Esme: Midomo Charm Bracelet - Preview Party Round Up..

Press Release: Here
Pictures from the event.

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The evening was approaching... The clock had nearly struck half past six...The guests had been invited, the glasses were polished, the cakes looked heavenly, the bracelet was displayed to perfection and we were in our party dresses (James was in a shirt, his dress stayed at home for the night). But there was one rather large and irritating problem - the TFL tube types had decided to go on strike!

Why they obviously decided to sabotage our party I’m not sure, but in the end most of our lovely guests battled on despite the odds and managed to join us, if a little fashionably late! Red Button Design’s preview party for the Midomo Bracelet was a complete and utter success and I am sure I speak for the whole team when I say thank you to everyone who came along.

This was a special night for everyone at Red Button because it was really our first ever fully-fledged-wine-and-cakes-in-the-evening event, and even more importantly because it marked the launch of the Midomo Bracelet.

Teaming up with Alex Monroe, creator of the infamous bumblebee necklace (for those of a fashonista inclination) was really a honour. Alex has designed and handmade a delicate, beautiful charm bracelet, featuring various charms to represent our latest project. The wearer of each bracelet will not only be the proud owner of a bespoke and beautiful piece of jewellery but can also wear it with the knowledge that they have helped someone else along the way. For every one bracelet purchased, one Midomo will be donated to an NGO in a developing country. The owner can track the journey and arrival of the donated equipment via a unique serial code imprinted on their bracelet - just log on to our site, and see who is benefiting.

I think that is what I have cherished throughout this project - that you don’t have to be a martyr to help those in need. You can enjoy the jewellery you love and all at the same time, know that your decision to buy that charm bracelet rather than any other, is directly solving the old age problem of water shortage for one family. Small steps, but steps in the right direction.

Aside from the serious stuff.... We had a great crowd of people at the party. To name a few, we spotted fashion bloggers including Hannah from His&Hers Daily Styling and Saskia from Not Just Medical swapping notes, the crew from Pants to Poverty, Lauren from Cosmo, William from Green Element and Jan from Global Giving. There were all sorts of media moguls hovering about the sumptuous cakes and I hope everyone had a chance to talk about the project. Emma popped in from Alex Monroe’s team to say a few words about the collaboration too, I liked her sparkly shoes very much....

Amanda, in the style of her confident and lovely self, did a great introduction to the bracelet and gave everybody something to think about after we watched the promotional video which accompanies the bracelet. James was a whizz with the electronic stuff as per usual and dealt with all queries of a technical nature... i.e. that us girls know nothing about! Sophie, who (I am so sad to write this) has just finished her internship, was amazing and the party wouldn’t have happened without her.

I will not mention much about the aftermath - merely that it featured eating all the left over cakes, almost thinking the only Midomo Bracelet in the world was lost, then finding it, and several more drinks in the pub across the road... Well we did have something to be proud of, after all...

Lessons from OxfordJam (then promptly back to business..)

I am very aware that we're well overdue a thorough update on Red Button Design's progress. A lot has happened in the first quarter of 2010, much of it good, some significantly better than good (!) and I am genuinely eager to speak about our achievements. Rest assured, all has not stagnated - as you'll see in my next post..

Meanwhile, I'm re-calibrating after OxfordJam: the social enterprise unconference/phenomenon that I mentioned last month I was involved with launching. Broadly speaking it came to be that I was responsible for websites, wikis, social media, a little bit of planning, pr, promotion, design-for-print work and first port of call for all manner of tech and digital fitzjiggery while the event ran Wed-Fri last week. (14-16th April, 2010).

True of all the best things, I found it very difficult to limit my involvement with OxfordJam by the amount of time I had available. Rather, I wanted to limit my involvement by the amount I felt I could usefully contribute. As the amount I felt I could offer greatly exceeded the amount of 'spare' time I had, (and I hasten to add this is mainly by virtue of having little time vs. being vastly talented in this arena!), I had to make the decision to displace some of my non-essential functions at RBD in order to benefit from the experience of helping make concrete something I believe our industry needed. Controversial, perhaps, but I am glad I did. I feel like I gained a lot from the process and I wanted to share with you some of my learnings.

I cannot comment much on the content from a delegates point of view, but suffice to say that feedback so far has been abundant and extremely positive. We'll be collating all this on the OxfordJam website. Meanwhile:

10 things I learned from OxfordJam
..and think apply to all entrepreneurs and small business owners, alike..

