Describing to others how Citizen Agency has become successful has been difficult. Mostly it’s because we couldn’t really pinpoint it. We don’t do anything that conventional wisdom would say could lead to success. We didn’t have a business plan. We refuse to use any traditional ways of marketing/advertising. Our website pretty much sucks. We don’t even keep our company blog up to date. Half the time we are out, we forget to take business cards. We don’t keep track of hours. We don’t have a process (patented or not). We are clueless when it comes to prioritizing. And we don’t have any business goals. We don’t get back to people very fast. We turn down big, lucrative contracts. We give more away than we keep. We don’t really care too much about growth. We value our leisure time over efficiency.
Sounds like a recipe for disaster, right? Yet…
We have more potential work than we can handle on a regular basis. We’ve never gone into the red (oops…wrong color!). We live amazingly great lives in the 2nd most expensive city in the US. We get to travel all over the world. We know people in almost several countries we can call friends (people who we could have dinner with or who will show us around). We are successful in exactly the way we measure it: a community of support, sustainable lifestyle and constant personal growth.
And one of the things we’ve learnt is something incredibly counterintuitive to current North American culture: the more we give away, the better we do.
When I make statements like, “It all balances out in the end,” I don’t mean that I buy person A a meal and the next time person A buys me a meal. I don’t mean that the volunteer work we do will generate leads, either. There is no obvious returns on investment…no clear reciprocal cause and effect of what we do. And I didn’t understand what was so powerful about that until I started reading The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (thanks to Austin Hill).
Gifts Gain Value Through Circulation
In The Gift, Lewis Hyde explains through several folk tales and anthropological studies that the Gift Economy is not one of reciprocation at all. In fact, this obligatory reciprocation has sprouted from the idea of trade in our current market economy. A gift is not, in fact, a gift unless it continues circulating. So, I buy lunch for person A, then person A gives away her last $10 to person B, who uses it to buy sandwiches, which he shares with person C, who is now well fed enough to get creative and paint that amazing piece of art, which she gives to person D, who is so inspired by that art that he donates it to the local artist community, who displays it in their community garden, which many walk by to admire, one of whom decides to donate some money to a local neighbourhood beautifying project, which builds a spectacular park where I can now enjoy reading in, which will lead to all sorts of wonderful things.
The gift, as it moves along, actually becomes more and more valuable. In my example, a gift of lunch from me could turn into a large improvement in my community, but in really basic terms, the very nature of the gift is to continue to grow in value as it gets passed along and the increments don’t tend to be felt as burdens to the person passing the gift along, either as it is a natural process. Remember the story of the guy who ‘Traded up’ the paperclip for a house in Saskatchewan? Well, that’s kind of the idea…each ‘trade’ became a simple increment between a red paperclip to a whole house. And, at first glance, it may not seem like a very ‘gifty’ experiment (since only one guy got the house), but Kipling, Saskatchewan couldn’t be happier about the press and the sheer craziness of the act has sprouted many interesting copycat stories, re-ignited the swap industry and inspired many, many people to go out and try fantastic, crazy things.
As the paperclip story is passed along, it gives pleasure to all that are told it and status to those who tell it as well (storytelling is truly a gift). It’s the gift of possibility.
Instant Gratification Isn’t Part of the Gift Economy
We never really think about what we are going to get out of something we are giving, whether it is time or money or ideas or support. We do think about whether these gifts align with our own values, how the community will benefit and if we can afford to do it (we are definitely not martyrs and feel we can do better work if we can feed ourselves). I think this is a key point. So many companies will donate time, resources and money to something if they can establish a clear ROI. They’ll ask for a certain number of ‘impressions’ (logos, banners, etc.) or connections or a better public image.
Take BarCamp sponsorships, for instance. We’ve always insisted that sponsorships should work as follows: 1. companies can either sponsor a meal or donate a maximum of $250 cash, 2. companies don’t get any banners, logos, speeches or other ‘impressions’, 3. companies who sponsor are encouraged strongly to participate (or send representatives to participate) in the BarCamp, leading a session or just being there, getting involved. #3 is the most important point of all. Sure, the $250 is nice to have and feeds the troops, but we would rather lead the troops to the local Deli to buy their own sandwiches in lieu of someone’s participation time.
