goodworkpeople

By teaching the world to read, and helping save the environment.

Here’s how we do it: First, Better World Books takes “unwanted” books that would otherwise have ended up in landfill and finds new homes for them. We do this through library discards and donations, campus collections, and community book drives—so far we’ve diverted over 26 million books from landfills.

Then, when we sell the books a portion of every sale benefits our nonprofit literacy partners who use the funds for scholarships, to build schools, and to get books to people who need them. So far we’ve raised over $6.5 million for our nonprofit literacy partners.

We work very closely with our nonprofit literacy partners. For example, we regularly send college textbooks to Africa through Books for Africa in addition to funding much of their operation.

We recently worked with NCFL to develop a grant program—the BWB/NCFL Libraries and Families Award—that will make 3 awards a year of $10,000 to libraries. And of course, Invisible Children and Better World Books ran the biggest book drive in history last year, bringing in 1.9 million books.

But the greatest indicator of our commitment to our nonprofit partners is our new initiative to grant stock options to several of them. So now as Better World Books grows, our nonprofit partners stand to benefit.

People want to be socially responsible—it shows in our employees who are passionate about their work making a difference, and it shows in our customers who choose us over other alternatives because of our social mission.

What’s been lacking is a model where people can apply these principles to their daily work while not being divorced from the capitalist engine that forms our society. Triple bottom line companies, for-profit social enterprises, b-corporations—these are all part of a movement to change the way business is done to benefit all stakeholders, not just shareholders.

So ultimately, the commitment comes from the desire to have what we’re spending our time on matter in a profound way in the world.

We’ve grown from nothing to $31 million in sales in 5 years, and it is technology that has enabled us to scale effectively. Under the hood, we are actually a very sophisticated technology and analytics company.

For example, we constantly benchmark millions of prices across the web, and we measure supply and demand to arrive at fair, competitive prices. We list our books on 21 different Internet marketplaces, again facilitated by technology. And we use our technology combined with our logistics expertise to enable free shipping in the U.S. and low cost shipping around the world.

It’s hard to generalize from a specific business instance, but I think there are a couple of principles that small businesses can think about.

First, we take an unwanted resource—used books destined for landfill—and we turn it into a valuable product. There is something to say for thinking of society’s waste streams as a valuable opportunity not only through re-cycling, but through “up-cycling” or re-using first.

Second, the way we create that value is by leveraging the Internet. It provides us a potential customer base of something like a billion people, and our business is all about getting “unwanted” books where people can find them, which suddenly makes them very wanted indeed.

Finally, when you find the right way to build social benefit into your business, it isn’t a burden—it is the business. That’s a tall order, but there are a lot of very smart, creative entrepreneurs out there who can figure out how it applies and help fast-forward the social enterprise movement.

Movember is the month formerly known as November, where we challenge men to grow a moustache for 30 days.

The idea is that you register at www.movember.com, start Movember 1 clean shaven and then for the remainder of the month grow, flow and show your moustache.

The moustache becomes our ribbon by which we raise funds and awareness for the fight against men’s cancers.

Each of the guys becomes a walking billboard promoting men’s health.

After all, if you’re sporting a moustache for the first time in your life you will be compelled in meetings and out socially to explain your new look.  The moustache opens up conversations about prostate and testicular cancer, conversations men don’t normally have.

Last year the campaign raised $24 million USD and was run in the US, Canada, Australia (where it originated), New Zealand, the UK, Ireland and Spain.  We had more than 172,000 registered participants, more than 600,000 individual donors and had 28 end of Movember parties attended by around 30,000 people.  When you run an event on that scale it’s a year round effort.

Throughout the year we work closely with our beneficiary partners who administer the funds we raise and report back to the participants on the impact they are having from the funds they raise.

One of our stated aims is not to be like a typical charity—we don’t do auctions, we don’t do dinners, we don’t do runs or walks.  We grow moustaches!

To engage men in a charity about cancers that affect men you need to approach things very differently.  First and foremost, Movember is FUN, it’s irreverent and a little anti-establishment but it’s for a critically important cause that has long been neglected. It’s this combination that engages men and women in the campaign.

There are very few differences.  Movember is a brand, we have customers, we have a product that needs to provide real value to in order to engage our customers.  We use web based technologies and social media to efficiently reach our customers and operate the campaign.

I don’t like the term not-for-profit and we don’t use it at Movember.  We are all about profit—our fundraising and administration costs run at 9% of the funds we raise.  The only difference is how the profit is applied. In our case the profit is used by our beneficiary partners—the Prostate Cancer Foundation and Lance Armstrong Foundation to fund programs that help improve the state of men’s health.

So you can see that we run Movember as a business.

We are busy building the first business tool specifically designed to run on the mobile phones of micro-entrepreneurs. To be more concrete, we are focusing on the small mom & pops and their accounting and inventory management needs.

Exactly.  We believe the smartphone will become the main computing tool for the base of the pyramid (BOP), since it doesn’t have to compete with laptops or PCs as in the richer world.

Almost every adult has a cell phone at the BOP and from the drop in price of technological products, we can infer that in 3-5 years everyone at the BOP will have a smartphone.

Will they also buy a PC computer? Well, it will depend on what they can’t do on their smartphones, which is an interesting inversion to what happened in the US and Europe.

Of course now that the smartphones have powerful interfaces and an internet connection, here too we’re starting to see what novel applications they can foster.

The difference is that those apps still have to compete in most cases with their equivalents in laptops and desktops, as even while on the move you can always wait until you get home to write that long email. In the developing world, there won’t be any laptops necessarily, so you’ll write that email on your phone for sure!

We will have to educate them at two levels. First, they’ll need to learn how to use our tool. But to extract all its potential, they will also have to learn the business skills required to run efficiently a retail operation.

How will we do that? Even if we’ll use teachers and workshops in the early stages, our goal is to have a self-teaching tool. Using the multimedia capabilities of the phones, we plan on creating short how-to videos, interactive animations, audio testimonials and even simple games that modularize the knowledge and make it simple to digest.

The benefit of using the phone is double. On one hand, once you’ve built the content, its replication is free. On the other, the shopkeepers will take advantage of the idle time they have in their shops, instead of having to close them to go to a classroom and forgoing some income.

I’ve heard before that you can’t teach entrepreneurship, let alone its social sister. By that I take that the drive and desire to build a new organization can’t be taught and that’s one of the most important ingredients for a successful venture.

In my case, the two years at Columbia business school gave me the tools to analyze an opportunity, to understand the rudiments of how to capture it, and to devise ways to ensure its lasting social impact.

Furthermore, it provided an excellent testing ground to sharpen skills, which I took advantage of by launching Microlumbia, a student-run fund focused on investments and consulting for microfinance institutions. Going through that process while getting advice from professors and experts, as well as access to Columbia’s network of professionals, was an extremely valuable teaching experience.

And it made me want to continue down a similar path after graduation.