Heading in the right direction – Skoll award confirms we are!

When BasicNeeds was awarded the prestigious 2013 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, we realised this was a natural outcome of having cultivated one of our core venture support criteria – openness to a collaborative working relationship with VPF.  Simple and even somewhat clichéd, yet if you can get this grounded from the start, then tackling challenges transforms them into opportunities.

So what was VPF's contribution?

By matching BasicNeeds, an international development organisation with Bernie Waldron as their VPF contact point. Bernie is an international business leader and experienced mentor with over 15 years non-executive board experience and 25 years of executive and management experience, spanning Private Equity, UK plc and global blue-chip corporates such as IBM and Maersk Data Group.

What was also key was that BasicNeeds’ mission - to bring about lasting change in the lives of people with mental illness and epilepsy around the world (since 2000, they have reached 580,130 people with mental illness and epilepsy their carers and family members in 12 countries), was one that Bernie felt inspired by.

Life post Skoll Award

This award has also coincided with the launch of BasicNeeds’ 5 year strategy to reach 1 million people. So indeed exciting times for them!

The relationship with Skoll is also already bearing fruit, with substantial financial backing from the foundation.  Winning such an award provides a platform where BasicNeeds’ message can be heard by an even greater and more diverse audience, opening up opportunities for even more growth areas where VPF can and is currently assisting BasicNeeds with.  These areas include branding, communications, and recently recruiting an investment professional for their development committee – Giles Marshall. Giles attended one of our networking events and shortly thereafter took the steps to offer his invaluable pro bono skill set.

Crowdfunding

BasicNeeds is also thrilled to be partaking in the biggest CrowdRise Challenge ever! Launched jointly by Skoll Foundation and Huffington Post called ‘Skoll Social Entrepreneurs challenge’. Yet another innovative approach to increasing awareness and funding.

Click here to access the challenge and then select BasicNeeds as the team to donate to.

Click here to read more about Crowdrise hosted by Edward Norton.

So what is this Crowdfunding hype all about?

Have a look at this short animated video that will attempt to shed some light – enjoy!   

Leave painting to the painters?

I know we don't judge books by their covers, but if you were asked to guess the occupation of the woman in the photo above I bet you would not plump for builder, or decorator, or landscape gardener. No, unsurprisingly, Corneilia Luciana (name changed to protect true identity) is a private equity investment professional working in London. She is also working pro bono with one of VPF's ventures, MyBnk.

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Lots of pro bono community programmes see financiers, lawyers, marketers, investment professionals... bascially anyone who isn't an expert on laying pathways, painting fences, building school blocks etc... sent off to lay pathways, paint fences, build school blocks... bascially anything that doesn't use the highly valuable skills that they hone day-in-day-out in their careers. It's great to get out of the office for some team building, but from the perspective of society, it doesn't seem the most effective use of city professsionals' particular skills - painters are better than investment professionals at painting, builders building etc, surely?

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We think (and this is changing across the board to be fair) that the best way anyone can help society without donating money is by donating their professional expertise, the things they have been trained to be good, no, excellent at. VPF is the counduit for City professionals to acheive this.

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A couple of testimonials (we'll give you more a couple each month):

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SANDEEP DHILLON

"As a VPF member I have been working with AfriKids management team to provide them with input on strategy and to help refine their current business model for future development. After meeting some of the exceptional CEOs of the social enterprises supported by VPF, Afrikids seemed like the perfect organisation to become involved with. VPF has provided the perfect platform for me to use my consulting and banking skill-set for wider social impact."

KIERAN D'SILVA

"Working with social ventures allows me to get involved with good causes which operate in line with robust, sustainable market principals. By contributing the skills I have developed during my career then I can offer much more to the organisations than I could by donating funds alone. I have enjoyed applying my due diligence and investment analysis to projects outside of my usual sector and geographic coverage. The regular VPF events also allow me to meet with like-minded individuals within the Private Equity industry."

If you are a City professional and would like to donate your skills (from a couple of hours a month upwards) then please do get in touch with us, we'd love to hear from you.

VPF pro bono project wins Management Consultants Association Award

A team assembled by VPF and Oliver Wyman has won the "Sustainability" category at the Pro Bono Management Consultancy Competition 2013 for its work on the strategy review of portfolio venture, 'Excellent'.

Excellent has been addressing water shortage issues in sub-Saharan drylands with increasing success over the past ten years. It is now looking to expand the reach of its vision to see sand damns transforming millions of lives around the world.

Such an ambitious goal requires a detailed strategy, so VPF brought together a VPF Trustee (social sector veteran Vik Anderson), a VPF Member (Adrian Barrick, Head of European Content at UBM) and a small group of junior management consultants from Oliver Wyman, to work with senior management at Excellent on devising a six year strategy over a period of six months.

