real impact on a variety of issues.
TEMPO: You were head of fundraising at France’s AIDS organization, Sidaction, and then the Director of the French Institute of Fundraising. What were the learnings that you took away from these two experiences?
JON: Being asked to play a leadership role in one of France’s largest NGOs at the age of just 24 was humbling and incredibly challenging. Over one million people donated money to Sidaction, and the charity was a key influencer of policy on AIDS in France and in Africa. We invested heavily in ensuring the message of the disease and its urgency was heard by the largest number, and we organised regular televised fundraising events, and were deeply embedded within the entertainment and music industries. I think this whole experience showed me, more than anything, the power of people to come together around a cause to truly make a difference.
TEMPO: Tell us about be the change the global consultancy that you founded. What were the successes and challenges you faced?
I have always been interested in step-change – how to take things to the next level – rather than slowly progressing the status quo. At bethechange, the modus operandi is to identify the obstacles and challenges that a non-profit is facing in achieving its mission and then focus on using creativity and innovation to remove them, one by one. Bethechange takes a lot of inspiration from the Margaret Mead quote « Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
TEMPO: You’ve said that there exists a correlation between corporate success and social responsibility. What is that link?
JON: The link is a relatively recent phenomenon, but today is evident in all industries and socio-economic contexts. It is driven by the fact that we now live in the era of the Conversation. People are talking, sharing their views, opinions and what is important to them. They are doing this around dinner tables and in coffee shops, as we always have, but now we are also doing it online, through social media. In the past, if a company wanted to build its brand and sell more product, it simply needed to push messages out through traditional advertising channels. Today, if companies want the same outcome, they need to have a brand that people want to talk about and share with their friends.
If companies want to be successful, they have to be worth talking about. Which means they have to embrace putting conscious capitalism at the heart of their business, and focus not just on making their products but on how their products or brand are contributing to the lives of their customers and to the world at large. This is not just borne out by logic, but by financial performance. A recent study showed that the companies embracing this new modus operandi of business are outperforming the S&P 500 by as much as a factor of 1 to 10.
TEMPO: The Conversation Farm which solves problems by creating ideas that engage people in conversations that change
attitudes and behaviours. How have you done that?
JON: The Conversation Farm harnesses the power of the conversation to change the way that people think about brands, causes and issues. And we do this because we know it to be the single most powerful way to communicate in the world we live in today.
One group of people that understood the power of the Conversation very well was Team Gleason, a small US-based organisation created by Steve Gleason, the ex-NFL football player who now suffers from the neurodegenerative disease ALS. Steve asked us to help leverage the world of American Football to create a big Conversation around ALS, one that would get people talking about the disease, engaging with it and bringing forward more funding to support sufferers and find a cure.
By rallying Steve’s friends from the football community, we were able to help him literally hijack the 2013 Super Bowl. The result of our work was that almost 30% of all of the tweets with the hashtag #superbowl were also hashtagged #stevegleason, Steve’s organisation raised millions of dollars in just a few days, and it raised the profile of the disease to the point where the research community is now just weeks away from finalising a business plan for finding a cure.
After the campaign, we posted one of the films we developed for Steve. This was designed to reach out to journalists and get their attention in the lead-up to the Superbowl. See it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxoBl5zZgNM
TEMPO: How do you see individuals, and companies, harnessing the power of innovation and creativity for the social good?
JON: We are witnessing a real upsurge in creativity in this field. Some of the world’s largest companies, such as Coke and P&G are experimenting with new ways of using their brand to connect people and to achieve new types of positive contributions. Perhaps one of the most exciting innovations is the way that companies engaged in conscious capitalism are actually rewriting the fundamental notion of social good.
We tend to associate social good with fairly traditional notions of giving money to good causes. But as I mentioned earlier, money given to good causes only represents 2% of GDP (at most). Well-run, values based businesses can contribute to humankind in many more tangible ways than charities or any other organisation (including government). And as the case builds from a profit point of view for adopting these business practices, more and more companies (the other 98%) are following this path and reinventing the landscape around social change as they do it.
P&G, for example, launched their “Proud sponsor of mums” campaign at the London Olympics, and continued it in Sochi. They championed the role of mothers in the lives of athletes, and by doing so opened up a huge conversation around the lack of value that many societies attribute to the work of mothers. This conversation moved the needle on this issue way more effectively than any government policy change, or NGO fundraising campaign had ever managed previously.
