All For Good. Good for All.
Social-entrepreneur and ethical branding guru Jonathan Greenblatt challenges companies to find their core purpose and use that to serve their communities.
By Jason Carignan
Portrait by Christopher Brereton / picturehealing.com
What if your company were to broaden its view of “community” beyond the geographic vicinity of your offices, stores, and employees’ homes, to everyone on the planet touched by your product or service? And what if you measured your firm’s success not solely with economic indicators, but also by evaluating the social and environmental contributions to this community?
Jonathan Greenblatt believes that casting a broader sense of community and defining a business’ core purpose in serving that community are the fundamental questions facing companies seeking to build an ethical brand. Greenblatt is a professor at UCLA and CEO founder/president of recent start-up All For Good (allforgood.org), a crowd-sourced volunteering Web site that is turning the traditional community service model on its head.
Back in 2003, Greenblatt co-founded Ethos Water with his former business school classmate, Peter Thum. Ethos was one of the earliest companies to combine the power of consumer branding with a social cause. For every bottle of Ethos water sold, the company donated a significant portion of sales to help children around the world get access to clean water. After just a few years, they sold the company to Starbucks. But Greenblatt insists they didn’t sell the company for the money. Instead, they believed that selling to Starbucks would allow Ethos to spread its message atop the shoulders of one of the largest and most successful retail and brand platforms of our time.
Sitting in a bustling cafe on the UCLA campus at peak caffeine consumption time, I chatted with Greenblatt about All For Good, and his views on why ethical brands are leading the way in a new era of community-driven business models.
Work Your Core
Overnight, the acquisition of Ethos by Starbucks reduced the company’s risks of failure to almost zero while instantly accelerating its core purpose: to change the way people think about water. It is this kind of core purpose that Greenblatt believes must drive every decision a company makes, something he calls Ethical Branding.
Today, Starbucks donates five cents to water causes for every bottle of Ethos water it sells, setting the goal of raising $10 million – far more than Ethos could have accomplished on its own. But perhaps more importantly, Starbucks continues to renew its commitment to educating people about the world water crisis. In effect, Starbucks has turned its more than 11,000 U.S. locations into mini-classrooms where its employees, partners, and customers collaborate, in a sense, to help alleviate the world water crisis.
Ethos Water never set out to become the biggest bottled water company in the world. Instead, it challenged its customers to redefine their “community” to include the more than one billion people around the world who don’t have access to clean drinking water and sanitation. In so doing, the company engaged its customers in its cause and has since helped an estimated 420,000 people get access to clean water.
For his current venture, All For Good, Greenblatt got the inspiration while serving on the Obama-Biden presidential transition team. During the campaign, Obama challenged citizens to step-up community service efforts. Greenblatt took that challenge to heart and set out to utilize Web 2.0 tools and open standards to create the largest database of volunteering opportunities in the world.
All For Good currently lists more than 200,000 volunteer opportunities with organizations around the country. But most surprisingly, and true to the company’ open-source model, most of the activity on the allforgood.org Web site does not seek to succeed as a destination Web site, but instead takes a backseat to its partners who can use the platform to build and enhance their own presence. Thousands of people have done so by embedding the All for Good Gadget on their blogs and Facebook pages. A number of large publishers have used the tool to enhance their Web sites. Some entrepreneurs have used All for Good to power new social ventures. A few ambitious developers have built robust mobile applications on their platforms. This actually occurs across its partner sites like Google and others via feeds and imbedded widgets. For example, you could be checking your Gmail while being presented with a series of volunteering opportunities in your neighborhood. In all these varied instances, All for Good helps people find ways to make an impact, but to do so in an environment of their choosing.
But for Greenblatt, service is not an end in itself, but a means for building stronger communities. He believes that community service should not be viewed as punitive or even as a mandatory, compulsory activity, but simply as an act of civic engagement participation for the public good. With All For Good, Greenblatt is actively connecting people with service opportunities and organizations they’ve never heard of, simply by extending the volunteering conversation across the Web. In Greenblatt’s mind, these “conversations” will ultimately lead to increased engagement and stronger societal restoration.
Building an Ethical Brand
Ethical brands take many forms, but each strives to pursue its core purpose above all and to “do the right thing” by having a larger sense of what defines their community. Some companies, like Starbucks, use their influence and marketing platform to affect positive change in their employees, neighborhoods, and supply-chain partners. Their efforts to support sustainable farming and legendary employee benefits are a few notable examples. Other companies, such as Ethos Water and All For Good, intentionally set out to create a profitable business with a larger mission, providing clean water to children around the world. Tom’s Shoes and (Product) [(Red]) have since launched very successful ethical brands based on similar models of cause-based consumption. Some nonprofits, like All for Good, seek to drive social impact while simultaneously generating earned income and achieving sustainable economic models.
These companies all point to a growing trend where the line between for-profit corporations and not-for-profits is increasingly blurry. Were it not for delineations in our tax code, these distinctions might easily become obsolete. Greenblatt states, “We need to rethink the basic chemistry of companies today and the way in which we value their economic overall contribution. For some, economic impact may be about making the most money possible. For others, it might be about excelling purely on social good.”
Will ethical brands get it right every time? Absolutely not. But, Greenblatt believes that an ethical brand should ultimately be evaluated across the span of the organization’s life. However, in a business world that typically values shareholder return and double-digit annual growth above all else, identifying and pursuing your company’s core purpose beyond profits can be challenging at best. With the convergence of globalization and technology, our interconnectedness is unmatched in history. Unfortunately, our economic value system has not kept up with the social implications of this new global community. For that reason, Greenblatt argues that we need a new periodic table that reconsiders the core elements of organizations and how we build successful markets and healthy societies. We need a new way to measure the contributions, impacts, and risks of companies beyond just quarterly financial results.
