Social enterprise or “social entrepreneur” are terms that few people know, but I’m keen to get them out into the wider world because I think they’re the way of the future. As one person put it on Couchsurfing, “Is social entrepreneurship just evolved capitalism?” The Boston Globe seems to think so, and I agree.

Here’s how Wikipedia describes social enterprises:

Social enterprise is a relatively new term for a type of business that has existed for at least a century. The term social enterprise relates to social entrepreneur, the name originally given to 19th century philanthropic businessmen and industrialists, who had genuine concern for the welfare of their employees.

Today, its use varies in different regions. In Britain, the focus is on the use of the surplus as the defining characteristic. In North America, there is less emphasis on generating a surplus and more on the double bottom line nature of the enterprise. European usage tends to add the criterion of social rather than individual ownership.

As I say, “profit + good cause = social enterprise.” It’s what I started Do Good Design for, before I knew what to call it.

You, yes you

Much of the talk focuses on large organisations, and I worry that leaves the everyday person behind. What interests me is how people working from home, running their own small business, can act like a social enterprise. How the artist or coach or web designer or piano teacher can be a part of this growing movement of do-good business.

I think that running your own business can be so demanding that it’s hard to find time to think about how to help the environment, or your local community, or donate a portion of profits to a charity. Simply paying the bills can seem enough of a challenge.

But at the end of the day, I also don’t think making money is enough. I don’t have the answers, but hopefully it will become clearer as I take myself and Do Good Design further down this path.

For the most part, what makes a business a “social enterprise” is that where you put the money: in the hands of charitable causes rather than shareholders or owners or even employees.

Researching social enterprise hasn’t been easy, so I thought I’d share my list of resources for Scottish and British people interested in either starting their own or in buying goods and services from one.

Starting your own social enterprise

A one-person business can start a social enterprise: I’m going to convert Do Good Design into a social enterprise in the coming months. So can you — just decide on a salary for yourself, pick a non-profit you want to give your proceeds to, and you’re halfway there.

After that, if you’re in Scotland, head over to First Port. First Port offers help to people trying to start up, and as their name implies, they’re the first place to go.

If you’re in the Highlands and Islands, there’s also HISEZ: Highlands and Islands Social Enterprise Zone, which is where The Sorting Room is getting advice from in the form of a consultant. Our consultant, Clive Sheppard, is facilitating a workshop for us to define our objectives and activities, and generally move from idea to reality — including getting funding.

Get the legal structure sorted

Check out Community Interest Companies (CIC), a special legal structure just for social enterprises that the UK government recently created to make life easier. The CIC Regulator website has a FAQ section which can help you understand why choosing a CIC as your legal structure is a good option.

Building your skills

Learn “social accounting”, where you learn to attach a price tag to eco- and social factors in your business accounting.

Or take a course in Peer-Led Instruction at The Social Enterprise Academy, which offers courses and training for social enterprises in Scotland. They can also come to your location if you can pull together enough people.

Connect with local social entrepeneurs

Senscot seems to focus mainly on networking, and has a membership fee of £25. They have local networks of social entrepeneurs as well as a newsletter and profiles of social enterprises throughout Scotland.

There’s also the Social Enterprise Coalition for the UK, but to be honest, they seem to be mainly about lobbying government for more funding or attention. I called them for help early on, and they sent some materials, but it stopped there. They also run an annual SE event called Voice, with workshops and meetings.

Finally, there’s Social Enterprise Magazine, a fairly slick looking online magazine. Just found it so will investigate further.

Poor websites and disorganisation make information gathering hard

I’ve spent the last 6 months researching how to start a social enterprise, making calls and sending endless emails. Until we met with our consultant Clive — which happened through luck and knowing the right people — we struggled to make things happen.

As you can see from just my list for Scotland, there are a heap of organisations being funded to help social enterprises, and yet many of them are either invisible on the internet (never once found First Port or HISEZ until it was mentioned by someone else) or have very poor websites. I can’t count the error pages, outdated information, trouble signing up or faulty databases I’ve encountered.

So my advice is, persist until you find someone who’s a good fit with what you’re trying to do. There’s information and money available to start up and connect you with like-minded people. You’ve just got to find it.

I’m using the Stripe Generator to create the pattern for a felted bag I’m knitting, and it’s useful to see both what the design will look like and the basic pattern I’ll need to use to achieve it.

I had a cone of dark brown yarn, a bunch of teal, a bit of pale turquoise and tangerine, so I plugged those colours in and used Photoshop to play with things till I got the pattern I want.

