Promoting More Human local economies

I’m Emma, ex Creative Director, now Co-Founder of More Human, a startup building technology to help communities flourish. I also head up the devices and apps program at Parkinson’s UK, I’m a charity campaigner, Trustee for The Jubilee Sailing Trust, author, speaker (including 5 TEDX’s), blogger and stand-up comedian.

I was given the CharityComms Inspiring Communicator award in 2015 and since then have been named one of Management Today’s 35 Women Under 35, dubbed a Wired ‘One To Watch’, shortlisted as a Woman of the Future and a Woman of The Year 2020 nominee. In 2017 I was part of a BBC2 television documentary called Big Life Fix where Microsoft created a bespoke wristband which allowed me to write clearly despite having a hand tremor.

I was diagnosed with Parkinson's at 29 and made it my mission to raise awareness of the condition and never let it win.

Social structures, like clubs and communities, are brilliantly placed to lift people out of loneliness. But they are struggling to survive. Many village halls and community centres have had to close during the COVID-19 lockdown and two thirds of Meetup groups operate at a loss. Often the leaders of these communities have to fund things from their own pockets.

We're building a hub, a Virtual Village, that connects people with their local clubs, venues and businesses. Members will use the hub to discover and participate in local life. For example, by attending events, joining clubs, claiming discounts for shopping locally or even hiring local venues and starting a club of their own. In turn, residents are incentivised to give, redirecting money and energy back into the system to sustainably power social activity and start to heal the broken economic system.

We're pioneering a more human generation of social media.

Nearly half of all adults worldwide say they feel lonely on a regular basis (Ford's 2020 Global Trend Report). And we know that joining a social group boosts your life expectancy as much as giving up smoking (Better Together report, Robert Putnam). But the world's 10M communities (that are active online) are struggling to survive financially and at risk of failing their 2.5B members. From our research we've discovered two thirds of Meetup groups operate at a loss and often voluntary group leaders fund things from their own pockets. Many village halls and community centres have been forced to close during lockdown - according to ACRE, "Village hall committees up and down the country are asking for help to make sure they can continue paying their bills"(ref ACRE, June 2020).

Many clubs and interest groups have struggled to adapt what they do to go virtual - for example, one adult learning institution in the small Lancashire town of Ormskirk went from 100 events per week to zero.

This has exacerbated the already insufficient number and inadequate reach of financially and digitally inclusive social activities during the pandemic – potential lifelines for lonely or isolated older adults.

Our first product, a local What's On Widget, embeds into existing community email newsletters to make it easier to get involved in activities run by local clubs, interest groups, and social hubs (such as community centres and village halls). This widget leads through to a page integrated into the club or group website, allowing members to see what's on, buy donation tickets, and join virtual events - all in one easy-to-access place. All activities are financially inclusive, with a pay-what-you-want ticket payment option; you can attend for free, or opt to support the club with a donation. Virtual activities are digitally inclusive, accessed through a simple click.

Our platform will become a new social clubs market, to tap latent demand and willingness to pay, by helping organisations to convert from struggling voluntary-only models to community businesses. Across 8 years, we'll expand to connect and serve more of the local ecosystem. We'll build a sponsorship platform for local merchants creating a hyper-local advertising market, to help local businesses recover and grow. And as a gateway for virtual events, we will make it easier for activity providers to enter the market as sole traders or volunteers - creating a hyper-local skills market.

We directly work with leaders who are involved in running a community space, especially those in rural areas who often cater to a particularly underserved, lower tech confident older adult audience. During lockdown we’ve been supporting 10 communities to host their own events virtually over Zoom. We’ve been invaluable to leaders who had feared they might ‘lose the community’ but who with our help have kept them engaged.

Our project also serves the members of the communities we work with. Our virtual events have hosted more than 1,200 attendees to date with older adults referring to us as a ‘lifeline’.

We’re now running a pilot of our events widget and pay-what-you-want process with 4 communities. One leader commented, "This is a godsend... it's really simple, intuitive, easy to understand, seems really accessible.”

In the future we’ll serve businesses with a discount scheme to encourage members to shop locally and practitioners who can make money from running virtual sessions.