CEO Simon Maddrell was hugely appreciating of the project and said that "with the strategy and six-year plan we developed now in place, we have our roadmap to expand our operations to other dry land regions.”

This pro bono project worked because it had a clear deliverable, experienced leadership, and committed, enthusiastic professionals with first rate commercial consulting skills and who bought in to the NGO's vision.

Congratulations to all involved for helping Excellent plot its future trajectory towards empowering millions to access clean water.

PEAS' success is venture philanthropy's success

PEAS (Promoting Equality in African Schools) has won the International Development and Best Charity (all categories) awards at the 2013 Civil Society Awards. This is in recognition of the innovative young NGO's incredible success in achieving extraordinarily rapid growth via its winning formula for providing sustainable low cost secondary education in sub-Saharan Africa. VPF played an important role in supporting this.

If VPF were a venture capital firm focussed merely on growing the income of its portfolio companies, PEAS would be the equivalent of the one in ten super performers that would allow us to take risks on investments that often fail, but when they win, they win big.

PEAS' income when VPF began supporting them three years ago was around £300k. It has now hit £3m. If VPF had taken an equity stake (not possible in relation to most charities) instead of making a grant, then we would have seen an ROI of 1000% over three and a half years. This would equate to one hell of an IRR.

If we switch to the central metric of social impact, then PEAS has grown from around 1000 to over 8000 students over the same period, which is not far behind the income growth.

How did this happen?

The simple answer is that PEAS' CEO John Rendel is a devoted and very talented entrepreneur with an equally talented team around him.

However, social entrepreneurs need donors as much as 'normal' entrepreneurs need investors. VPF has been a special type of donor to PEAS, by explicitly and quite deliberately supporting its growth in the following ways: 

1. Kite mark
   VPF's rigorous due diligence, performed by VPF members with high-end consulting, corporate and City finance backgrounds, not only acts as a useful operational health-check for portfolio ventures, but also gives them a 'badge of quality' that allows them to attract other supporters more easily. We are akin to a prestigious conerstone investor. This supports growth.
2. Unrestricted finance
   VPF provided initially £25k per year (rising after two years to £35k per year) of UNRESTRICTED grant funding to PEAS. Most funders insist on restricting the use of their money to specific projects, with an insufficient allowance for project management costs, and NOTHING for business development, marketing etc. This is like investing in a factory instead of investing in the company that runs the factory, and stifles the growth of good business models in the third sector. VPF provides unrestricted funding because it wants to see winning ideas scaled up. In PEAS' case, VPF's unrestricted funding allowed management to hire a specialist Monitoring, Evaluation and Reporting Officer to measure PEAS' impact on literacy and numeracy figures, infant mortality and fertility rates etc. This in turn allowed PEAS to apply for funding from larger donors that require sophisticated reporting metrics. One of these was the Department for International Development, with whom PEAS raised £1.2m in 2012. This supports growth.
3. Access to corporate partnerships
   VPF members' wide corporate networks allow us to make high-level introductions to potential corporate supporters. This has resulted in several lucrative partnerships for our portfolio ventures. In PEAS' case, VPF made an introduction to Progressive Digital Media, who have donated tens of thousands of pounds of unrestricted funding to PEAS, and whose support as official communications partner was pre-requsite to the NGO qualifying for the DfID funding mentioned above. This supports growth.
4. Access to pro bono support
   VPF member Catherine Hackworth is a partner at management consultants Oliver Wyman. As well as acting as mentor to CEO John Rendel, Catherine was able to source pro bono support from the firm to deliver a full, professional strategy review, which resulted in a five year plan that has been invaluable in communicating PEAS' ambition to an external audience and uniting the team around a simply expressed common vision of expansion. This supports growth.
5. Access to High Net Worth supporters
   Senior VPF members have an enviable network of HNW contacts with philanthropic genes. In PEAS' case, this led to an introduction to an extraordinarily successful Boltonian businessman, who has poured over £0.5 million into PEAS' expansion, directly funding three sustainable secondary schools in rural Uganda. This supports growth.    

VPF has thus been a dedicated and valuable partner to PEAS during this period of phenomenal growth, and while the credit for this achievement lies entirely with John Rendel and the PEAS team, it is testament to the value of VPF as a private sector/third sector portal, that John has been able to exploit the connections VPF has facilitated to such staggering and heart-warming effect.

PEAS' achievement in bringing a sustainable secondary education system to an area where 75% of primary school leavers have no access to any form of secondary education leaves us humbled, and we thoroughly congratulate the whole team and all their supporters on winning this award.