SoFA needs to find extra ways of making income. Would you help us identify new ideas or give us feedback on the ideas already listed?
At the top are the main money makers, and on the bottom are new or early-stage ideas. This sheet is for SoFA members only.
This is so helpful!
Comments:
Does this sheet show revenue, or profit? Profit = Revenue - Costs (including share of indirect costs like time required from tech support)
What are the heart programs? See Training Circle WOL topic where we discuss how heart programs are high mission impact, low profitability, and need to keep but contain costs. We also need to consider - what are our low mission impact and low profitability programs?
I think investing in training is definitely a right call!
Profit; we don’t calculate revenue in this way because we don’t have defined P/L centers. (example: training circle spends time on revenue-generating work but also on pro bono work; in the same way, revenue-generating work that occurs in Training Circle is supported by other circles, like outreach and website)
Thanks! I hope GC will adopt this as a simple short cut of talking about it.
I like the direction this is taking! Especially investing in training and corporate sector emphasis. Interested to see what new book ideas might be percolating (and writing/ giving feedback always perks my interest.)
About offering adjacent services, like strategic planning, leadership training, or conflict resolution i wonder if this could be like strategic planning and sociocracy so it’s still connected
I really like the idea of in person retreats. Also, i’ve been wondering about how we can have more sofa people giving in person trainings. SoFA people could give trainings outside SoFA and donate a percentage of the earnings or something like that?
Im curious as well to what other grants is the financial wellbeing circle planning to apply? we could do a collaborative list with al sofa members in case someone spots a good opportunity.
Along with in person trainings-- I wonder if there’s some sort of conference/expo we could latch on to, where we do a training but we’re not neccessarily the main event-- so another org would be handling a lot of the infrastructure like venue acquisition and do some marketing with us(probably we’d also get a lower % of the revenue than if we managed everything on our own, but less labor for us too)… Back when I did natural building, we would sometimes go to sustainability-focused conferences like this. I don’t know what type of business organization or governance conferences might exist out there though.
I also wonder if there’s smaller subscriptions than the OL/membership offerings we have that we could offer on a monthly rather than annual basis. I’ve seen other websites do micro-ish transactions for things like printable worksheets or things that are close to SoJo but people pay for them. Offerings close to what people do over on Patreon, which could be done through our website’s platform, or I guess we could even make a patreon if we wanted to expose ourself to their audience. We could include things like “premium templates” that are more aesthetic than some of the free ones we might give folks access to. Subscription access to a livestream with a sociocracy person-- or other opportunities that are more focused on discussing with an audience rather than offering a specific workshop-- or a free livestream where you plug a bunch of paid sofa offerings to market them. A series of journaling prompts/other prompts that help people explore their relationship with/implementation of sociocracy in a more open ended way.
Sort of got into a stream of consciousness there, but those are ideas I have based on things I’ve seen other organizations do-- I’m not really sure how successful the tactics generally are though.
i added them to the sheet, @Lainewyne
Hi! Pondering about money, I realize that money is ultimately managed by people. People move money from here to there, so I would rephrase “the need to find extra ways of making income” to “a need for extra ways to find more interested people, make more friends through authentic human connections and find ways to facilitate their journey with us (inside SoFA or outside SoFA) by fulfilling their needs”. Money moves for many reasons, and I guess together we could invent reasons for money to move to SoFA. I don’t see much more income without finding many more people and many more needs being met. Of course, this is just an opinion. I think the pursuit of income (money) it’s actually a search for people who don’t have their needs met. We could use sociocratic tools (like having every voice heard in rounds) as personal development/optimization tools. Thematic conversations, exploring meetings or just having your voice heard could be a good reason to become a member. More members equals more membership incomes. It seems to me that increasing membership could be a sustainable solution because people tend to bring other people and so the word about sociocracy could fly, not just walk around. Could we form a “SoFA Club” circle? I also made a proposal for a new book called “365+ Sociocracy Quotes For All”. I guess you may take it into consideration. Many people are interested in having an income, so thinking about ways to help them value themselves through a sustainable social enterprise could also generate incomes for SoFA. As I recall, sociocracy was first used in an enterprise, or not? I appreciate all that has already been done and I believe that there could be a “next level” for SoFA, for SoFA members and for humanity through sociocracy. Best wishes to all involved in this decision making process.
I’ve had another idea-- which is a thing that I’ve thought about making a few times for some orgs I’m a part of.
The problem: Even after getting over the hurdle of training everyone in sociocracy, over time, its easy to slip back into bad habits. Its hard to prioritize any sort of continuing education/retraining when you’ve already done the training and things are good enough until they’re not, especially when most of the training options take a lot of time… And then, once they’re not, there’s the additional conflict of people feeling like you’re just emphasizing doing training together again as a way to avoid addressing the real problemTM.
The Solution: Mini-modules. Mini-group training exercises that can be done in <15minutes or less to help refresh and re-practice the bits of sociocracy that tend to go rusty over time. Include all the information you need in a compact format for anyone to be able to facilitate the exercise.
How do we use it to make money? I haven’t thought that part out yet since mostly so far its just been a thing that I have wanted to make but haven’t made yet-- but figure it could either be on a micro-subscription basis(ex, get an exercise to do together with your group every other week for x/month) or publish them as some sort of collection.
Yes! And it also goes together with the need to train new people who arrived after everyone got trained on the fly.
There have been plans like that but it’s some work… we were thinking of making it a subscription service and just add short snippets/readings that people could read during the admin section. I think I made a draft once of a few of them. If we could sell it as a maintenance program, that would be cool.
Wow, I will keep bringing this thread back to life endlessly it seems. I was looking at whimsical earlier today, which is a cute app that’s part jamboard, part flowchart maker, part many other visual organization tools, but in their advertising imagery, they included this idea for a “Feature Prioritization Matrix.” It looks like it might be a simple and or fun way to organize ideas for potential future projects to prioritize them.
Hey! I think Panvala is a great option for SoFA.
In short Panvala redirects marketing budgets from companies directly to communities (such as SoFA) instead of to middlemen (e.g. Google, radios). Watch here a more detailed explanation.
That is done through stamps (NFTs) that anyone can collect after doing whatever the companies ask them to do (e.g. watch a video, attend an intro webinar) and choose what community to send the funds to. Read more here.
With 150+ members in SoFA (@TedRau any idea about how well “versed” members are with “crypto”?) I think it would be possible to collect a good number of stamps and receive part of the quarterly distribution (which was around $17,000 last quarter).
In addition SoFA could eventually fund a marketing campaign and reach hundreds of communities (there are a number of “web3” communities in Panvala, which I believe might be (and should 
) interested in learning more about sociocracy 
Happy to talk more about this any time
Short update Panvala has closed 
Oh. Thanks for circling back, Unai.
I believe Gitcoin grants could be an option for SoFa.
It mixes crowdfunding and matching funds through Quadratic Funding (QF).
They used to run 4 QF rounds per year, but since this year, in addition to those seasonal rounds, there are a number of independent grants.
There are certain elegibility criteria (which keep changing) and I believe SoPra can fit under the “Web3 Community & Education Round”
Thanks @unai.gaztelu I signed up for their list to get updates.