Our decisions to date have been driven by co-creating with communities. We’ve gained unique insight into how we can remove leadership burdens by making it simple to engage members and bring in vital income so they can keep running.

Our project will open up opportunities for underserved members of the community to be able to participate more fully in what happens locally. Our virtual events are inclusive and a stepping stone for those who might be anxious to attend something in person. Wellbeing will be greatly improved as people start to feel prouder of their local area. By championing and supporting Community Leaders it will give them the opportunity to grow their reach and achieve a sustainable business model. It will also elevate the community as a whole by empowering them to be economically stronger and more self-sufficient.

I joined the zinc.vc venture builder program in September 2019 to start a business aimed at helping people in their later life. This mission really spoke to me as someone with a long term health condition traditionally found in older people. During my research I noticed in almost all cases that loneliness was something that either caused or exacerbated the problems people were facing. I met my co-founders on the program and we all felt it was an area we wanted to tackle. We came together formally as a team in January 2020 and incorporated our business at the start of April.

The COVID-19 outbreak forced us to move our focus from the power of in-person events to reconnect people, to the potential of virtual meetups. We started to offer simple drop-in cafes on Zoom for older adults and noticed the impact they were having. We were called a 'lifeline' by attendees and the community leaders were equally relieved to be able to offer support to their members even if they couldn't meet in person. By helping communities in this way we were able to pinpoint where their challenges fell and how we might be able to help them.

Community support has played a huge part in my life so far. Growing up in a small village the local community was an important part of my childhood. From the vicar who christened me to the local head of the Women's Institute who helped us in class at school, local leaders were ever present and vital to the village infrastructure.

Now, during COVID, I'm spending lockdown with my family in the village and I see a very different community. A church with no vicar. 3 pub closures in the same amount of years. Local interest groups struggling. A village hall forced to rent its parking spaces to remain open.

I have experienced loneliness myself. I know the importance of finding your tribe and feeling connected and supported. The community where I live in London has been a source of comfort for me and many others over the years and its longevity, along with that of the incredible Parkinson’s community, is key to my ongoing wellbeing. It’s incredibly important to me that we’re able to offer a solution that helps others find the joy in community membership and that sustains the buildings and leaders who make that possible for future generations.

Professionally, I have 13 years of creative strategy, brand building, service design and leadership experience behind me. I’ve worked my way up in design agencies from Junior to Creative Director so i’m not afraid to get my hands dirty.

On a personal level:

I'm passionate: I have personal experience of loneliness and understand the importance of community. This means the work we are doing fires me up on an even deeper level.

I’m empathetic: Because of my own challenges I am tuned in to those of others which makes me user centric in my approach to problem solving. This means we’ll create a product with humans at its heart.

I’m ambitious: My vision for the future of More Human is a bold one. I have just the right amount of stubbornness to make me push harder for the things I want to achieve. This means I won’t give up even if it’s difficult.

I’m rebellious: I like to challenge assumptions and amplify the views of others who don’t have a voice. I enjoy pushing boundaries when the situation calls for it. This means we will create an innovative product.

I'm brave: I trust my gut instincts and I’m (mostly) fearless in the face of uncertainty. I know my own mind, my strengths and my limits. This means I can ensure we are pushing ourselves to make the impact we want to achieve.

I'm lucky: I have two incredible co-founders who's skills compliment my own.

Earlier this year we were given an opportunity to work with a leading charity focusing on social isolation. We had put together a proposal to work with them on a PR stunt that would spread the word about how we can help communities. We sadly were unable to get existing technology to bolt together in the way we required in the tight time-frame and the project was pulled.

This felt like a blow after the effort we had put in to trying to make it work. And it would have been very easy for us to carry on attempting to realise it but I knew that as it was my idea I needed to be the one to call time on it. It was a difficult decision but we didn’t let the effort go to waste. We learnt a huge amount about our customer and ways of working and have put a lot of that learning into our product, process and future vision. We now invest more time in feasibility testing and creating slicker demos - and have on-boarded new communities thanks to these. We've also agreed to partner with the charity later in the year.

