The World Wide Web is a great source of information, especially for entrepreneurs. But everybody needs a little help from time to time and it’s hard to know how and where to find someone suited to your specific business needs. That’s why you need a Gangster.
MakeSense.org is an Open Source project co-founded by Christian Vanizette. Collaboratively created by a community and free for all to use, MakeSense.org is dedicated to bringing social entrepreneurs together with mentors. A global Gang of social business activists (the “Gangsters”) helps root out the challenges of social entrepreneurs and get a worldwide community together to solve those challenges with the help of “Sensemakers” – people who can solve them.
Take a business like Swayam Bags, in India, which employs women living in the slums to design and create bags out of old newspapers. The bags are sold to large retail stores and most of the profits are given to the women; the rest is reinvested into the business. Swayam Bags uses MakeSense.org to locate mentors in marketing. All they need is for somebody with experience in marketing to visit MakeSense.org, brainstorm a few creative advertising ideas and come up with the solutions the company needs!
Want to get involved!? Just visit MakeSense.org, select one of the super-cute avatars, take a look at some challenges, then click your “Get Involved” button!
There are 4 ways to get involved:
- I can help — you can apply your personal skills and expertise to the challenge;
- I know someone — you can refer the social entrepreneur to someone else by email;
- I can spread the word — you can talk to your group or company about the challenge; or
- I can organize a Hold-up — you offer to run a brainstorming event around the challenge.
Yep. A “Hold-up.” A Hold-up is a real-world, 2-hour brainstorming workshop held by Gangsters, often yielding a set of 5 or 6 detailed solutions to one social entrepreneur’s specific challenge. Christian explains that these Hold-ups are “a way to spread ideas and to show that nothing is truly impossible if you put creativity into it — we can all become social entrepreneurs. Even if the concepts developed are not implemented, at the very least the workshops gather more fans for the social entrepreneur and people feel involved in the project.”
So, if you’re looking for a way to expand your social business and need answers from people whom you wouldn’t otherwise know how to contact: hit up MakeSense.org and find your own Gangster – maybe he or she will make you an offer you can’t refuse!