I call this pattern “Soil, Sea and Single Malt,” in honour of the landscape and whiskey that comes from Orkney.

There’s a small stripe of tangerine in the centre, above the peaty soil and sea, below the sky.

I’m just about done with the knitting, which is a pattern for the Felted Stash Bag from Alterknits, a wonderfully creative knitting book.

The bag, once felted, is incredibly strong and durable and will replace the ugly Tesco’s plastic “Bag for Life” we currently use for the shopping. I foresee a few more bags along the same lines, to use up some more spare wool.

Do what you’re good at and you’ll be happier

From a business management side — which is what this book is mainly aimed at — the reason to have managers focus on their employees’ strengths is because Gallup research found that people who do “are six times more likely to be engaged in their jobs and more than three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life.”

From my perspective, it just makes sense. The kind of “Duh, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that before” reaction.

The way Strengthsfinder works is that you buy the book, get a code and take a test online that will spit out your top 5 strengths. Then they offer ways to put those strengths to work in a tangible way.

My #1 strength: Input

I was a tad disappointed in my strengths to be honest. They’re all so airy-fairy, so intellectual. I like to think I’m an action-oriented person, but my strengthsfinder says I need to spend a lot of time in my head.

People who are strong in Input collect information. We gather knowledge because it’s interesting and might be useful one day.

I do this with books. I read all the time, and while I frequent the public library, I also have a small personal library — ruthlessly culled — of books I think are useful. Books on self-sufficient living by John Seymour; wild food and herbs; natural dyes, cosmetics and cleaning. On the business side, I’ve got ones on colour psychology, design (lots), web writing and project management.

I dip into these books daily and love to extract bits of wisdom as the situation requires.

Putting a strength into action

But why I’m writing this post — and it’s hard for me to write a blog because I always think “Who cares?” — is because my little Strengthsfinder books says that we Input people need to share what we learn:

“You naturally soak up information in the same way that a sponge soaks up water. But just as the primary purpose of a sponge is not to permanently contain what it absorbs, neither should your mind simply store information…Be aware of people that can benefit from your knowledge and be intentional about sharing with them.”

Sharing information in my 3 themes for this year

So here’s what I think: I’m a web designer running her own business. My husband and I are trying to lead self-sufficient and happy lives. I love colour.

Every day, I learn something in at least one of these areas. Usually through books, sometimes through hands-on practice.

I’ll do my best to post one idea or piece of information I learn in these areas regularly. If any of these 3 themes are of interest to you, then perhaps you’ll find something useful.

Today’s tidbit is Strengthsfinder 2.0. See if your library has a copy of the book to figure out if it resonates with you. The idea of all of us cosying up to what we’re naturally good at, rather than tearing ourselves down for what we suck at, really appeals to me and I’d love to see more of it.

My dream kitchen, circa 1850. This gives you a flavour for the life I’m aiming to have, which is mighty different from what it was only 5 years ago…

Back in 2003, I wore a suit everyday to my corporate job across from the FBI. I got mugged at gunpoint, downed a raft of prescriptions for asthma and allergies, and couldn’t walk to work on Red Alert days, those days in DC when the air is so polluted it’s a health risk to breathe.

I ate out a lot (how I miss sushi), and dined in on Annie’s macaroni and cheese, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and snacks from the Korean corner shop.

That all changed when I came to Scotland on a holiday, met my husband, and didn’t bother to take the return flight home.

Since then, I feel like I’ve been on a steady meander away from city living, or even suburban living (which is what I grew up with in Simsbury, Connecticut). Partially thanks to my husband Malcolm’s interest in bushcraft and all things pre-Industrial Revolution, and partially because it seems to make me happier.

This week, we move to a house 4 miles outside of Stromness, right on the water, and it’s another milestone.

Up till now, we’ve lived in the heart of town where I popped over to the Deli at least once a day to pick up cheese or pizza or snacks. I’ve learned how to cook a bit, but still prefer to pop a deluxe frozen pizza in the oven to the rigamarole of making my own food (Malcolm does most of the cooking).

But like a lot of people, we’re getting fat, tired of all the plastic packaging around food, and less keen on dairy and wheat.

It’s also time to save money.

Both the UK and US are near debt crises, and the price of food and everything else is going up. Rather than take on debt or get jobs that would pay more but make us miserable, we’d like to try an experiment.

Personally, I like to think of Little House on the Prairie or Mrs. Weasley (without the magic, sadly). I’m going to grow our own vegetables, keep some hens, cook a lot more, play my fiddle, knit, spin and dye.