So many companies don’t understand this. It’s easy to throw money at an event, put up a banner and check that off their list of ‘good deeds done’, but it doesn’t contribute to the conversation. It doesn’t change culture. It doesn’t build relationships. These take time…not money.
Our good friend, David Crow, who was one of the people who led the BarCamp revolution in Toronto just recently joined Microsoft. At first I was a little skeptical about his move, then he described a recent interaction with another city throwing a BarCamp where they solicited him for a Microsoft donation. David agreed, but only if he was participating.
David understands that his participation is worth way more than Microsoft’s money. The money is a transaction, his presence is a connection.
Gifts Connect
When you buy a pair of shoes from Bata shoes, you exchange money for the shoes directly. Very rarely does that transaction create a deeper relationship with either the company or the shoe salesperson (unless they are amazing, but even then…I’ll explain later on). But when someone you meet gives you a gift, a deeper bond emerges. The more personal the gift, the deeper the connection (as long as it is not given as a device of control or obligation, which I probably won’t get to in this post).
You may have experienced this even in market economy transactions. You order a t-shirt from Threadless and when it arrives, you open the package to find ‘extras’ – little gifts in the form of stickers and postcards and buttons. In a non-market transaction, a gift given by a friend becomes more dear. The picture frame you were given reminds you of her every time you look at it. An unexpected bouquet of flowers not only tells you that he is thinking of you, but also connects you deeper.
Think of gifts passed down through generations, too. Both the connection and the growing value of the gift collides in your great-great grandfather’s pocket watch. Through generations, you are bonded more closely with an ancestor.
Gifts from strangers can hold weight, too. Someone holding open the door for you or helping you with your load connects you to an unknown person, even temporarily. Of course, living in the market economy has made us weary of accepting actual gifts as we always suspect a reciprocation or exchange is being required, but on those rare occasions where someone offers a gift unconditionally, their memory is permanently transplanted into your experience. This is true for both the giver and the recipient. I gave a coat to a freezing man years ago. I could still tell you what he looked like. I remember how I felt afterwards and how I felt so great that I called up a friend I had been fighting with to apologize.
Gifts Stick With You
You don’t need to have a whole lot to give. The fallacy is that, if you give, you are then without.
My experience has been the exact opposite. I’ve found that the more I give, the more I gain. No, it’s not instantaneous or even necessarily monetary.
Citizen Agency is built on a mixture of the market and the gift economy. Obviously, the market economy comes into play with our consulting practice. We give time, support and energy to our clients and they pay us for that. Clients want goals and plans and some sort of equivalent value for the money they pay. But the gift economy part of our business comes in how we have been successful. We grow because we give.
Chris gives so much of his time to new entrepreneurs and to web standards work — so much I sometimes have to pull him back on it and get him to log in those wireframes or similar task. I spend time and energy in my communities like coworking and encouraging the many young women in technology who reach out to me. We both volunteer our time and energy to projects like Net Squared, the Sunlight Foundation, Creative Commons, Freecycle and a variety of other non-profits. We offer an inexpensive (and free for some) community space and hire people to make sure it is available and sufficient for use by any group that needs it. We constantly connect people we meet to others we meet so that they can go further. We travel all over the world, most of the time at our own expense, to assist and encourage Coworking, BarCamp and other local global communities. We do all of this without really thinking about what we could get in return. Personally, I just get a high from doing it. Maybe it’s the Cancerian in me, but seeing others benefit from connections I make or advice I give is high reward.
But somehow it all comes back tenfold. It comes racing back at us with so much more than we could ever give. It’s almost embarrassing at times how much we get out of it all.