1) If you have 'the big vision' don't sweat the detail. It's easy to get hung up on the little things, but act with the vision in mind and the details will align themselves accordingly.
2) Stay flexible. Be willing to re-evaluate everything and anything, even at the very last minute, if doing so will make a positive difference.
3) The strain of long hours and high stakes can be mitigated by working with amazing people.
4) Understand that ultimately what you're creating is not yours, it's the delegates'/customers', and be prepared and willing to let go.
5) Resist the temptation to oversee other people's work. Get good people and trust them to perform accordingly.
6) Tea. Lots and lots of tea.
7) Good communication is the lynchpin of an effective team. Have a protocol for keeping everyone updated with the latest developments, allow disagreements, and have an open line of dialogue for when things get tough. Achieving the latter is by far and away the most difficult.
8) Smart crowds can usually self-manage, and will naturally weed out their own bad seeds if you let them.
9) A little bit of praise, when deserved, goes a long way when things are stressful and spirits low.
10) There is absolutely no substitute for genuine enthusiasm. Not contacts, money, prestige nor a perfect résumé.

A tough but worthwhile experience and great lessons learned. Better still, I do not believe that OxfordJam is over simply because we're no longer gathered in The Jam Factory! I hope to continue working on the project (though at a much more manageable pace) and will propose to help the contributors and delegates build a living, open, resource that will grow alongside our learning and understanding, and that this could also provide a platform from which to begin the discussions next year* As well as proposing this, I'd like to suggest perhaps a regular virtual conference or twitter-based chat in the vein of Ashoka's #SocEntChat and perhaps even the occasional 'tweet up' for us folk for whom London is fairly accessible...

So if that sounds of interest, or for more on OxfordJam, please check out the OxfordJam blog and Twitter feed, both of which are also manned by me.

And the next time you hear from me here (very soon!) it will be with a concrete and informative post about Red Button Design's progress.
Promise! :-)

* and yes, for good or ill, one by one, the OxfordJam team and attendees all gave up saying "if we do this again" in favour of "when we do this again"!

Dates for your diary: OxfordJam, 14-16th April '10

Not for one moment forgetting the remaining posts of the 12 Lessons series, or indeed my very important birthday wish, but I did just want to have a quiet word in your ear..
In the spirit of Lesson #10 and gift economy, let me share with you a upcoming social-enterprise event on which I've been fortunate enough to do a bit of moonlighting..

Running 14-16 April 2010, parallel to the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, OxfordJam is a co-created, pay-what-you-can event for the nurturing of social economy and social finance projects the world over.

Instigated by Ben Metz, OxfordJam isn't going to be your average conference, or even your average un-conference. OxfordJam is a conference 'in relief' asking you to: "Invert everything you have experienced at any vanilla flavoured conference, however inspiring.."

But if that's a little too 'down the rabbit hole' said Alice, worry not.
The basic premise is strikingly simple:
⇒ Take the breaks “in between” normal conference programming and fill them full of inspiring TED style “talking heads”
⇒ Take the programmed time of a normal conference and empty it out immediately after each of these very short talks
⇒ Allow the inspiration borne from the talking heads to fill this space
⇒ Let the conversations and encounters go where they will…

The plan is to provide the space and the inspiration, alongside the tools and games to facilitate. That’s it, nothing more.

We're like your favourite Auntie; we'll let you loose in the toy box, you can stay up past bedtime, and we're genuinely eager to see what you create!

Yes, much to my delight and exponentially increasing interest, OxfordJam is becoming quite something other. Huge thanks to those who willed it into existence and adoration to the growing list of participants.
Tickets (free/by donation) will go live this week, so do check it out. Such a series of amazing people, coming forward with this level of conviction and energy, is not to be missed. Better yet, it is still yours to influence so get involved:*

Follow @OxfordJam on Twitter..
Check out the website..
Join the facebook group..
Subscribe to updates via RSS..
Contact the organisers
Comment below!

*Really, do volunteer to get involved... Else I fear, if left unchecked, the food and sexy metaphors may get the better of us..

#10: Net-works

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Throughout Jan-Mar I've been posting the "12 entrepreneurial lessons I learnt from 2009" series.

Installments so far: Introduction,
Lesson : #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9

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Everyone's heard it, some of you will have said it:
"It's not what you know, but who you know".
Whether you believe it's that simple or not, it is hard to deny that knowing the right people can put a good entrepreneur on the fast track to success. I do mean exactly that, though, knowing the right people can put a good entrepreneur on the fast track to success.

A really good entrepreneur can almost certainly make it without much outside support, it'll just take longer, and if you're a bad entrepreneur, well, all the who-you-knows in the world aren't going to help you. But for most startups, securing pertinent, influential contacts within our sector or customer base is an important part of our development.

