Tara Anderson On Social Procurement & A Branding Campaign To Grow The Business For Good Movement

Tara Anderson specialises in strategy, business development, innovation, marketing and cross-sector collaboration in the for-purpose sector at executive and Board level. Her experience spans small and large for-purpose businesses in Australia, the UK and Europe.

She is the incoming Chief Executive Officer at Social Traders, Australia’s pioneers in social enterprise procurement. She is a Director at Social Enterprise Australia, the peak body for social enterprise, and Chaired the Brand Social Enterprise working group. She is also Co-Founder and Director at The Dragonfly Collective, an advisory to for-purpose businesses.

Tara holds an MBA (UK), a Masters in Social Innovation (Europe), and a degree in Media and Communications (Australia).

Tara discusses her diverse experience in social enterprise, key lessons for social entrepreneurs and her perspective on the Australian social enterprise landscape.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - Tara, tell us a little more about your background and what led to your passion in social enterprise?

[Tara Anderson] - I've always had a passion for making the world a better place, particularly around issues of equality and fairness. I've spent my career experimenting with how to do this in different ways. I started off in the charity sector, worked there for quite a long time, but then got a little bit frustrated with the sector’s dependency on grant, philanthropic or government funding. I felt hamstrung and not in charge of mt own destiny as such. That's when I asked myself, "how do we do this differently? What are some other models?" I did three things at that point in my career, which included setting up The Dragonfly Collective as a consultancy to approach social change from a different angle. I moved to the UK to experiment with what the sector was like over there and started my master’s in social innovation to experiment with a different way to tackle social change.

In the UK, I started working at a social enterprise, and that's where the dots started to join for me around how you can do business and purpose and blend those two things together in a social enterprise model.

From there, I moved into a peak body in the UK, which worked with local social enterprises; 750 of them across the country. That's where I started to find my stride in what I loved, which was around the ecosystem perspective of creating change by building business and purpose into one model through social enterprise. For me, it's just the obvious solution to how we create a society that is fairer, more equal and makes the world better. We can actually do it through the model of business and charity that we have, and then put those two things into one.

What have you observed in the social procurement landscape in Australia, where do you seek opportunities, and why should social enterprises become certified?

What's really exciting is that through my role at Social Traders, I am working at that ecosystem level in Australia and bringing some of my experience over from the UK. The exciting thing is the growth we're seeing, and that's really the headline for what's happening in the social procurement landscape here. We now have 120 business and government members that have signed up with Social Traders, and 450 enterprises that have certified with us. We have had a 58% year on year average growth in our business members, and nearly 30% average year on year growth in social enterprises. Seeing that momentum is really exciting and more people want to start getting involved. But the most exciting part of this is the spending that's happening between business, governments and social enterprises. We've seen nearly $400 million spent with social enterprises in the last four years, and that's incredible. That's a 67% average annual growth rate. It is heartening to see that is really catching up. More and more people are wanting to get involved with this, not only signing up to do it, but actually doing more of it as in spending with social enterprise. We know that is getting bigger and bigger. There was a survey done last year commissioned by IPA Personnel Services, in partnership with The Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply, Social Traders, and Ākina, and conducted by CSI Swinburne, The State of Social Procurement in Australia and New Zealand 2021.

One of the key findings was that 86% of the businesses we spoke to were saying social procurement is only going to get bigger. It's only going to grow and that's because governments and customers are going to continue to expect and demand it.

The sky is the limit really with where we can take that. One of our business and government members for example, John Holland invested $12.7 million with 59 different certified social enterprises in the last year. That's just one business, so imagine where that can go. We see most of the opportunities at the moment in government and construction, but they're really everywhere and that's the beauty of social enterprise is that they supply in all different categories. They work in all different industries, so you can buy from social enterprise in almost any part of your business.

Social Traders Awards Night, Queensland 2022.

When social enterprises certify with Social Traders, do they receive support to secure larger contracts with corporates or government?

That's where we started with Social Traders; we were saying we have a definition of social enterprise in Australia from the FASES research: Finding Australia's Social Enterprise Sector. But because social enterprise doesn't have a legal structure as such, there's no way to identify it without a certification process. We set it up initially as a mark of credibility to say you are a genuine social enterprise that has purpose embedded in the business model, and that gives real credibility for our business and government members that want to buy from social enterprise. It avoids that risk of social washing and others claiming to be a social enterprise when they're not. There's a range of other benefits in there for being certified as well. The recognition piece is really important, but it also unlocks access to training and development opportunities. We've seen governments starting to use it as a grant criterion; they will only provide grants to certified social enterprises. You become visible on our social enterprise finder directory, which is the national list of social enterprises in Australia. Just recently, it's the key to unlocking verification as a social enterprise globally through the Social Enterprise World Forum.

