 You heard this morning that we're talking about impact that comes from other places that you you might not have expected it And what I think one thing we really underestimate in this area where we're talking about capital markets We're talking about impact through capital markets is that there's a lot of people making impact through those capital markets in a different way through activism through campaigning and we have someone here with us tonight who brings down the house every year at personal democracy forum who is a Celebrity in this world of activism and organizing and I just think I'm so impressed with her and Really wanted the soak up audience to hear these other ways that people are having impact tremendous impact and making huge social and environmental change So please welcome Christy George from New Media Ventures and Taryn Steinbrickner Kaufman from some of us I was just saying to Lindsay. It was quite sadistic to put us after guy with guitar like we're not gonna be able to sing for you but Knowing that we are the last thing between you and a drink. We will try to make it as interesting as possible I'm short. Yeah short and interesting. I'm Christy George. I'm the director of New Media Ventures We are a seed fund and network of angel investors focused on media and technology startups that create progressive change and I've been coming to SoCAP for many years and speaking at SoCAP and one of the things that I'm so excited about today is the integration of Politics and activism into the conversation around impact investing So we were really proud a couple of years ago to have Taryn come into our orbit and to be able to support Her work at some of us and I think you are in for a treat in hearing how she's grown that organization from just her to quite a global behemoth so Taryn why don't we just start tell us why did you start some of us? What is it? Why should people in this room care? Yeah So some of us is over five million consumers investors and workers around the world working together to push companies to be more Responsibles and socially environmentally Politically getting money out of politics and so on and the reason that we're New is because the way we do that is online and in global internet access as you know is like a relatively new phenomenon Historically and so the idea that you could get you know, 200,000 consumers overnight to express Concern about an issue to a company from a hundred and eighty different countries That's a new thing and that's what we do and the reason that I think this is so important is because major global corporations as you know are The most among the most important political actors in the world and in fact like of the top hundred world economies Something like half of them are corporations not countries And so when you're thinking like who are the people in the world who can change people's lives It's not just presidents and prime ministers. It's CEOs and often that change can happen much more quickly than political change and I came to this work because I came out of the climate movement and I worked in the lead-up to Copenhagen in 2009 the big climate conference that was a total and complete failure and Took a sort of step back from that and Was like well I'm an American citizen the reason that we cannot get this global treaty that everybody knows is the right thing for the world Like everybody knows the policy solutions. This isn't a mystery It's purely a power problem But the reason we can't get that treaty is because of the US. I'm an American citizen So I came back in 2010 and worked to try and get a climate bill passed in the US Also a total and complete failure as you might remember And again the sort of the next step back is well why why can't we get a global treaty because of the US? Why can't we get a US treaty because of the stranglehold that the fossil fuel industry has on Washington? There's no way around it. That's the answer And so I'm gonna do what I can to try and hold corporations accountable because they really are the power players on most issues So is that the problem that you would say some of us is explicitly solving? Yeah, I mean well, we haven't solved all the world's problems yet but the idea is that you know In some ways the economy on the marketplace is actually a more democratic forum than politics There's literally no politician in the world who cares what every single person on earth thinks of them Even the Secretary General of the UN like there's a lot of people on earth that they really just don't care about but pepsi like pepsi Literally cares what every single person in the world thinks of them and with not that much difference in how much they care You know an American consumer might only be worth ten times as much as to them as like the poorest person in the world frankly And so that the ability to mobilize people around the world To hold corporations accountable seemed really Potentially quite powerful and we've seen a huge amount of success in this in this strategy Can you give us a couple of examples of the consumer advocacy campaigns you've run because I think what is? At least as grant makers what has been so exciting for us is how you are winning essentially campaigns Yeah, it's a it's a lot more fun than politics a lot of the time So at one example that's really relevant right now in California that I'm excited about is I mean We have a drought as I'm sure you all know and it's not just here. It's up and down the whole West Coast and Nestlé is bottling groundwater in California and selling it for a profit right now and They're due they want to start doing that in Oregon. They are I've also been doing it in British Columbia In fact in British Columbia The water rate was I'm not making this up was two dollars and twenty five cents per Let me make sure I'm getting this right per million liters of groundwater is what they were paying the British Colombian government And so we you know stopping Nestlé from doing this would be awesome in and of itself But it's also an entree into a larger conversation because Nestlé is a very relatable brand for consumer consumers And so we're running campaigns up and down the West Coast in California