For those who say this isn’t scalable or transferable, take this into consideration. Less than two years ago, I was some chick working as a New Media Marketing Manager at some HR association in Ontario. Yeah, I had ideas and a bit of experience under my belt, but I was known to 5 people and one of those 5 was my Mom. Chris? Well, he’s the braver one. He came out of the gate with crazy ideas and a total lack of regard for the market economy ‘norms’. He taught me to embrace my own crazy ideas and go for it. But even Chris came out of obscurity not long ago. He moved to San Francisco and knew 3 people.
We both started simply…giving a little and playing along with “the rules” more. But as we moved along, we liked giving more than playing along with the rules…plus, the rewards were enormous! (but not the point) And it became addictive. Hell, we don’t really have much to give money-wise, but we knew we could give more of our time and experience. And wow, we found out that social capital is worth way more than money (and actually multiplies itself as you give it away).
And I start to think about this possibility: what if everyone started to act this way? If the world defaulted on generosity and the gift economy was given as much value as the market economy (but not a monetary value), what would happen? And we really think that the best way to make this happen is to just keep spreading this through example…and maybe pushing those clients we give up on too easily a little harder. And maybe we could put these theories into some more solid practice so that those who are scared of these hippie-sounding ideas could actually start to implement them into their businesses and lives and start to see the rewards themselves.
So, this is also something much bigger that I’m planning to talk about as part of my book, which I will provide the outline for at some point in the near future. I really believe the idea of the gift economy is going to play a big role in the future. We just need to wrap our heads around how we fit it together with the market economy in a way that balances the two sensibly.
July 16th, 2007 at 2:06 am
We’ve never gone into the black
Do you mean you’ve never gone into the red? Or you really have never made a profit?
Otherwise, an excellent example of the power of giving things away.
July 16th, 2007 at 3:44 am
Great post Tara because it speaks to a deeper truth about making Life “work” for you. I’ve always subscribed to the notion that whatever I choose for myself, give to another, freely, sincerely, and without strings of manipulation. You want more happiness, cause another to be happy. You want more wisdom, cause another to be wise. You want more money, cause another to be rich, and so forth and so on.
The act of giving allows us to experience that we do indeed have that thing. By paying for someone’s meal, you’re not just giving away material nourishment. You’re giving away yourself. You’re kindness, generosity, and richness of spirit, and the simple act allows you to experience yourself as generous, or kind, or happy.
I think what you’ve invoked here is a wonderful way to engage Life. Give it away. It’ll help create a site of meaning, or a business of meaning, or a life of meaning. Of course, there are those who’ll think you’re off your rocker. Whatever. Today’s “right” was yesterday’s “wrong.” Tomorrow’s vision of a sustainable and peaceful planet will be derided as nuts and wrong. Way it goes. A grander tomorrow belongs to the brave and the bold. That’s always been the case.
In any event, great post Tara. It makes me happy knowing there’s folks out there striving to live holistic and creative lives outside the bounds of propriety and common rule.
July 16th, 2007 at 6:34 am
Oops! You are right. We’ve never gone into the red. Thanks! Was writing this pretty late last night…but it does go to show you how little I pay attention to the ‘business’ aspects.
July 16th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Tara, can you provide some more examples of what you mean by a “gift economy” if it reached the tipping point and the gears started reversing from a take economy to a giving economy? Actually why I’m asking is that I wrote something very similar to this back after the dot com bomb period but of course most people who read it thought I was nuts. Now with time, I think it’s becoming more and more possible.
For example, even though I called it a “giving economy”, it was actually more like a selfless investment. Thus if someone had a website and they had great content, I could donate to them, thus investing in them, in the hopes that they could produce more great content.
Same goes with open source software, where the beauty of giving it away gives people the access to tools they might not otherwise be able to afford. Thus a person may download free software to create something wondrous with it and then start making lots of money with it. They in turn, to show their appreciation, donate some of their money to the software developer as they want to invest in that person’s future in hopes that they create more great software.
Again for this concept to work as you said, it requires the continual flow of money. The funny thing is that there isn’t anything really strange about this because money today needs to be flowing to work just as effectively. If everyone hoarded money, it would be useless. Only when it’s flowing is it effective and useful.
