Does your business need to be on the Internet?

If a website for your business can do one or more of the following 3 things for you, then the answer is yes:

1. Result in extra revenues (when people can actually buy from the website – e. g. Tata Croma selling through its website in addition to its real world stores)

2. Result in extra footfalls/customers (when people tend to discover businesses in that category on the web, typically through Google – e. g. florists, hostels)
3. Make the business look more credible (businesses with websites appear to be more serious/professional)

If any of the above is relevant to you, you need to formulate an online strategy – things you ought to do for your business to benefit from the Internet. Let’s get to that then.

What do you need to do for your business on the Internet?

That question can be split into the following two simpler questions:

1. Should you have a website on your own domain name, a blog or a Facebook Page?
2. What content should there be on your online presence?

For the first question above: a website with a dedicated domain name (www.yourbusiness.com) is usually the best. It offers more importance and prestige to your business, can be completely customized, and belongs completely to you (a blog or Facebook Page technically belong to the blog site and Facebook respectively, there are limitations to what you can do there, and any investments you make there can do down the drain if your blog / Facebook Page get suspended for whatever reason).

Therefore, if an online presence is important, the way to go would be a website on your own domain, with a blog and a Facebook Page embellishing it if you have the time for them.

Now to answer the second question (what content should there be on your online presence?). Your content strategy for your website is basically an answer to the question of how often you need to update your website.

1. If your reason for having a website is just to make you look more credible as a business (the third reason mentioned at the beginning), you need a simple website with no regular content updates.
2. If your reason for having a website is to get more footfalls/customers (the second reason mentioned at the beginning), you need content mostly to rank high on Google for searches being performed by people who are eventually likely to need a product you sell. As an example, if you are a hotel, you could use a page on your website on the best budget hotels in your city (of course, subtly helping your own hotel).
3. And since Google likes fresh content, you need to keep updating your website with articles on     these search terms (and they should be good articles, too, since readers would think you are good at your business if you appear to know a lot about it). These articles would typically be published on a blog which is part of your website.
4. If your reason for a website is to get extra revenues by selling online in addition to offline (the first reason mentioned at the beginning), you need a pretty elaborate website, most likely with regular text content updates, too.

How you design your website depends on what your content requirements are.

I’m a novice at this – what can you tell me about website creation that I’ll understand?

Here are some basics of website creation. The only thing simpler than reading these is reading them again. Instead of mulling over that,  just plunge into these – they’re much, well, simpler:

• There are two people you’d need to pay money to, to set up a basic website – the domain name registrar, and the hosting provider: The domain name registrar charges about Rs. 600 a year to give you a domain and a control panel to manage it (with a login and a password).
• A website is nothing but a bunch of files. A hosting provider gives you space on a server it manages, to put your files. Hosting can come for as low as Rs. 250 a month. When you pay it, the hosting provider gives you 2 “name server” hostnames (e. g. ns1.abcdef.com,  ns2.abcdef.com) that you need to enter in the control panel given by your domain name registrar. After this, the moment you put your website’s files in a specified folder (typically called “public_html”) in the server space given to you by your hosting provider, your site magically starts to work!
• These two services can be bought from the same company most times.

Creating a website has these 4 important components:

• Design (look and feel, with focus on usability)
• Engineering (converting the design into a functioning website)
• Content (high quality and engaging language)
• SEO (search-engine-optimization)

