Business for good

One woman is trans­form­ing busi­nesses through mak­ing busi­ness giv­ing a habit.

By ELEANOR YAP

Masami Sato has had many careers. Orig­i­nally edu­cated to become an archi­tect in Japan, she has spent time as a teacher, a trans­la­tor, an entre­pre­neur of com­mer­cial enter­prises, and even a nat­ural food chef and a farmer! But now, she’s found her real pur­pose in life by cre­at­ing B1G1 (Buy 1, Give 1), a Singapore-​based social enter­prise which trans­forms the way busi­nesses give.

Sato started the com­pany in 2007 and on top of that, has authored two books, ‘JOY – The gift of accep­tance’ and ‘ONE – Shar­ing the joy of giv­ing’. SALT Online chats with her about B1G1 and why she focuses on SME busi­ness giv­ing in this new way:

Can you explain the B1G1 model?

We focus almost totally on SME busi­nesses. We recog­nised that SME busi­ness own­ers wanted to give back. How­ever, they tend to do noth­ing, prob­a­bly because they don’t know how to start or maybe they just don’t have the time.

Of course, the big­ger com­pa­nies with their larger teams can cre­ate CSR depart­ments to cre­ate and run CSR pro­grammes. But SMEs sim­ply don’t have that abil­ity — and yet, SMEs power 70 per­cent of our economy!

We came up with a sim­ple idea – why not, we thought, make busi­ness giv­ing a habit by mak­ing it pos­si­ble for every busi­ness trans­ac­tion to give back in some well-​defined and impact­ful way. So, pow­ered by that sim­ple thought, we devel­oped sys­tems and processes for SMEs to give back effec­tively and easily.

Now, SMEs join B1G1 as busi­ness mem­bers and they can link a tiny por­tion of each sale to a wide-​range of projects in 30 coun­tries. In this way, the com­pa­nies are ‘embed­ding’ giv­ing into their every­day activ­i­ties. Each com­pany can decide how much they want to give as well as which projects to give it to. Our sys­tem makes it really easy for them so that giv­ing really becomes a habit and an inte­gral part of their business.

This model also keeps in mind those SMEs who offer con­sult­ing or account­ing ser­vices, where they may not have fixed prod­ucts. B1G1 gives every busi­ness a chance to give back regard­less of their busi­ness model, often involv­ing their employ­ees and cus­tomers in the giv­ing process and make the most impact out of their giv­ing. We don’t focus on one-​off giv­ing; we focus on habit­ual and impact­ful giving.

So how do you choose the projects?

Mem­bers of B1G1 can rec­om­mend new projects to the B1G1 board. Every two months, we have a board meet­ing to assess new appli­ca­tions against our cri­te­ria and require­ments. Our focus is to find the right type of organ­i­sa­tions rather than hav­ing more and more projects.

We tend to part­ner with smaller organ­i­sa­tions who work with local com­mu­ni­ties and lead­ers in order to really find the long-​term solu­tions. Those smaller grass­roots organ­i­sa­tions may not have great mar­ket­ing exper­tise, yet they are experts in cre­at­ing pos­i­tive impacts in the com­mu­ni­ties around the world. We then work with these approved char­ity organ­i­sa­tions to list some of their focused projects such as giv­ing clean water or improv­ing lit­er­acy — there is a vast range of options; we list all the projects in terms of the tan­gi­ble impact – we never focus on the mon­e­tary giv­ing. So in B1G1, it’s never about a com­pany say­ing, “We gave $xxxxxx to char­ity”. It’s always about “Our giv­ing gave 1,300 chil­dren access to water,” or sim­i­lar highly focused outcomes.

And how do you work with businesses?

We help busi­nesses to ‘embed’ giv­ing into their every­day busi­ness activ­i­ties. For exam­ple, we have a unique wid­get for each com­pany so the com­pa­nies’ giv­ing through B1G1 can embed it on their web­sites so their stake­hold­ers can also see the com­pa­nies’ giv­ing. It shows the real-​time, live impact sta­tis­tics. SMEs can also men­tion their giv­ing in their mar­ket­ing col­lat­er­als to their clients, engag­ing the cus­tomers in the giv­ing mis­sion. We cur­rently work with nearly 650 SMEs in dif­fer­ent countries.