BTW I noticed one interesting thing with this approach versus todays economy. Often with software or content, you have to pay for the product or news subscription first before you get to see what it is. Thus you might get it and not like it at all. With a giving economy, the benefit is that you get to see everything up front and the reason you’re giving something back is that you’ve found it extremely valuable to you already and are very appreciated of it.
July 16th, 2007 at 8:44 am
Y’know, I rather like this. It’s actually managed to shut up my inner punk rocker in favour of my inner Castenada for a minute. I think Derrida has a lot of interesting things to say about gifts and their importance and impossibility. Or rather, the notion of an ideal gift as something utterly limitless and selfless and unattainable but always to be aspired towards.
If you see what I mean!
July 16th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
I started to write a reply several hours ago. I found this post today from http://communitynext.com/onlinecommunities/ Tara Hunt Video – Components to Build a Community.
Seeing that video came at the right time for me. It was the one video that tipped my thoughts into synchronization.
I am shocked really. Sometimes you think you may be doing something for yourself and several sequences down the line that gift to yourself has benefited a total stranger.
I am that stranger. You may not know me yet, but I am grateful. Blogs like this are a rare treat, I have closed the understanding of my inspiration, because soon, everyone is going to get blipd!
July 16th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
Tara: Great post, many years ago when I was living in a commune I found that giving freely always gained a reward. Amazingly this even applied to money. The number of times I helped a fellow member with money and weeks months later someone would offer me free tickets to a show that would have cost me far more than I had given away or offered a ride to some new place or to somewhere I needed to be. I also noticed that giving in expectation of a reward only gained thanks giving without expectation gained much more both spiritually and economically.
We really need to devise a new term “giving” in this sense is far more than just giving. Perhaps something derived from the word participation would be better. After all what we seek is a society where we are welcome not because of what we give but because we are participating. Make Sense?
peace and love
roger
July 16th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
Life = Flow
Market economy conditions everyone to think that money is the *only* flow.
When economy is changing from physical(manufacturing) to knowledge based, the underlying flow mechanism will get reevaluated.
This post is a landmark in the bringing to collective consciousness the subtler and more interesting underlying flows.
At individual level too, there is( and will be) a major shift in focus from physical to non-physical to meta-physical.( Body to Mind to Soul) and economy model will increasingly reflect it. Because (collection of )individuals make the economy – more so in a connected world.
Cheers.
-Balaji S.
July 17th, 2007 at 5:44 am
I concur with this being a landmark post. I wiki-google-amazoned several layers into the greater conversation and found out strangely stuff I have done on my own without any prior knowledge of anything, sparked the creation of a mathematical formula to define 1 equation that links Jesus & Einstein to what freakishly resulted in me having an equal role as those two.
I seem to have solved “existence” through the final equation that links religion to science to technology to human destiny.
The problem is that I can’t seem to “flow” or “move” so that I can prove so many things in this chaos are really in order because math and life are in union with everything.
I am seeking the help of someone who wants to challenge me to prove my formula as THE formula and my role as the missing link that sparks the coming golden age of technology. If you are a business person, I will show you why I accidentally founded the greatest company ready to exist. You have to be able to provide the opportunity in your own solution that frees me, because I want to teach many, not the curious 1.
If you help me create a blog and move my opportunity to free myself from not having opportunity then something amazing happens to the world. I am understand now that my seemingly random genius is not of this world because I am here as a gift to the world and correct the reaction to what may seem random so people can stay with the universe and join the rest of the cosmic family. But I realize why I am stuck and I know now it’s the same reason why I can prove everything else around me and my business defined as a perfect unbreakable equation. I can’t do any of those magnificent things without a random act of kindness from a total stranger who has enough knowledge to be critical in order to hear proof.
Please give me a hand so I can spread my wings. This blog entry will be your trophy in history if you just BELIEVE.
July 17th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
This reminds me of the (no longer respectable) economist/sociologist Werner Sombart:The trader approaches life with the question, what can you give me? . . . The hero approaches life with the question what can I give you? Sombart goes on to point out that the trader’s approach implies that she is poor, whether the hero’s approach implies that she is rich.