1. For design, you can get many free templates on the web, or buy templates from websites dedicated to selling templates (typically Rs. 4,000). If you are conversant with the technologies, you can tweak the templates for your purpose, or you can pay someone to do it. You can always, of course, hire a designer to do a completely custom job, but that will be more expensive, and good designers are hard to find. And remember the golden rule: the more involved you directly are in the process, the better the output.
2. For engineering, if you want to cut costs dramatically, Google up “wordpress”, and read up about it – it can be slow and boring, but is quite rewarding. Once you have the theme ready, for most basic websites, WordPress solves most of your engineering problems. You can, of course, hire a PHP engineer to integrate your design / template with WordPress.
3. A Facebook Page makes you look like you are clued in and all, but usually does little else. The idea is that if someone “like”s your Facebook Page, then every post/update you make on your Facebook Page will be visible the next time they log in to Facebook (on their “news feed”, which is the first page a person sees when they log in to Facebook, appearing under the URL www.facebook.com). In reality, however, only about 3-4% of users who have liked your Facebook Page typically see an update you have posted on your Facebook Page, on their feed, unless your content is seriously engaging or viral (which chances are, let’s face it, it is not). A lot of Facebook Page likes however has the advantage of making you look really popular Facebook Page likes can be got by advertising on Facebook – so you do not need to beg and spam your friends and sundry acquaintances to “like” your Facebook Page . Always take care of your punctuation and your grammar. Content quality influences users sub-consciously.
4. Ensure that you do all the basic SEO that you can do:

• Meta titles, meta descriptions and h1 tags (google them) are all-important
• Ensure reasonable keyword density on the text on your pages
• Try and link to each page of your website from as many other pages of your own website as possible
• Try and get links from other web pages that have content related to your website’s subject matter – SEO is a whole universe, and there are lots of ways to do this

Of course, don’t overdo SEO. If you’re starting out with SEO, remember that Google has already seen just about everything that you can think of.

So have fun creating your website. It’s  fun, it’s addictive, and it makes you really attractive to the opposite sex. Or at least two out of the three, which ain’t bad.

And don’t forget, the dates for the next Summit have already been announced. Block your calendar for April 9 – 11, 2014.

Words from Sankalp Awards Finalists 2013

Sankalp Finalist 2013 Avani Bio’s founder talks about how his company creates value from waste to generate electricity from pine needles. He also talks about what takes him into the Himalayas and keeps him ticking.

One of the challenges facing East and South-East Asia are the next steps from market fragmentation to consolidation.   Building the marketplace requires effective intermediation, sufficient infrastructure, and enterprises able to receive investment. Generally, the focus has been on the first two components, but how can impact investors better serve the ecosystem by increasing the capabilities of social businesses? If the pipeline is lacking, then how can capital (both financial and non-financial) that is available to the most promising social enterprises be provided to more enterprises that could become viable investments if given the support to do so?

This leads to the challenge of accounting for on-ground insights from social enterprises.  Here, we would argue that attention must be paid to the increasing numbers whom are interested in the space, but not yet engaged.  Viable social enterprises must have goods or services aligned with demand for an unmet social need and a team that is able to execute.  While internally strong, these types of organizations have often been nurtured by external support, in one form or another.   While a usual solution for increasing the pipeline has revolved around casting a wider net, another key question is how might investors or supporters engage social enterprises beyond commercial considerations? How are they communicating with social enterprises and how can those channels be strengthened?

Recently, SOW Asia has gleaned new insights by bringing together diverse young leaders and experienced professionals from the corporate, social and entrepreneurial spaces in Hong Kong.  Curated conversations in small groups have clarified key barriers to capable people taking a leap to action.  Many deficiencies were noted, including the lack of: visible community, success cases, social prestige or respect, competitive wages, safety net for high-risk initiatives, infrastructural support, ways of meeting like-minded individuals to build teams.

Many of these issues are familiar to all of us and need to be addressed.  Accounting for them suggests that investors and capacity builders need to constantly consider new strategies in order to make the kinds of investment that will serve society. For South-East and East Asia’s current stage, concrete scaling might demand smaller steps: a one partnership at a time support capacity approach that challenges the very core of impact investment. Instead of waiting to catch social enterprises after a certain milestone, perhaps it is worthwhile to explore a realignment of expectations between entrepreneurs and investors, so that all stakeholders can invest their resources to an effective strengthening of the industry.

Asia’s impact investment industry is at a critical juncture: on the one hand some challenges, such as the pipeline, have yet to be solved, while on the other there is an encouraging growth of interest in social enterprise and the wider ecosystem from all sectors. As the discussion continues, investors need to develop strong feedback channels from social entrepreneurs and other stakeholders. This will likely include finding new strategies that take their needs into account, not only at regional and regulatory levels, but also at local and individual levels.