How­ever, we weren’t always blessed with that num­ber. When we started B1G1, for the first three years, intro­duc­ing the brand new idea was not very easy and we didn’t know how to imple­ment our idea in real­ity. It was a lot of trial-​and-​error.

For exam­ple, we con­sulted every busi­ness and man­u­ally cre­ated giv­ing agree­ment doc­u­ments. As a result, we didn’t have the capac­ity to work with too many busi­nesses as we had a small team. Now, things are dif­fer­ent – we are still improv­ing our processes and sys­tems but as a result of the sys­tem­atic approach we’ve devel­oped, we can now deal with many more busi­nesses and giv­ing trans­ac­tions eas­ily. Our activ­i­ties are now much more scalable.

B1G1 is still run by a small team based in Sin­ga­pore work­ing with many vol­un­teers and inter­na­tional sup­port­ers. We speak and present at var­i­ous SME events around the world to bring aware­ness about B1G1. Now five years after the orig­i­nal launch, we have more than 600 projects from over 30 coun­tries listed on our site. We con­tinue to do reg­u­lar reviews on exist­ing projects and refresh our list­ing to ensure the effectiveness.

What about indi­vid­ual giv­ing? Any new things on B1G1?

We also want to bring indi­vid­u­als into the B1G1 model mainly to encour­age more busi­nesses to join the cause as a result. The per­sonal giv­ing plat­form was launched in Jan­u­ary this year. How­ever, B1G1’s focus is still firmly on busi­ness giving.

Where are SMEs from that are on B1G1?

They cur­rently are from 28 coun­tries around the world includ­ing places like South Korea. But most are from West­ern coun­tries like Aus­tralia, New Zealand, UK and later this year, we are expand­ing into US.

So, are you say­ing SMEs are not giv­ing enough?

Well actu­ally the sta­tis­tics say that busi­nesses as a whole are not giv­ing enough! One well-​respected sur­vey says that all busi­ness giv­ing taken together rep­re­sents only five per­cent of the giv­ing that goes into our world. I think when busi­nesses start out, they focus on prof­its and they tend to for­get the ele­ment of giv­ing and why they started in the first place. Giv­ing is an impor­tant part of busi­ness and our life – through giv­ing and car­ing activ­i­ties, employ­ees can feel more con­nected to the com­pany and the com­pany can also con­nect to its cus­tomers more deeply. But there is no doubt that that view is chang­ing rapidly. And on B1G1 right now, we have many start-​up busi­nesses who make B1G1 a fun­da­men­tal part of the way they do business.

We believe that busi­ness giv­ing in the SME space is very impor­tant. In fact, more than 70 per­cent of busi­nesses around the world are small– to medium-​size busi­nesses. We believe every­one cares and wants to give back if it fits into their beliefs and doesn’t take much time and effort. We all love to give, why not embed giv­ing in every­thing we do so we can care and give more?

It is inter­est­ing that your com­pany is reg­is­tered in Sin­ga­pore but your giv­ing is all over­seas. Can you explain?

When we first came to Sin­ga­pore, we chose to come here because of the loca­tion, effi­cient Gov­ern­ment approach, etc. And we knew that Sin­ga­pore was striv­ing to become what many referred to as ‘a Giv­ing Nation’. What we didn’t know until we moved was the focus and encour­age­ment towards local giv­ing within Singapore.

B1G1 is focused in a very spe­cific giv­ing model that is ‘impact-​based’ giv­ing for SMEs around the world. And nat­u­rally, the causes we work with are also global. So for that rea­son, we haven’t been pro­mot­ing B1G1 ini­tia­tives within Sin­ga­pore to-​date. But that’s not because we don’t want to. The B1G1 model does not fit in per­fectly with some of the ‘rules’ in Sin­ga­pore right now. But of course, we hope that will change over time.