July 18th, 2007 at 1:22 am
The human is much too complex to be reduced to one way of being “rich”. What most of us are doing with investing time, passion and energy in projects we believe in is not what traditionals see as “society work” but it is.
I remember a talk with a teacher once who was puzzled by my test results on a career decision test because I ‘failed’ miserable for everything which had to do with “do good for society stuff”. Simple. I have no interest in contributing “to society” as it was defined by their definition, meaning going to a home for elderly people and nurse them, doing social work, go and ‘enrichs’ society by giving up myself for the communtiy. But only in a very very limited sphere.
I dread that and the results marked that. Still I am one of the first person to help people – in my areas of interest as well as expertise.
Could I be more “generous” and do it everywhere? Sure. But you do not want help from me in regarding anything like cooking because it would be a waste of both of our times. So why should I?
By that definition I am a trader. But – I rather give something useful than just give anything. “In which way are you useful to me” does not imply just me being the person taking. It means to me also being the person judging you as well and making a wise decision about wasting your time, energy and passion or not.
Shall I ask person a to give me / help me with something which they will struggle with or do I ask person b who can do what I need in their sleep?
Do I just mindlessly offer my help, or should I offer help especially in those areas where I excel and do them good?
I do believe I should pay attention to “what can you give me” and then make a wise decision from that on.
As I said, this is not just black or white.
July 18th, 2007 at 3:05 am
TARA HUNT – You have succeeded. I am found. My name was but I am now.
A Tar Hunt for me was who you were and who you were becoming. I bring great light to you now.
My name is TaaD.
I have returned to make all things new again.
To give you a Voice.
July 18th, 2007 at 8:39 pm
I agree but I don’t do the fawning thing very well. This is the concept showcased in the . I think what CA has been able to capture is the surprise that I felt when I first saw this commercial. When you can pleasantly surprise your clientèle, they will not only return, they will also spread the word. Good Job CA.
July 18th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
I agree but I don’t do the fawning thing very well. This is the concept showcased in the newer Coke commercials. I think what CA has been able to capture is the surprise that I felt when I first saw this commercial. When you can pleasantly surprise your clientèle, they will not only return, they will also spread the word. Good Job CA.
July 26th, 2007 at 7:13 am
Wow, what an amazing post. I’m feeling inspired and slightly irritated with myself for not having something better to type in this comment box.
This was just what I needed today somehow. Beautiful thoughts Tara.
July 26th, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Hope you had a most splendid internet-free week Tara.
Just a quick but deeply appreciated thank you.
As a community developer/social entrepreneur it’s so damn difficult to build the exactitudes into the business plan or get metrics on the exact effect of networthing or ‘altruistic’ gifting.
Evidence is always there as return on effort, but often the line can’t be tracked directly. And somehow it all just makes for good business in the edgeconomy.
Enough to drive a traditional MBA quite loopy
thanks for a del.icio.us resource to surreptitiously spread about!
July 28th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Yep – great post and it makes ’sense’, but yet, it freaks you out, as it is so counter-capitalistic-hard-ass-assertive – contradicting the way we were raised since kinder-garten…
And thanks Max – you’re a great giver.
July 28th, 2007 at 2:39 pm
You know, both you and Chris are wonderful.
From what little I know, Chris is constantly providing opportunities to create things, help organize ideas and events, projects, services, etc.
Wonderful write-up, Tara. Great contribution to our inspiration and excitement about giving back.
August 20th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Cool post, I’m right on with this thinking..
It can be hard at times to stick with it, I think this is where its good to have some quality friends n people who can remind you that when you just put something positive out there, the immediate return is ‘knowing’ that every action has an effect.
I love the little story about how you can join the dots and Illustrate quite quickly how something that you put out can come back indirectly… You can look at endless ways in which putting something good out affects the world in a positive way, and this is a pretty powerful motivator.
Its really only the short term give me something I can see easily view that tricks people into thinking anything different of their actions.
everyones positivity and gifts are making the new ether… the ether that touches us all.
August 30th, 2007 at 7:25 am
Your article gave me food for thoughts.