we held a rally outside of a Nestlé bottling plant. They got national press coverage a few months ago In Oregon. We're fighting the new state law that would allow Nestlé To do the same thing that they're doing in California and in British Columbia. We actually had a big win we after we got we had a position that went totally viral calling on the state government to change the way that they treat water rates and had 225,000 people signed it and we took it delivered it huge delivery lots of press and the British Colombian government agreed and is currently Changing in the process it'll you know, we don't know what the outcome is going to be yet But they entered a process they were not In because of our campaign and so that was really exciting and it said it's it's allowed us to start a bigger conversation With five million consumers around the world about water privatization issues One thing that I've heard people say about some of us that is interesting from an activism perspective is that People think of traditional activism as wholly oppositional and one thing that is also interesting about what you do Is the way you think about having a positive influence on companies as well. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean Companies are not monolithic, right? And there are lots of people inside every company who want to be doing good Or want the least to be doing better But they often don't have the power to make that happen and so What we actually see ourselves doing a lot of the time is providing those internal voices with like more sort of External stuff they can point to you and letting giving them like a leg to stand on well If you've got 200,000 consumers who've expressed anger about this thing Then you can call a meeting about it and maybe some people will come whereas before you couldn't Or if you if you force the social media people and the comms people and to spend Two days working on this issue It's gonna get to a much higher level in the organization than it might otherwise So it's not like you know, we don't Most people in the world work for big corporations, right? It's not like we think that all those people are evil or something But the way that the incentive structures are set up. It's it's not you know It's not easy to to do good always so you started doing consumer advocacy campaigns But you have also done a lot of work in the shareholder activism world I suspect that there are people in this audience who have been quite active in that world Can you tell us how that manifests in the context of some of us? Yeah So I really think consumer Organizing and shareholder advocacy go hand-in-hand and that's one thing actually that if you're gonna take something away from this That's a big one for those of you work As you know in shareholder advocacy or in related fields like I think there's sort of a division like we don't People in those worlds don't know each other the people in the consumer Organizing world in the shareholder world don't know each other very well But if you're a shareholder you're trying to get a company to do something you have to demonstrate a financial risk And consumers are the ones who are the financial risk a lot of the time And so you know we look for issues where shareholders are doing work And we look to channel and express consumers frustration around that in a demonstrable way So you can say there's 200,000 people who are worried about this thing We also actually act as shareholders Sometimes so we file shareholder resolutions. We file the resolution on behalf of some of our members who own shares in Amazon earlier this year and Got Amazon Amazon is notoriously unresponsive to consumer campaigns But this was around the working conditions in Amazon warehouses and File the resolution asking for disclosure Around those conditions and got it on the the ballot and Amazon was much much much more responsive to that Then they had been to other groups consumer campaigns and Another great example was kinder Morgan is a Canadian extractives Company that's trying to build a pipeline as many Canadian extractives companies are and it's going through the land of the Sallail Watt tooth First Nation in Alberta And so we worked with that with that First Nation and we crowdfunded a tour from our members donated to and we accompanied the Leaders of the First Nation group to Wall Street and got them meetings with JP Morgan with Goldman Sachs And with eight eight different institutional investors that represented 10.5 percent of Kinder Morgan's shares And those investors had only been told so far that everything was on track And that you know that was going to be approved and don't worry and everything's fine And they didn't know that the First Nations groups were fighting the pipeline actually until we met with them And Since then it's actually been a whole reversal Again, it's gonna be years before we actually know the outcome, but there's just a five-a-month delay announced And Alberta oil into oil newspaper not a progressive lefty rag at all Said that the whole thing had been a public relations nightmare for kinder Morgan So those are the kinds of things and you know, we would love to work with more shareholder advocacy groups The I'm sort of interested in how you characterized one company is notoriously Unresponsive and then there's sort of ways you can move them up the ladder toward responsiveness at some level It seems like there's partly a question of people just didn't know in this sort of in this example It was like they didn't know these people existed. Is that typically what is the difference or there are other differences? That move people it really depends. I mean Walmart is a totally different kettle of fish from, you know A small company that has never had a PR crisis before I mean you guys are all Involved you're in boards of companies like, you know, the different PR Experiences different comms experiences. So it's often, you know as consumers were often like this is a really important issue And we got nothing right and then this is a really important issue. No, let's yell it louder Let's do it in this other way and then you get something that bites and suddenly you get, you know