Days 5+6: Growing understanding

The last two days were flying by quickly. To stick with the metaphor from the days before, we were still busy with cleaning up the house. But day by day everything gets clearer and we have quite a good understanding of the ecosystem, we are working in.

Wednesday morning started with an insight of the financial details of MCISE. This helped us to get the context for our task about the financial sustainability. In the afternoon we split our tasks: Janet prepared our project plan and refined some details of the scope of work, Marek collected questions for our impact survey and I created a Business Model Canvas for MCISE. The canvas helps us to structure the key partners, resources, communication channels, value proposition, etc. and list the main cost drivers and revenue streams. Before leaving the office, we sat together and went through all our results to incorporate everybody's feedback. I should not forget to mention our special guest, a cute cat from the neighborhood, that we called Mise (reference to MCISE and her favorite food).

Today we continued to work in parallel and updating each other afterwards. Janet was structuring our learnings, Marek was refining the questionnaire and already starting to play around with an online survey tool and I was creating a comparison of Dare Inc. with several other companies that offer services for social entrepreneurs or start-ups, e.g. Uncharted, Mass Challenge, Impact Hub etc. While researching, we found a nice way how we could present our impact KPIs to the stakeholders. We want to send the survey to all entrepreneurs to evalute their businesses and the effects caused by Dare Inc.

The day ended with a Dare'Dacha talk given by Douglas Cheng from Hongkong: "How Balloon-arts Become a Tool for Social Innovation". YM Balloon is a social enterprise of Chinese YMCA in Hongkong. They offer the following services: providing balloon-art decoration, on-the-spot-twisting and balloon workshops/trainings. The business was started in 2015 and employs today 14 deaf artists. They do not only provide their deaf employees a job, they also empower the integration of deaf people. I learned as well that such an enterprise is called WISE = Work integration social enterprise. Two years ago, YM Balloon got a 3-years funding of 1.5 million Hongkong Dollars that equals 190,000 USD. It was good to hear that the company is profitable since recently. 

Douglas Cheng

Group picture after the talk, including 6 SAP colleagues from the Social Sabbatical

It was a very interesting talk. YM Balloon is a good example for social impact we are here for. One sentence will remain in my memory: "Customers first buy because you are social, maybe also a second time but the third time you are treated like all the other companies. Thus, you have to deliver value". 

Let me finish with two culinary highlights: in addition to our learnings in the office, we also try to discover more and more highlights of Moroccans restaurants. Yesterday we spent dinner in a Syrian restaurant and today evening we tried snails... Yummy!!!

Hummus with Chawarma

Group shot in the Syrian restaurant

Snails