What advice would you give to governments and corporates seeking to receive better value through the ways they procure?

Again, the sky is the limit. With social procurement, we are creating essentially free impact with the spend you're already doing. These are huge amounts of money, billions of dollars’ worth of spend that's happening around the country.

When you do social procurement and buy from a social enterprise, you are actually embedding different impacts into activity that you would've been doing anyway.

It's a way to link into wider sustainability strategies. We're seeing this push towards ESG and more sustainability activities. Employees, customers and investors expect this increasingly.

Tara presenting at the Social Traders Awards.

Building social enterprise into your supply chain is a way to meet that expectation and start to talk about the impact you are creating. At Social Traders, we help businesses and governments with that process of learning how to do social procurement, because it is a change management process. It's about how you set your mind and heart in the way you approach procurement. Traditionally as a function, it's about strategising for savings, but it's harder to then know how to strategise for supplier inclusion and impact creation. That's what we do at Social Traders; help the businesses and governments work and then report on their impact and be able to say, "as a result of this amount of spend, we created these impacts." We have a methodology to pull that out for them and be able to track the jobs created for marginalised people, training hours delivered, value of community services that was generated, value of donations to charity and waste averted from landfill. All of that can be achieved just by doing what they would've done anyway with their operational spending.

With the Social Enterprise World Forum coming to Australia in September 2022, and the Brand Social Enterprise working group formed earlier this year, what are the next steps that can be taken to tackle social, cultural and environmental problems through business?

Social enterprise is the way to tackle social, cultural and environmental problems via business. What our challenge is as a sector is to grow that. We must grow ourselves as a sector and make ourselves more visible to people that might not know about us. That's our biggest challenge as a sector, or one of them I saw in the UK and coming back to Australia. Social enterprise is creating this amazing impact through business, so it's a viable model. It doesn't rely on charity and uses the market to create impact, but it's still a bit of a best kept secret.

We're still not quite breaking through that bubble and echo chamber that is the sector. We're good at talking to ourselves, but not necessarily talking beyond that.

Resource wise as a sector, we don't necessarily as individual social enterprises or intermediaries have the marketing power behind us to make a big noise to shout about our sector. But if we come together, pool those resources and networks as a collective, we are hugely powerful. That's our big opportunity, to explore how we talk as a sector. How do we say the same thing at the same time about why social enterprise is exciting and put that out there? That's the way we're going to engage people that haven't yet been able to reach. Fundamental principles of marketing include consistency and repetition. If we can talk as a whole sector in the same way repeatedly, that's how we're going to see this start to grow. We started some conversations when I first got back from the UK, putting this thought out there into the world saying," what if we could have a shared marketing campaign for our sector as a whole?" People were initially interested, but questioned how could we do that? Could it work? But now we've got that off the ground.

The Brand Social Enterprise team, which Tom you have been part of, has 30 other organisations part of that team. We've had a conversation over the last year about how we could do that and what that would look like? From there, the group has set itself up. We've been working on creating a playbook, common messaging and tools for the sector. It's now been embedded in Social Enterprise Australia (Australia’s peak body) as a subcommittee. We've just launched an exciting campaign.

What inspiring projects, initiatives or networks have you come across and are collaborating with that are creating a positive social change?

Social Enterprise Australia is an exciting development for the sector here, because we haven't had that peak function in the same way. It's set up now to bring the sector together and help us work as an ecosystem.

Shout out to the state networks that we have in each of the states and territories around Australia.

That's coming together nationally through Social Enterprise Australia and joining some of those dots is really exciting. We saw some of this in the UK as well, and it was heartening to be a part of collaborations that join together twelve of the biggest peaks and intermediaries in the sector together to jointly campaign, join up back office functions, come together in different ways and pool resources. It's really exciting to see Social Enterprise Australia starting up here and have the capacity to knit together and be a connector of some of the various activities happening in the country.

To finish off, what books would you recommend to our listeners?

There's a couple of books I've gone back to recently. One is called The Second Curve by Charles Handy. It focuses on how we reinvent society at a high level, but it has a really interesting methodology which talks about how you get to a certain point of complacency as a society, in a career or in life, and there's always an opportunity when you hit that point to create what he calls a second curve. It's about radical innovation, remodelling of life, society or business and how you actually take that exciting leap of courage to do something very different outside of previous comfort zones, norms and expectations. Recently, I’ve reread The Power of Unreasonable People, which is about how social entrepreneurs are creating markets that change the world. This book I love because it's all about disrupting established norms and ways of doing business through the social enterprise model. The book points out that because social enterprise operates in this hybrid space between charity, business and government, that's where there is real space to play, experiment, innovate and do things differently. Those two books are a motivation boost for me I come back to every now and then.