TEMPO: How can each of us be a positive force in this world?
JON: In my recent book, (me)volution, I write about a concept that I call the “coffee cup moment.” Imagine sitting over a cup of coffee, taking a short break from the day. You are staring out of the window, sipping your coffee and daydreaming. Maybe you are thinking about an image that you saw on the news last night, or something that you read in the paper this morning. Maybe you are thinking about that homeless person who asks you for money as you walk past them on your way to work every day. Or about the shocking images from Syria, or other such crucible of poverty and suffering that inhabit the daily newscasts. As you think about these things, maybe you also start to think how much you would really like to help that homeless person back onto their feet, or do something that would make a real difference for those people suffering in silence. You maybe even begin to imagine what you could do.
And then you realise the coffee is cold, or the cup is empty, and you cease the daydream put the cup down and go back to your routine and daily life.
We all have these “coffee cup” moments. They are all different, but I believe that they are absolutely critical. In those moments of reverie, we each hold a small part of the future of the world in our hands. And what fascinates me is why some people put the coffee cup down and don’t go back to their day jobs. Why do some people act on the compulsion they feel in this moment, and why do others simply not?
We live today in the era of the Conversation. The future is being created, more than at any time in our history, by individual people. People who are passionate about something are using the power of the Conversation to share their interests and values and gather a tribe around themselves of people who feel the same way. These tribes are influencing consumer behaviour, they are influencing policy, they are influencing almost every aspect of our societies.
Today, policy follows people. Corporations follow people, too: people have changed their buying habits and attitudes, and this has legitimised conscious capitalism and helped begin the slow transformation of successful corporate models.
Billions of people are leveraging the power of the Conversation every day to achieve things that are important to them. And so if we can understand why some of them choose to put down their cups of coffee and go back to their routines, and why some capitalise on their “coffee cup moments”, we have the opportunity to perhaps harness the most powerful tool of social change known to man.
TEMPO: How can you marry corporate success with social consciousness?
JON: There is no one-size-fits-all model that can be applied here. That said, there are two words that I find myself using regularly when talking about companies who are being successful today. And they are “authentic” and “sincere”.
Marrying corporate success with social consciousness requires a company to take a long, hard look at itself and define its belief system. Few companies have the reflex to start here, but it is impossible to align the principles of conscious capitalism with a company’s core without knowing what the core is.
There is so much greenwashing and inauthentic social marketing out there that consumers have developed very highly tuned antennae and can quickly sense something that doesn’t feel right. Many companies have yet to understand this, investing huge sums in social good platforms that are not aligned with the core values and perceptions of their brand and truly missing the opportunity that conscious capitalism presents for them. You simply cannot achieve the multiplier effect of generating a conversation around your brand if the conversation is not authentically aligned with who you are and what you stand for as a business.
TEMPO: If it was possible to have a perfect socially-attuned world?
JON: I am optimistic. I don’t think we have a perfectly socially-attuned world, by any means yet. But I do think we are definitely on the right path.
Since the industrial revolution we have been focused on a capitalistic model of extraction, production and disposal. The quest for short-term profit has driven product life spans down to ensure consumers buy more and more often, and the real environmental costs associated with both the extraction and disposal have been completely ignored.
This model is fundamentally unsustainable and we know it. And today, capitalism is changing. Profit is still the driver, as it should be, but the realities of how one makes that profit are evolving. Consumers are increasingly making choices based on both values and sustainability and it is becoming good business to practice business in a way that takes into account all of the social, environmental and human impacts that we have spent so long ignoring.
Then we have people. As I mentioned earlier, individual people are in an unprecedented position of power in our societies. Our ability as individuals to have and lead Conversations about the subjects or ideas we care about, and to use our voice to influence those around us is becoming a principal societal driver. As more people wake up to the fact that they can make a difference and define their own future, both on the macro and micro levels.
TEMPO: Any parting advice to business leaders?
JON: Policy and profit always follow people. The more people you engage in a conversation about something that matters to them, the more you will able to lead and achieve what is important to you.
Jon Duschinsky is co-founder of The Conversation Farm, a global strategic communications agency based in North America and Europe, and his portfolio includes two books and faculty roles at several universities on both sides of the Atlantic. Duschinsky take an innovative approach to solving the world’s problems: The Conversation Farm creates ideas that engage millions of people in conversations that are aimed at changing attitudes and behaviours. Its clients include Fortune 500 companies, NGOs and governments in over 20 countries.
