Social impact design wannabees take heart – there are folks on your side, coming to your aid. Folks like Manuel Toscano, who went after Rockefeller funding to generate contractual templates for all of us who want to work in this field, but aren’t sure how to do it. He organized a workshop in NY that included players from all walks of life, including: Chhaya Bhanti, a business strategist who also operates her own non-profit in Rajasthan; Bill Drenttel, prominent designer and founder of the Winterhouse Institute and Design Observer; Deb Jonson, a tenured professor at Pratt who also runs Design In Kind; Danny Alexander, an industrial designer who is preparing to launch his own design firm in Argentina. Our fearless facilitator was Alexander Osterwalder, author and advisor on business model innovation.
Whether you’re an existing design firm or a freelance designer, the question at hand: can social impact design work be a viable business?
We’re not talking freebie PR work, but financial sustainability. Each of the organizations represented have differing approaches, but we could initiate the discussion by defining the client(s). From there, we considered the offering for each client and what the designer/client relationship might look like in select cases. Because Manuel plans to publish the findings, I won’t go into detail…
Needless to say, it was a challenging topic for two-days time. This workshop is just the beginning of a much more in-depth exploration. At the conclusion we had generated ~30 potential strategies for working with non-profit clients, but on a personal level I was inspired to share the 30-second version of Catapult’s business model with whoever wants to know. Drum roll…
Catapult is structured both organizationally and financially like that of a consultancy. Our work force consists of designers with several years experience in both product development and fieldwork. Our clients are for-profit companies, other non-profits and social enterprises that serve our market: disadvantaged communities. Each client pays a fee for our services; the fee is based on the project scope as well as the client’s capacity to pay. Some of our clients don’t always have the capacity to pay market rate – but because Catapult is a non-profit corporation, their rate can be subsidized by grants and donations received. Each client is evaluated for project impact and financial capacity on an individual basis.
With this model, the amount of subsidized rate project work Catapult is able to take on per year is a function of grants and donations received. Catapult only takes on project work that is consistent with our mission and values.
While we’re not the only design consultancy serving these markets, we also acknowledge that we are a guinea pig for this industry. As such, Catapult’s goal is always transparency and shared learnings. And the hope that those who are inspired to follow will have a stepping-stone to start from.
