Developing the Demand Side

(or How do we buy what social enterprises sell?)

By David LePage, Enterprising Non-Profits and Michele Fugiel Gartner, Trico Charitable Foundation

Social purchasing is a key element to the success of social enterprises. Social purchasing practices blend a social valuation into all purchasing. So along with price, quality and environmental impact, social value is also a criteria.

Over the years we’ve watched the incremental, but sluggish progress of the development of social purchasing opportunities and agreements.  At previous Social Enterprise World Forum (SEWF) conferences, we’ve shared our war stories of the struggle to develop a consumer appetite for “social value” as a criteria in purchasing.  (And by consumer we mean the full gamut: government policy, corporate social responsibility & community investment initiatives, and retail buying choices. )

At SEWF 2013, representatives from Scotland and England will share why the UK seems to lead the field in the development and practice of social purchasing.   We can’t explain here some key advances in Scotland and England, but they are quantifiable in number and importance, including: the Commonwealth Games, Scotland’s Community Benefit Policy development, UK Social Value Purchasing Policy, and SE UK’s Buy Social progress.

This isn’t a “Canada lags behind” story, but we certainly haven’t harnessed the full spectrum of opportunity.  We’ve shared some recent successes (and where we’ve missed out, please add to the comments area below this article. It will be great to have a full and robust list by October.)  This progress though is still a list of isolated events, and obviously doesn’t preclude the tremendous effort ahead of us to move this agenda forward.

Congratulations to:

• The city of Winnipeg for including a measurable social value component to a recent Request for Proposals!
• Province of BC for moving forward on both a government purchasing policy and adopting a small business accord that emphasizes increasing purchasing as a key component!
• The 2015 PAN AM games, from the very beginning having inclusive purchasing goals!
• Social Purchasing Portal in Winnipeg at 10 years of creating local opportunities!
• And… (add your example below….)

Community Benefit Agreements as government policy and practice are still a rarity, or one-off incidents; sustainable purchasing, as a corporate CSR model, has evolved to generally include environmental practices and measurements, but the social elements barely rise beyond a few examples; and consumer awareness needs continuing encouragement and support to get to scale.   There’s still work to be done & SEWF is a great opportunity to learn.

We’ve attached some resource links to get us thinking about what is possible.

Join us in sharing your successes, struggles and building an international strategy for social purchasing in Calgary at the SEWF2013.

• Social Purchasing Portal – Winnipeg
• ‎Enterprising Non-Profits – Social Purchasing Toolkit
• Social Enterprise UK – Buy Social campaign
• CEIS Scotland – Procurement
• BC Partners for Social Impact – Social Impact Purchasing
• Government of British Columbia – Small Business Accord

Show that you are buying social by adding the “Buy Social” image to your website.  Courtesy of Social Enterprise UK.

Tags: buy social, community benefit agreements, social purchasing