Since my Parkinson's diagnosis I have been given countless opportunities to tell my story. I have become a leading voice within the Parkinson's community by being open and authentic in the sharing of my learnings. I believe a good leader takes the charge from the front and willingly takes a step back when those that look to them for guidance step up to take on elements of leadership themselves.

In 2018 I made a video blog every day for 365 days and uploaded it to YouTube. Over the course of the year I tackled topics from new medication, internet dating and chin spasms all the way through to death and being lonely. The videos collectively have had 149,720 views to date. As a prominent community figure I felt it was important to lead by example and that was the kind of content I wanted to see from others. It has had a powerful effect, with people regularly reaching out to me from across the world to say my experience helped them deal with their own. I believe you shouldn't expect anyone to do anything you wouldn't be willing to do yourself. That is definitely indicative of my leadership style.

We're driving systems change by rethinking the local economy.

Club leaders and public venues want to reach and engage more people but they're struggling to make ends meet. Yet for every 500 people (the average audience of a village hall), Facebook makes $60,000 of advertising revenue a year. Money that real-life communities don’t benefit from.

So we’re disrupting the advertising industry, by creating localised marketplaces that connect clubs, residents, and local businesses.

We’re building a platform to serve a new business model to community organisations and their members. Members will use the platform to discover and participate in local life - by attending events, joining clubs, claiming discounts for shopping locally, or even hiring local venues and starting a club of their own. This way, residents are incentivised to give back; money and energy are pumped back into the local community; which helps to sustainably power social activity and quality of life.

Over 50s account for nearly half of all consumer spending, worth ~£320 billion a year in the UK. But this entire audience is underserved; no one has provided a tool for rural community group leaders, and nothing out there is designed for older adults or less tech literate communities. They have yet to be reached by the kind of tech available to businesses.

There is a huge opportunity to create a SaaS market for this type of customer – and for a pioneer integrator to step in and make this functionality truly accessible with a brilliant user interface.

Activities

• Providing clubs and community hubs with simple tools to:
  • serve affordable and digitally accessible activities to their membership of older adults
  • generate income to sustain their service using "pay what you want" pricing; there's evidence to suggest that this kind of pricing generates good returns in situations where buyers have an existing interpersonal relationship with the seller (Kim, Kaufmann, & Stegemann, 2014; and Mak, Zwick, Rao, & Pattaratanakun, 2014)

Outputs

• A greater volume and choice of affordable and accessible activities, meaning an increased opportunity for social interaction. During our lockdown pilot working with 10 clubs, our service increased the average number of activities from zero to 3 per week. Plus 65% of those who attended online events for first time during lockdown plan to continue to (UK Office of National Statistics, June 2020).
• More prevalent and regular promotion of activities
• More prevalent and regular requests for donations from people who attend community activities

Short Term Outcomes

• Increased attendance; more older adults participating in social and physical activities
• An increase in club or hub income, thanks to more donations from the community who use their services. We're testing this in our current pilot, and we have reason to believe an increase in promotion will lead to an increase in donation: 50% of people would donate locally if they were aware there was an option to (TSB Bank Survey for Small Charities Week, 2016); and $500m is donated by patrons to creators on Patreon each year.

Long Term Outcomes

• More social clubs and community hubs achieve financial sustainability, and continue to operate for longer - i.e. they have a significantly reduced risk of closure
• More people are inspired to start clubs and community groups, because it's so much easier to do so
• Reduced experience of loneliness and increased social connectivity amongst attendees; and so increased health and wellbeing in later life. There is scientific evidence to suggest that interventions that enhance opportunities for social interaction via group activities or group-based interventions tend to be more successful in reducing loneliness (Cattan & White, 1998; Cattan, White, Bond, & Learmouth, 2005).

The number of people we serve in the next few years is largely the number of unique attendees of community activities:

Current

1,200 (we are currently serving a handful of regular clients)

In one year

12,000 (based on onboarding and serving 60 village hall and community centre clients with an average of 15 of events per week, attended by 240 unique monthly beneficiaries each - using precedents from our current clients)

In five years

1 million (based on social platforms serving groups in a similar space with similar growth models e.g. Meetup), before counting for other user types, such as local businesses and activity providers.