I’ll admit I feel a bit self-conscious about it all. First, that I seem to want to do all the “female” skills like cooking and textiles. I’d love to say I have a hankering for metalsmithing or dry-stone walling. But I don’t, and Malcolm does, and the glory of feminism is we women get to do what we choose.The second reason I feel a bit nervous is that I have little idea what I’m doing, and how many stories do you hear tell of foolish city folk with their romantic notions of country life?

Well I have no doubt I’ll make a right mess of gardening, but one can only try. I’m determined I’ll get there in the end, and I’ve got my trusted friends, books, to help me out.

Most importantly, I’m learning these old-fashioned skills, the ones my ancestors all knew intimately, because I have a deep and abiding love of good design, which means beauty and usefulness in everything that I do and have.

So I’m knitting a bulletin board to hang up inspirational pictures and notes, making a willow basket to gather wild foods, growing food that will taste better and be healthier.

As John Seymour says in The Forgotten Arts & Crafts:

“There never was a time when it was more important for the health and well-being of humankind that men and women should start to make real things with their own hands again. For a human being to spend a life pressing computer buttons, or doing boring and non-creative ‘jobs’ in a factory, is to spend a life in hell.

“Apart from the fact that the huge global monstrosity is not sustainable and is due to come crashing down anyway, the intolerable aridness and boredom for most people will enetually become unbearable and we will all rebel. We will seize the right again to make things of utility and beauty for ourselves, with our own intelligence and our own hands.”

It’s nothing so bold as No Impact Man, or one of many other people out there going the self-sufficiency route. That’s the dream eventually, but you’ve got to start somewhere, and I think now is the time.

I firmly believe that a good brand is part of any business’s success, so I wanted to make sure our wonderfully diverse and unique cooperative had a brand that gave a snapshot of that personality.

After meeting with the other directors for a brainstorming session, I created 3 different logos that tried to express the overall feeling and personality we want for The Sorting Room.

But it wasn’t until I made a fourth logo, inspired by the circus and The Wild West, that it felt right.

Logos and the business’s personality

This logo is expressing a brand whose personality is:

• lively
• a bit quirky
• welcoming
• creative

Colour psychology

Red is passionate, bold and full of life. It says that The Sorting Room is a business that isn’t afraid to stand out.

Aqua blue is refreshing and clean. It gives what’s otherwise an old-fashioned design a modern tang.

Two versions

Since we’ll be using these logos on everything from product tags to bags to t-shirts, a 1-colour version was needed. As we plan to print many of our own things on our fantastic old printing machine, the fewer colours, the easier and cheaper.

The Sorting Room, located behind the post office on the main street of Stromness, opens at the end of May during the Orkney Folk Festival. Anyone that’s on the island then, come stop by!

Since The Sorting Room is about bringing together amateur and professional artists and musicians in a space that encourages creativity, fun and community, I felt like the 3 logos I’d already designed were too staid.

Cirque du Soleil for creative inspiration

I did my usual big heap of research and honed in on circuses to capture that fun — even mad — feeling that I think we have going on in this project. I checked out Cirque du Soleil and Archaos, two surreal and highly imaginative circuses for ideas on branding.

This got my imagination going. If you’ve ever seen Cirque du Soleil, you’ll know they can be very unexpected and playful. They are definitely not the mainstream, and I took some of that off-the-wall feeling as inspiration.

But I wanted to keep the feeling old-fashioned, so I also had a look for vintage circus posters, harking back to the days of Barnum-Bailey and the grand traveling circuses.

Vintage circus posters

Aren’t the colours marvelous?

The Wild West comes to town

I chose a font, Rough Riders Redux, that brings a flavour of the Wild West and circus acts in the early 1900s.

I did 3 colour versions of the logo. Here’s the simplest:

The 2 colour “circus” logo

“Pillar box red” logo

Since The Sorting Room was originally for the Post Office to sort the mail, using a colour known as “pillar box red” makes sense. According to colour psychology, red is a passionate, vibrant colour which stimulates and energizes (for more on this, see my article The Colour Symbolism of Red).

With this logo, I used white for contrast and to literally lighten up the white. This is the simplest version.

Now let’s add a 4th colour: turquoise.

The 4 colour “circus” logo

Logos can look ugly at first. Ugly or really boring.

Usually, a committee gets together to assess a new logo and takes away anything interesting or controversial until everyone agrees. But the end result is often also utterly forgettable.

