Funding Digital Social Innovation

Sometimes we forget that social innovation is just as much about improving existing solutions to social problems as it is about creating new ones. Policymakers and funders of digital social innovation are due a reminder of this fact too.

That's not to deny the importance of new digital enabled approaches to tackling social issues. Working on a research project, at the Open University, studying digital social innovation we have spent days talking to truly inspirational people; who with the help of the Internet are working to solve some of the toughest problems we face.

Like many others, we have been happily swept along on a wave of enthusiasm for the novel, the emerging, and the high-tech. However, a nagging feeling remains that advocates of digital social innovation need to temper such enthusiasm. That in our rush to celebrate the latest example of Internet-powered progressive social change we are missing a trick or two.

Talking to volunteers involved in Freegle, a website that enables people to directly give unwanted items to others in their local area, really brings this home.

Freegle (a UK off shoot from Freecycle) is a huge, but often overlooked, success story of digital social innovation. A non-profit organisation with more than 1.6 million members, Freegle is run almost entirely by volunteers on an annual budget of £10,000, and saves 13,000 tonnes of potential waste from landfill each year.

Yet Freegle faces huge challenges when seeking funding to improve the service it offers. Edward Hibbert, a volunteer director of Freegle, believes that; “In the current climate it's extremely hard to win funding unless you employ professional fundraisers, or you invent a project just because it fits funding criteria.” 

“Sustaining and developing the core work of existing organisations with a proven track record too often takes second place to funding glamorous but ultimately doomed startups.  Given the spectacular impact Freegle has with such limited resources, we could do so much more, but we have effectively given up on the formal funding route as a waste of time - and we hate waste.” 

It seems Edward has point, in 2011 the Cabinet Office announced £10 million of funding to the support innovators develop the next Freecycle or JustGiving.

The focus on supporting start-ups, at the expense of more established innovations, may be a result of the dominance of Silicon Valley thinking in the world of digital social innovation.

The Silicon Valley model - start-up companies securing venture capital investment, establishing a business model, and scaling up – is not the only way to address social problems using the Internet though. This model often overlooks the persistent and complex nature of social problems, and the important role played by grassroots movements.

Of course we could be wrong. Maybe grassroots organisations would benefit from becoming more like an internet start-up. Freegle could certainly become more entrepreneurial, and find a Silicon Valley solution to its funding challenges. It could easily create a revenue stream by charging its members a small subscription fee.

It feels as though that this would undermine the grassroots principles of the organisation by excluding those with the least financial resources from the free reuse movement. 

So as our initial Internet optimism fades we are developing a more balanced and critical perspective on digital social innovation. A perspective which hopefully helps the digital social innovation community grapple with the tricky dilemmas of this era of enthusiasm for using the Internet to solve social problems. 

This blog was written jointly by Dr. Chris Martin (Research Fellow at the Open University) and Patrick Truss (Freelance Science and Technology Writer)