And the way to get to know the right people in your industry is to build a network.. and when it comes to building a targeted international network, cheaply and effectively - the 'net works.*

There are a lot of doubters when it comes to online networking, and a lot of online networking platforms to have doubts about. There are also a lot of blog posts out there dedicated to; why you should care, which sites to choose and how best to use them. So I'm simply going to remind you that 80% of the UK use some sort of social network and I suggest that, unless you're certain both your influential industry mentors, product/service evangalists and your competitors and pissed off contacts/customers are all in the 20% not using soical media, you might want to do a little strategising in this area. That's all. ;-)

3 tips on building and nurturing a business network online:

1) Target

Very simple maths. There's one of you, there are lots of social networking sites; any one of which could easily consume several hours of your day, everyday. Target the right sites, target users who log in frequently, share good content and have a strong following themselves, and ration your time there.

If you're hiring and you want to see CV's you'll be better on Linked In than Livejounal, which would suit you better if you're an aspiring writer. Bands looking for signing head to MySpace: to quickly spread documents and links try Twitter, to build a fan base start a Facebook Group, to get the attention of an industry leader comment thoughtfully on their blog. If they don't blog, comment thoughtfully on your blog and send them the link.

You can't make a play on all the networking sites out there. Spend a little time deciding on your aim and audience, and pick the one that suits you best. Use your time there productively. Which leads me to my next tip..

2) Make yourself useful

Once you've picked your target site, settle in and make yourself useful.

The most common mistake I hear from newbies is asking what is the benefit they'll receive from online networking. To paraphrase an old one, "ask not what the network can do for you, ask what you can do for your network". Make yourself useful to others. It'll earn you friends, respect from the community, it could accrue you favours and it will showcase your knowledge. Explaining this to a freind the other day, they then likened Twitter to a gift economy. I couldn't have said it better. Make it your mission to be useful, the rest will follow.

3) Seal the deal, respectfully

Approaching someone online is a very different skill to walking up to them at a networking session. One of the deceptive things about the internet is how it distances you from the other person. You're socialising or collaborating but not face to face, not necessarily in real time, they can't see you, and you lose the 93% of communicative clues we use that are non verbal. Accordingly, it is more important than ever to be respectful when writing emails, messages, and forum posts to possible contacts. Always be polite. Always get to your point in the minimum number of lines, and you must double check spelling, punctuation and grammar, it's the online equivalent of ironing your shirt and polishing your shoes!

Many social networks try to account for the lack of non verbal cues by allowing avatars, font and colour customisation. All I can say is that these don't fully compensate for the complexities of body language and vocal tone but they do still count. Suffice to say people who email me in Coloured Comic Sans have a special place in my inbox. Oh and one more thing, get a sensible email address. No one is going to take "tinkerbell84" or "racerboy1" very seriously.

Treat your online network with no less care than you would treat someone you were meeting face to face. In fact, treat online contacts with greater care. There is often a temptation to hide behind the web and allow the distance and relative anonymity to fool us into become louder, brasher or more pushy than we would be in person. Dont.
No, really - don't!
Everyone has bad days and everyone misjudges situations sometimes but If you're a little pushy or rude to someone in person, only you and they know about it, and the moment (hopefully) passes. If you're throwing your weight around on a blog or forum .. the world knows and it becomes public property, out there to be re-lived ceaselessly.


Creating and nurturing a network is difficult! It is a high level skill which takes a huge amount of perception and social bandwidth, but your business needs someone who can do this just as surely as it needs someone to balance the books; and if you're a start up short on time & budget, using the net to broaden your reach is ideal.

Lesson No.10: When it comes to networks.. the net does indeed, work.


*Anyone who thought i'd get through these 12 blog posts without a bad pun, grab your things & move down to the front of the class where I can keep an eye on you. You've obviously not been paying enough attention.

SICamp Scotland ... Blogpost 1/?

I spent the last 48 hours completely immersed in Social Innovation Camp-ness .. no wait, that didn't come out quite right ;) Still, the sentiment holds if not the expression. Unless it was Twittered to #sicamp I have no idea what happened outside of The Saltire Centre for the last 2 days.

Like the most convoluted of film plots I am going to start with the end, skip to the beginning and see if the middle sorts itself out in the interim, so bearing that in mind ... let me introduce FlockLocal.