To be honest, I think this version is a bit ugly, but it’s the unusual colour combination that could make it work really well.

The problem with just red and white is that it’s used a lot in logos. Not too many use turquoise as well, and I think the pale blue gives the logo an edge, a modern quality, it might otherwise lack.

OK, the final version is extravagant, but I had to play. It’s my favourite, but I’m not sure how practical and flexible this logo would be:

The harlequin circus logo

I had such fun with this version — it’s definitely my favourite.

I took colour inspiration from Harlequin’s costumes that you often see at Mardi Gras.

The festive colours are such fun. The dark, neutral colour of the brown (it may appear black on your screen since it’s quite dark) make the other colours pop out like a Jack-in-the-box.

It’s playful, fun and festive. The problem is that brown is the dominant colour here, and its earthiness and calm might overwhelm everything. It’s also a lot of colours.

Which logo is right for The Sorting Room?

I’ve had the initial brand meeting with fellow co-op members and people seem pretty evenly divided. So I’ll keep tweaking and see if I can create a solution.

Another possibility is to use the 2 colour model but let different artists use a unique colour for their line of work, since our shop will be selling items from several people.

Which logo and version do you like the best?

The endless, useless meeting

The first situation is bad because I have very little tolerance for meetings that go nowhere and take forever. Perhaps you can relate:

In this nightmare scenario, you’re stuck in meeting after meeting, not sure what you’re even there to be discussing, wishing you were somewhere else actually doing something. You try bringing some order to the chaos, perhaps suggesting there be some kind of plan, but things quickly spiral down into endless talk and boredom.

The person who screws things up

Or then there’s the project where you’re dumbfounded, gobsmacked by how unbelievably incompetent/spineless/useless someone is — and you’re left to pick up the pieces.

You’re building your dream house (Hobbit hole, eco-house off the grid) and your omnipotent builders charge you the earth, take three times as long as promised, and do a shoddy job too — but all you can do is bitterly fork over more money and pray it’ll turn out all right (this hasn’t actually happened because we’re nowhere near being able to have our own house, but I like to worry about it anyway).

Getting It Done: How to lead when you’re not in charge

If any of that sounds familiar, and you’re like me in seeking salvation in books, you’ll be delighted to hear of two I’ve just started:

Getting It Done: How to Lead When You’re Not in Charge and the charmingly named Dealing with People You Can’t Stand: How to Bring Out the Best in People at Their Worst.

Getting It Done deals with neverending meetings and how to get things done when everyone’s milling about, hoping for direction.

If, like me, you’re involved in a volunteer organisation that’s trying to accomplish a major project or care about making your workplace meetings more productive (I remember those days, shudder, and wish you the very best), then I think you’ll find it very useful.

Dealing with People You Can’t Stand

If you’re terrified or exhausted at the thought of working with people who irritate the hell out of you, then Dealing with People You Can’t Stand is the ticket.

You’ll learn about the most common types of problem people, why they act like that, and what to do about it. The authors, two naturopathic doctors (similar training to MDs, but emphasize disease prevention and holistic healthcare), saw that when people learn good communication skills and are able to achieve their goals, their physical illnesses disappear. So they turned to developing a program for dealing with difficult people, and out of that came this book.

OK, I’m a part of the communication problem too

Let me say, by the way, that I know full well a lot of the problem is how I approach things, how I deal with people and my issues getting in the way. Thanks to some great conflict studies classes I took at Bryn Mawr College, I know that negotiation and personal communication is all about accepting it’s no one’s “fault” and that you start by looking at what you’re doing “wrong” first.

The problem is, I don’t know how to apply that to working with other people when you desperately need to get something done. But I’m learning.

3 Steps to getting things done when no one’s in charge

You can tell Roger Fisher’s Getting It Done is designed for the corporate manager (the cover even has a picture of a suited guy giving a thumbs up), but don’t let that put you off.

His approach is:

1. Learn how to get things done well for yourself.
2. Figure out what a successful meeting looks like.
3. Learn how to get others working at their best.

He uses the analogy of a jazz band. If you want to get your jazz ensemble playing great, first you need to make sure you’re playing the best you can. Then you need to know what a good ensemble sounds like — the notes, rhythm, style. Finally you need to inspire your fellow players to play at their best.