We love being here for all sorts of rea­sons and we feel very blessed. Sin­ga­pore is a great hub for busi­ness and exper­tise, and it’s a won­der­ful place too for my two chil­dren to go to school! Plus we work a lot here with young peo­ple — peo­ple who are doing great things, for exam­ple, in the social entre­pre­neur­ship space.

Have you seen any giv­ing trends?

I have noticed a lot of young peo­ple inter­ested in giv­ing back. We also work with stu­dents from uni­ver­si­ties on some of our projects. For exam­ple, we work fre­quently with teams from SMU (Sin­ga­pore Man­age­ment Uni­ver­sity) in their final-​year projects — the young peo­ple are very inspired by B1G1 and we love work­ing with them.

Of course, that con­nec­tion also means that we are fre­quently invited to speak at var­i­ous stu­dent events in Sin­ga­pore. And not sur­pris­ingly, we also see more inter­est towards entre­pre­neur­ship espe­cially social entre­pre­neur­ship among the youth.

Any chal­lenges?

Our oper­a­tion and activ­i­ties are becom­ing sta­ble now. When we first started, we didn’t have the right fund­ing model. We ini­tially con­sid­ered var­i­ous fund­ing mod­els that other organ­i­sa­tions were imple­ment­ing that included a model to take trans­ac­tion fees from giv­ing as well. Yet we’ve decided not to go on that path.

Instead, we came up with a mem­ber­ship pro­gramme whereby the busi­nesses join B1G1 as mem­bers or part­ners and receive mem­ber­ship priv­i­leges. And our model today ensures 100 per­cent of giv­ing gets to go to the projects the B1G1 mem­ber busi­nesses choose for them.

We are con­tin­u­ously com­ing up with ways to add more value such as the impact reports, mar­ket­ing resources and online wid­gets. The SME pro­gramme starts from one dol­lar a day and it makes giv­ing sim­ple, easy and impact­ful for any type and size of company.

How do you ensure the integrity of your ini­tia­tives while work­ing with many other char­ity organisations?

We have very strict cri­te­ria for approv­ing our Wor­thy Cause Part­ners who, of course, are already sub­ject to strict process reviews by Gov­ern­ment agen­cies. We also con­duct reg­u­lar assessments.

How­ever, there’s also a limit to how much we can or should invest our time and focus on the due dili­gence area. Our view is sim­ply that if we all focused on doubt­ing and never did any­thing as we could no longer trust, we would not be able to cre­ate the world we want to see.

At B1G1, we believe in the world of trust and gen­eros­ity. We believe in a reward sys­tem where we high­light and encour­age good behav­iour and effec­tive approaches.

We see that every organ­i­sa­tion and every indi­vid­ual has the poten­tial to do good and yet we also have the poten­tial to occa­sion­ally make mis­takes and improve what we do and how we do it as a result. When we cre­ate the cul­ture of learn­ing and improv­ing, we can all do so much more with the same amount of resources.

We also believe that there is no sin­gle solu­tion to the issues we face in our world. Each organ­i­sa­tion can learn from each other to make their activ­i­ties ever more sus­tain­able and empow­er­ing so that we are not sim­ply hand­ing out aid, yet util­is­ing the resources avail­able to cre­ate last­ing change in each com­mu­nity encour­ag­ing local peo­ple to take own­er­ship for their own effort. We’re hang­ing UP as opposed to hand­ing out.

So, we’d like to share more of these great sto­ries and ideas among our Wor­thy Cause com­mu­nity to main­tain and enhance the cul­ture of giv­ing. We’ve iden­ti­fied that it is impor­tant to ded­i­cate our effort more toward cre­at­ing pos­i­tive and last­ing impact.

We believe that when we come together through gen­uine sense of car­ing, trust and an open mind, our world can truly change for the good. And we’re really thrilled to be play­ing a part in mak­ing that hap­pen in such a pos­i­tive, trans­for­ma­tive way.