After a successful tweetchat last week to get the dialog started, we are organizing a Google Hangout to feed into another track in the Summit - Incubating the Incubators: Developing an Effective Framework for Change.

Details:

When: April 12, Friday, 4 – 4:45 PM

Where: www.youtube.com/sankalpforum

Followed by: QnA through twitter 4:45 – 5 PM , hashtag: #sankalp

Topic: Making Social Enterprise Incubators More Effective

Building investment and scale-readiness among social enterprises is critical to the growth of the sector in India. However, current incubation and capacity programs that seek to support them are primarily physical and high-touch in nature and require social enterprises to be present in a specific location (often away from their headquarters) to access support.  Further, these programs focus on a limited set of high potential social enterprises each year.

A recent dipstick survey of 20 social enterprises* showed that their top challenges in accessing incubation and capacity building services were:

• Quality of programs need improvement
• Programs are too generic and not customized
• Programs do not provide enough ready to use advice/support
• Programs are not available on-demand
• Programs require travel which is inconvenient

There is a need to find sustainable ways to increase the scale of incubation and capacity building, and provide comprehensive and customized support to hundreds of social enterprises each year.  Sankalp Forum’s Google Hangout will bring together leading incubators and capacity builders in India to understand their take on this issue by asking:

• What are the areas in which current incubation models need improvement and how are they seeking to address these in their work.
• Is there potential for incubation services to be scaled in a sustainable manner without heavily relying on grant funding.
• What opportunities they see for collaboration and common action with each other to make incubation more effective and more available.

*Conducted by Intellecap in February 2013

But since impact is at the heart of what these enterprises do – we thought it prudent to start an “inclusive” dialogue – one that brings together voices from not only the social enterprise space, but also from aware, proactive citizens of society.

We want to use this dialogue to raise tough questions. We want to know – How can lives of poor people really change? What is the role of social enterprises, government and also of each of us as individuals?

We also want to dig deeper into what “impact” should mean? Is it enough to say an organization has reached 10,000 people in a slum? But does that mean that “lives” have been changed? How should we measure this “change”?

Ahead of Sankalp Unconvention Summit 2013, the world’s largest social entrepreneurship focused event, Sankalp Forum and The Alternative invite you to a tweetchat to discuss how to “understand” impact, how to measure it, and how we should all work together to amplify impact.

When: 5th April 2013, 12 PM

 Where: http://tweetchat.com/room/sankalp

 How a Twitter chat works:

 You can join the Twitter chat anytime using your Twitter account. If you aren’t on Twitter yet, visit twitter.com to sign up. Registration is quick and free.

 Here are a few simple steps to join the conversation:

1. Visit TweetChat at www.tweetchat.com.

2. Click on “sign in,” and enter your Twitter account name and password. Authorize TweetChat by clicking on “authorize app” when prompted.

3. In the box marked “enter hashtag to follow,” type #Sankalp.

4. Click “Go” and join the conversation!

Hashtags are Twitter’s way to set apart keywords, messages, or topics in any given conversation. Once you’re following the #Sankalp hashtag, you will be able to see every tweet from the event, even if you’re not yet following any users on Twitter.

Social enterprises have found a market gap, and stepped in. And the poor, as the The Economist suggests, have started to appreciate the cost-benefit trade off of buying clean water and preventing healthcare costs. Perhaps another intervention that works towards subsidising / eliminating these costs would enable an ideal solution. Interesting to note efforts like Sarvajal – a Sankalp Award winner in 2010 – which works with the Piramal Foundation. There is phenomenal scope for inclusive business functions to also integrate here.

Several other Sankalp enterprises are also creating low cost access to clean water in places where there was none. Water Health International, for example, serves over 100 million people across the globe with a low cost water filter that provides World Health Organization (WHO) standard quality water.

Basic Water needs, functioning in Pondicherry and Tamil Nadu, has created a unique water filter, Tulip siphon, which uses ‘gravity siphon pressure’ to force water through high quality ceramic filters. Apart from households, Tulip water filters also are being used in schools to provide safe drinking water to children.