Somebody once told me like if you can just make it Something that the CEO has to think about like once a week then and it you might you know Like CEOs don't want to have to think about your campaign once a week. So I Think that seems like a pretty good shorthand. Yeah, I want to pivot a little bit to some of us as model So some of us is a nonprofit organization at New Media Ventures. We make for-profit investments debt equity investments as well as grants and You know people tend to think of ROI in terms of investment and then think of grant making as simply giving money away And so I'm interested in how you think of both some of us's revenue model, which I think would be helpful for people to hear and How you think of sort of return on investment in the context of a nonprofit? Yeah My big top line here would be that it may be counterintuitive But actually in some cases giving to nonprofits is a better investment than Investing in a for-profit company and by that I mean if your bottom line is impact and change which I assume many That's why many of you are here We There are nonprofits that are actually revenue generating and that require investment in order to generate that revenue And we're one of them So we've taken less than three million dollars in major donor and foundation funding since we launched And we're currently Raising online a million dollars a quarter in small dollar donations So if you think about that the our early investors of which New Media Ventures is one and their investment group the investors that work through them like Are you believe those investors have already had a 10 to 20 times payoff in terms of revenue generated for progressive change? And that's just to date right that's going to continue to pay off for as long as we're raising money from small dollar donors, so that's Yeah, think about it that way right like you could invest in something and get the money back and then try to give it away for good But you could also invest in the good thing. That's revenue generating to begin with Yeah How do you you know there's a lot of hand-dringing within this community since you mentioned impact as presumably the bottom line of Every single person in this room about how exactly to measure that impact Especially in the context of a campaigning organization You've got the campaign wins, but the kind of change you're seeking is quite long term How do you think about measuring impact or how and you know, how might that be instructive for all of us? Yeah, it's it's really hard right has anybody got a perfect solution because I'd love to hear it I listened to the panel earlier today talking about this and I think in many ways the impact investing community is ahead of the campaign and community and measuring impact But I think we also have lessons to share And one of the lessons for me is to like you think if you think about your theory of change right some The thing that you do that makes this other thing happen that makes this other thing happen It makes other thing happen that means that like more poor people have food right or whatever it is whatever your theory of changes It's often really hard to test that the thing you're doing which is giving money to Some company is going to result in more people having more food But you can test the links along the way of the chain You may not be able to test all of them But so like the one thing I would say is like keep your eyes open for the links that you can test So an example of this in campaigning is we pour untold resources into getting people to make phone calls to Congress, right? as a movement and Actually, you know, there's a lot of reasons to think that that works that that has effect But nobody's ever run a controlled trial to see whether it actually does and it wouldn't be that hard you could use a state legislature as a testing bed and you could generate Pick half of the state legislators randomly on some issue that they don't get lobbied on a lot and Generate phone calls to that half and not to the other half and see if it affects how they vote And that's something that kind of thinking about like where are the links in the chain that you could test and Making sure you actually test them And I think the other thing I would say which I don't think the campaigning world does a great job of but I would I'm trying to change that is Is that you should be investing actual resources in measuring your impact? Like if you invest 10% of all your resources and measuring your impact and that makes you 20% more effective Then you've won right you've won that game And it's not that hard to get 20% more effective But if you like really work at it, so I think that's you know, that's a way to think about it You tell us as we're sort of wrapping up what you're most excited about now in terms of some of us's future And what we should expect from you. Yeah, well, so actually, you know, this is a little wonky But the thing that I'm most excited about right now is technology Our sector has not really adapted the digital, you know move on like you get a lot of emails Some of them are donation asks that's still the the the model that we all use in digital campaigning progressive campaigning and The world has changed a lot since that model was invented like people are now reading all their email on their phone Frankly, they don't really like email very much whereas it used to be really personal And we're building a world-class technology team in house to try and figure out how you use WhatsApp and how you use Apps on your phone to try and mobilize more people and just get millions and millions more people engaged Thank you for that as we wrap up. I was sort of thinking about my takeaways from your Points and I think I'm thinking a lot about one Keeping all of our eyes open for links that might reveal impact along the sort of chain of our work to also to consider non-profit impact as Potentially more efficient than some of the for-profit investments we might make and then last to create a campaign that keeps the CEO Thinking once a week and it seems like we'll be able to solve everything Just join me please in thanking Taryn Steinbrückner Kaufman in sharing some of her wisdom