Today is Social Enterprise Day - for many social enterprises it's an opportunity to celebrate their achievements within the communities they operate. Away from all the wedding fairs it can often feel like we're a little remote from our 'community' (the couples who use our wedding lists? the charities we generate money for? the end recipients in various countries of that money?) as for reasons of cost/efficiency we try to keep engagement to a minimum (i.e. mainly using the internet/email etc).
For us Social Enterprise Day is more about feeling part of a wider movement of different types of organisations trying to operate in the right way and make a difference at the same time. Although we're based just outside the capital we're members of Social Enterprise London and this gives us access to a variety of practical help, advice and other opportunities (including featuring on Shop Social Enterprise) - although we're not heavily involved it's really good to know they're there.
Meanwhile we're working on bringing a tranche of charities onto the various services in time for the new year;
The Green Gift List is one of our new services for 2008 and we're adding more charities there ready for the new year. One of these is elephant family who I went to see on Monday to start agreeing gifts for the website - there'll be some great ideas ("nibbles" - I'll say no more).
Bringing charities onto The Scottish Wedding List has been more of a challenge - as, generally, we have an idea of the ideal range of charities that we'd like on there (based on the sorts of charities that couples already select and also ask us for) we have a list of charities that we've already identified and been trying to bring on for the best part of a year. With many charities having such small fundraising teams it can take a while to get things moving, even when everybody wants to! Things seem to be picking up and so we're hopeful of getting the right mix of charities live for January.
Getting charities live for The London Wedding List was a little easier, although we're still adding a few more for next year - this service only went live in mid-2007, effectively missing the wedding season, so we're excited for what 2008 will bring.
Andy