10 Most Annoying Types of People

As for Dealing with People You Can’t Stand, I’m reading about the “10 Most Unwanted” types of annoying people. I have to say, top of my list of people that drive me maaaadddddd are:

1. The “Yes” Person — The one who always says they’ll do something and then rarely does it. The one who says they’ll have that for you next week, then next week, then next. You want to be nice, but you’re left holding the bag.
2. The “Think-They-Know-It-All” Person — The one who enthusiastically claims they can do something when it’s clear they know buggerall about it. But through sheer force of personality or lack of an alternative, persuade just enough people to follow them. Into the abyss.

Which annoying person am I?

A fun part of this book is where you get to figure out which annoying person you are when you’re under tremendous stress and really not at your best. I’d have to go with The Tank (blow up from frustration when you just can’t take it anymore) and The No Person (give devastatingly practical reasons why something will never work).

Can’t wait to find out more! Will keep you posted as I unlock the secrets of Harmonious
World Order.

The first logo stamp motif is the most direct reference.

This next one I call The Travel Label, because I used the old-fashioned travel labels that use to go on steamer trunks as my inspiration.

Logo #2: The Travel Label

The main font is from the Edwardian (1900-1910) time period, and the layout and rough edges are antique feeling.

Brand words and creating a mood with a logo

While I tried to convey all the words I had from a master list of brand “moods”, I focused on a few ones in particular such as:

• journey (the idea that we as artists and members are on a journey, evolving)
• welcoming (the swirly “g” is friendly, almost childlike)
• traditional/modern (the “cooperative” font is very modern to contrast)

The logo on bags, tags and more

Of the three, this logo is the simplest. Thinking about how to apply the logo to items like cotton bags (which we’ll be using instead of plastic bags), gift tags — even business cards and leaflets will be part of the decision as to which logo is chosen.

Logo #3: The Plants logo

The Plants logo is the most modern, though the rectangle layout is still rooted in the traditional. The main, stamp-like font is the only reference to the post office feel.

Mood and key brand words

The mood and brand words I emphasised here were:

• organic (plants as lively and growing)
• diversity (many different species to reflect the many nationalities in our coop)
• celebration

Got a favourite logo?

Like one more than the other? Let me know. Again, colour has a huge effect on people’s preferences, so that will influence what people like, but in black and white, does one stand out for you more than others?

We meet Thursday with all the members, so we’ll see what everyone thinks then.

I love designing logos.

Logos are the instant snapshot of your business or organisation. The challenge of transforming some words like “decadent” and “welcoming” into a few shapes and letters that actually convey that idea is one that really gets my energy and creativity flowing.

For The Sorting Room, I had to start with the building itself, which is an old post office “sorting room” (i.e., the area where they would sort the mail for delivery).

Researching before designing a logo

I did some digging into when the building was built, and managed to track down a photograph which showed men standing outside in clothing straight from the Edwardian period, 1900-1910.

I had a look at some books of historical Orkney postcards, and grabbed one showing a stamp and postmark from the post office from 1908.

The British Postal Museum & Archive gave me some more background on the style of post in the early 1900s, and I also searched some of the V&A Museum’s online collection for posters, ceramics, and other daily artefacts.

Logo keywords and mood

My brief was to create a logo that embodied some of these moods or qualities:

• rooted in history
• decadent
• diversity
• celebration
• journey
• traditional/modern
• quality crafted
• organic
• welcoming

But I felt that the history of the building had to be there in the logo.

Ideally, the logo should only use one colour, so we can print it cheaply on our cotton bags we’ll be using instead of plastic bags.

And finally, rather than create an icon, some image like a swoosh or hand or whatever, I felt the letters and words of the The Sorting Room should take centre stage.

The Sorting Room logo #1: stamp motif

Here’s one of the 3 designs I came up with, in black and white:

The logos are on a brown paper background, since we’re hoping to wrap our gifts in brown paper.

You can see the strong influence and link to the antique stamps and I’ve used the actual postmark as well — the mark was made originally in 1908 and says “08″. Given that we’re opening in 2008, I think it makes a nice touch and connection to the past.

To keep it from being too oldy-worldy, the “Cooperative” word is in a very modern font, and the layout is also modern.

Applying colour to a logo last

To avoid getting hung up on debates on colour, it’s useful to show a black and white version first. This way, you can try out a variety of colours if needed.

We don’t have a set colour palette, but since “celebration” and “diversity” were two of my keywords for the brief, orange might be a good choice since according to colour psychology, colour combines the warmth and dynamism of red with the welcoming nature of sunny yellow:

There are 2 other logo designs, and I’ll be presenting all 3 at our next members’ meeting next Thursday. We’ll see what everyone thinks then, but it’s been a great few days designing.