Published by Martha Danly under Green Living

Carrot or stick: which is a more effective motivator? That’s a no-brainer. Like a human law of gravity, reward wins over punishment. Fun trumps oppression.

So if you’re a smart social activist like Brent Schulkin, you’ll use this fundamental law of human behavior to drive social change. And that’s exactly what he’s done in creating Carrotmob, a project of San Francisco-based company Virgance, that harnesses consumer buying power to motivate businesses toward improving their environmental practices.

Schulkin is the master of the reverse boycott. In his first Carrotmob event a year ago, he challenged 23 neighborhood stores to set aside a percentage of sales for underwriting improvements in energy efficiency. He then funneled hundreds of shoppers to the store
that committed the most to becoming more environmentally friendly.

On a single day last year he had lines of people wrapped around the block to shop at K&B Market for life’s necessities, i.e., bourbon, toilet paper, and CFLs. Together, they increased sales five times over the average day’s take-in, and used that boost to pay for the installation of the store’s new energy-efficient lighting system. If this isn’t a great example of Triple Bottom Line thinking—benefiting people, profit, and planet—I don’t know what is.

Carrotmob Makes it Rain Video:

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

Following the success of the initial Carrotmob reverse boycott, Schulkin teamed up with Steve Newcomb, founder of successful startups Powerset, Promptu Mobile, and Loudfire, to create a new company, Virgance, whose story is embodied in the tagline Activism 2.0.

The Virgance brand of activism is entirely new and refreshing. It’s not the six-hour march against globalization or the chain-yourself-to-a-nuclear-power-plant’s-fence type of activism. It’s one that takes what consumers’ normal actions and warps them positively by harnessing the power of existing market demand and online social networks.

Their idea is to make it easy to participate and give people confidence that their activism will actually pay off –- and that’s not a five percent chance that something will be better in 20 years, but a definite, measurable payoff now. By marrying business and activist values, Virgance is defining a way to deliver tangible benefits to individual consumers and society at large, while also increasing profits for business.

The public ear does not often hear the phrases “for-profit company,” “activism,” and “improve the world” yoked positively in the same sentence.

“It’s not just us, it’s the whole political climate that makes this the time for Virgance,” says Schulkin. “People are ready to be re-booted. They realize how utterly failed the old systems are — and that we need new ones.”

Virgance wants to become the tool-and-die shop for many endeavors like Carrotmob. In November 2008, they acquired 1BOG (One Block Off the Grid), a nationwide campaign that helps homeowners band together to obtain mass discounts on solar power systems and other individually costly products, so as to help reduce the collective energy footprint.

Under development is Lend Me Some Sugar, an approach to corporate philanthropy that takes advantage of the same crowd-sourcing tactics being used for Carrotmob and 1BOG. The idea is for corporations to hand over the philanthropic budgets to Lend Me Some Sugar, which empowers its users to choose which nonprofits should get the money. This shows the rare wisdom of crowds in action.

Next up is Greenfund, the first microventure capital fund whose structure allows any investor of amounts up to $100 to become a partner of the fund. Members vote on which companies to invest in and so reap the gain (or loss). Again, it operates on the premise of power in numbers: Greenfund reckons that if every Facebook and MySpace user signed up with a $100 investment, it would swell the fund to the size of the World Bank’s.

Each Virgance project stands on its own merits and will succeed or fail based on market response. But they all start out with the same benefit of Virgance’s growing field organization and technology infrastructure to help make things happen on the ground.

Having served as a Regional Field Organizer for the Obama campaign in Nevada, Virgance’s field director Kanyi Maqubela knows how to scale up activism fast. Passionate about helping Obama win after Republican candidates had taken his district in the previous six elections, Maqubela is mirroring the Obama field organization, giving field organizers access to social networks, tools, and training. He sums up his job by saying, “We’re taking activism and making it mainstream. If you’re already going to buy something, we just want to make it easier.”

Shifting activism to the mainstream is an important point developed by Naomi Klein, the Canadian journalist, activist, and author of The Shock Doctrine. Her “Move the Center” lapel pin says it all in three words. Klein believes that until social movements are truly disruptive and become too large for politicians to ignore, we won’t see meaningful change. And for the mainstream consumer to change behaviors, the shift must be rendered easy and attractive: i.e., loaded with carrots along the path.

The Virgance tool-and-die factory is open for business and continuously designing new machines for activism. In tandem with SF Beta, Virgance will stage the first Equinox event in San Francisco on April 7. There we may expect to hear about their next campaign, as well as updates on current projects.

You can bet that whatever happens that evening, we won’t see any hair shirts there. Because the Virgance folks get human motivation.