Spring Health takes a different approach to providing access to clean water. It builds water tanks in the backyard of kirana stores (small Mom-&-Pop shops) in villages. They treat and test the water collected here and sell it through the kirana outlets for as low at Rs 0.20 a litre.

I am sure the stories of innovation and industry here abound. Have you encountered something interesting? Do share with us at Sankalp Forum via the Comments section.

There are a number of organizations that offer support to the budding social entrepreneur. I’d like to offer some guidance here on the types of organizations there are, and the support they offer, so that you can choose appropriately.

Executive education programs provide you with classroom sessions on the basics of your enterprise. These are immensely useful if you have little experience in running a business or building an early-stage enterprise. These programs will quickly deal with the most important things you should consider when developing your idea – understanding your customer, defining your target segment and value proposition, developing your product/service and channels, understanding your revenue and cost model, thinking about the organization you need to deliver, and fundraising. The time expended in attending these programs is well worth it. If you haven’t been an entrepreneur before, an experienced entrepreneur-mentor will be invaluable at this early stage. If do not have the benefit of a mentor you can go to regularly for advice, I would recommend you select a program that has a strong element of hands-on mentoring built in. Finally, some programs offer concentrated classroom sessions, while others break the sessions up to give you time to implement the concepts you learn in the field. Think about which model will suit you best. I personally prefer the latter.

Incubators provide your early stage enterprise with incubation services, such as office space, laboratory and prototyping facilities, etc. Some of them provide you with the services of a mentor, and a few provide seed funding. A few also help you by providing access to a network of service providers, who can help you with various services, such as legal, accounting, marketing, etc. Incubators can be physical (they require you to work out of their offices) or virtual (they do not require physical presence). Some of them specialize in particular sectors, and will have mentors and service providers best suited for that sector. Most incubators also have relationships with early-stage funders, and can therefore make introductions when you are ready to raise your next round of funding. Make a list of your requirements and then choose the one which is most appropriate to your needs.

The social enterprise support ecosystem in India is well-developed, with many organizations providing all the essential services required to get an idea off the ground. Choose thoughtfully and wisely and you will be able to maximize the benefit from the services they offer, and raise your chances of success.

Here are FIVE tips to get the most out of your investor-entrepreneur relationship

1. Understand Your Business Model. Investors want to know that you know your business inside out. A great pitch comes from someone who doesn’t need to look at their Powerpoint. Being able to cite your financials from memory will really impress an investor and differentiate you from other promoters.  Providing a clear understanding of where you are now will convince an investor that you can accurately predict where your business is headed.

2.    Identify the Relevant Investor. With the mushrooming number of seed stage funds, impact investors, angel investors, venture philanthropists in addition to mainstream venture capitalists and PE funds, the investor landscape is becoming increasingly complex.  Find the right investor faster by knowing exactly what level of funding you require and what investors work in that bracket and what they are typically looking for. Take for example; High Net Worth Individuals (HNIs) typically look for return on investment, while venture capital funds look for financial returns in addition to scalability and exit.

3.  Accept That You Have Competition. It is highly unlikely that your business model is unique and no one has ever thought of it. Chances are that investors have seen it or something like it before, considering they see hundreds of business models a year. What they are betting on, however, is a host of other factors that differentiate you from your competitors and your ability to leverage these. Therefore, don’t hide that there is competition, just prove that you can do it better.

4.   Remember That Investors Want to Grow Your Business. Investors are interested in investing in models that are scalable.  An asset-heavy model where a large percentage of invested capital is poured into infrastructure is far less attractive than an asset light model where the product being invested in can be replicated without a long gestation period.

5.    Go to Market When You Don’t Need the Money.  The best way to get an investment is to show the investor that your business will be fine without their money. Plan ahead. Start your investor outreach a year before you will actually need their investment. Don’t obsess over receiving investment, obsess about increasing your revenue. Investors will fund you the moment they feel that you will succeed without their money.

Peer-to-Peer Learning

All information in this article was featured in workshops and lectures at the Sankalp Residential Bootcamp held at ISB (March 9-10) All Sankalp Award Finalists had an opportunity to learn from each other, investors and sector experts on how to best raise capital.