FlockLocal was born in the spirit of the SICamp pseudo-mantra "using the online world to change the offline world." Using this idea we elected to create ClusterFlock...,. FlockYourCommunity... FlockLocal, which is a website and collection of associated apps & plugins to allow people to flash mob for social good. That is, to allow people who identify a social need to quickly mobilise volunteers to fill it.

Let me illustrate. We started to think about this idea in the pub on Friday night. By Saturday morning we had a fairly good idea of the user scenario. By 11am we decided we'd like to aim to actually hold a flash mob (henceforth to be known as 'organising a flock') 2 hours later (now 1pm) we had found the wonderful Glasgow Wood Recycling who were due to be reclaiming wood from a theatre set at Gilmorehill which needed loading into a van, driving across town and unloading into their community garden (which itself needed some painting and weeding). By 12noon the next day we'd assembled 15 people, done the job, and headed off for the afternoon.

Hence our tagline FlockLocal "Do Good. Fast"

But it wasn't just us!
The 5 other fabulous teams created the following:


Wee Day Out - A mapping tool for locating & rating disabled toilet facilities.

Fix the Freakin Buses (a.k.a "Hitch 'n' Bitch !!) – A SMS text platform for accessing live bus data.

AngelFish - Hyperlocal Micro-finace for community startups and business growth.

MyPolice.org – Allowing the public to give positive and negative feedback on the police.

Citipedia-An online public town planning tool.


.....and we'll hear more about them shortly.. in part 2 ... after I get some sleep!

but just before the zzZ 's hit, let me say a massive thanks to all at SICamp for working so hard to support all our hard work. We all really appreciate it!

Stay tuned for part 2.

Footnote: Glasgow Wood Recycling is an amazing organisation run by Peter Levelle to whom FlockLocal are very grateful and I will be blogging more about Glasgow Wood Recycling very shortly!

Shine 09 & Web 2.0

Well I have just about come down from the high of "Shine", the Unconference for Social Entrepreneurs, which ran Friday & Saturday last week. As I briefly blogged on the Friday, Shine represented a thoroughly enjoyable, inspiring, buzz of ideas, enthusiasm and (critically) caffeine.

According to The School for Social Entrepreneurs:
"The four partners started the event because they felt there was a need for an accessible, affordable, practical, well-networked, dynamic event that was less about long powerpoints and plenary speeches, and more about one-to-one support and moving your business on."
And I have to say I agree with both the premise and the execution of the idea.

I was particularly interested in how well this event translated itself to Twitter. You only need to browse through the Hashtag #shine09 to see how actively the event was reported by UnConference delegates and followed by those unable to attend. Increasingly I am coming to the conclusion that a good Twitter following can make or break an (un)conference and I had similar discussions at the highly Twittered Engage Invest Exploit Conference in Edinburgh last month (Hashtag #eie09).

For example, on the Saturday of Shine I hosted a scheduled, round table, discussion bearing the rather grand title "'Real & Perceived Barriers to UK Investment for Global Projects". I was asked to do so after a conversation which sprung up around my Tweet "Fed up of the misguided & labored notion that a social enterprise worth UK funding has to have beneficiaries within the UK"

It was advertised (optimistically in my nervous opinion!) as being an opportunity for 'provocative conversation' though I need not have worried. A brilliant hour or so was spent exploring common problems and barriers to investment, not only by the 15 or so people present in the room but, as some of us were Twittering, we had followers and contributors from the global Twittersphere! Most notably @cliffprior and @jameselliot chatting with me and @davedawes.

Furthermore it looks as if the roundtable discussion produced an idea that is going to translate to a longer, larger discussion on Ning and result in a sort of democratic, crowd sourced, crowd funded, international, endowment investment fund (!) inspired by the likes of Kiva, Zopa and MyFootballClub

....Oh I feel a web 2.0 / Social Entrepreneurship Blog post coming on! :)

It'll have to wait though, I'm off to the NLS Awards tonight. Wish me luck!

Social Enterprise - Powered By Coffee!

In the run up to the NLS Awards on Tuesday I am in London having a crazy-busy few days networking, chatting, collaborating, debating, generally drinking loads of coffee with young, cool, like minded social entrepreneur / innovator types :)

I can only hope that my enthusiasm comes across loud and clear as I will find it difficult to expressly articulate just how much fun I am having and how much great business is being done!

The fun started yesterday when I had the absolute pleasure of chatting to Ian Wallis head of Entrepreneur TV for cmypitch.com over a coffee in Adam Street and continues in full force today at "Shine" the Unconference for Social Entrepreneurs.

There is far too much of interest going on just now for me to blog about it all but check out the action on Twitter! (Hashtag #shine09 !)