Activity Attendance

1 year: +12,000 more older adults attending weekly activities

5 years: +1 million more

We will build a scalable product and iterate as we learn about what works best to inspire people to attend something new.

We'll reach new client organisations through talks, client referrals, and working with partners who support local community facilities and groups.

Community Income

1 year: +£540,000 more annual income for community organisations (based on serving 60 clients with an extra £1,500 per month per client, generated from "pay-what-you-want" ticket sales alone - assuming half of attendees pay £5 per attendance)

5 years: +£105m more (based on serving 4,200 client organisations, and increasing the extra income per month to £2,100 by incorporating sponsorship and advertising income from local businesses)

Our platform will encourage members who can afford it to support their community group financially, and also channel advertising and sponsorship revenue from local businesses into groups. We will build a sponsorship platform for local merchants - creating a hyper-local advertising market, to help local businesses recover and grow.

As a consequence of the above, we expect to achieve increases in:

1. Financial Sustainability

   5 years: Reduced closure rate of clubs and community hubs in areas we serve by 40%, and increased the number of new clubs and groups started per year by 15%.

2. Connectivity

   5 years: Reduced the prevalence of loneliness in communities we serve by 7%, and 25% of people we serve have made new friends.

The next year:

Funding

We're currently fundraising to enable us to continue our work - specifically:

• paying the bills
• building out the product so we can serve more community groups (and so impact more people)
• continuing to co-create, iterate and improve the product so it serves these groups the best it can with maximum impact
• building our team to help us reach and serve a larger number of community groups

The next 5 years:

Reach

It's important to us that we reach the communities who really need us, no matter how remote. Our challenge will be to make connections within communities who possibly are harder to reach using traditional marketing and sales techniques or word of mouth.

Behavioural / cultural

We know from our primary research that those who are most in danger of becoming socially isolated, or who are already cut off from society, often don't identify as having a problem to overcome and don't seek help.

Funding

• We're currently fundraising and applying for grants
• As a Zinc portfolio company, we have support from their Chief Scientist with grant applications
• We have adviser support to refine our investor pitch deck and access introductions to Angels and VCs

Reach

• Umbrella organisation and corporate partners will allow us to scale our reach. We have existing relationships in the UK. We also plan to establish relationships with organisations who work nationally with the community groups and clubs we aim to serve. (See details in the final question below)
• Leaders convert quickly and cross-pollinate. It currently takes about 2 weeks (2-3 calls) to convert a community and other leaders like to copycat (1 of our pilot clients delivered 3 others). We will build a community of community leaders to showcase our impact and encourage sharing and connections.
• We would look to build our international contacts to extend our reach even further.

Behavioural / cultural

• We have intentions of utilising known behaviour change techniques, community building methodologies and our own theories to try to affect a positive change on the lives of those who are isolated without them feeling like they're being helped. We have a partnership with a UK university and hope to explore effective techniques through research based studies.
• As a team, we're extremely user-centric and evidence-led. Combined with our co-creation approach, this lean startup test and learn mindset will enable us to continue to learn and iterate on what works best for the communities we serve.

N/a

• We operate as a purpose-led business with impact embedded into our business model.
• We plan to operate a "B2B2C" online events and ticketing platform, delivered via the club or community organisation who signs up to use our software-as-a-service as our client.
• Club & community members benefit from easy access to online events, made accessible though a regular what's on newsletter and pay-what-you-want tickets.
• This enables community leaders to easily continue to serve their members and reach those who can't join in-person activities (due to health or cost reasons, or care-giving responsibilities), whilst generating revenue to support their work.
• We design, build and operate a tailorable online events and ticketing gateway designed specifically for community organisations. The intuitive interface and bundled design makes it easy for them to get started and leverage best-practice, whilst providing a seamless experience for less tech-literate members.
• We charge a transaction and platform fee on all donations and ticket payments processed through our platform.
• Our primary costs are third party payment portal fees (e.g. Stripe), integration API services with third party software (e.g. Zoom), and staff to build, maintain, and onboard new clients to the platform.
• Over the coming years, we will add more revenue streams by expanding our hub to include other entities in the local ecosystem (e.g. businesses, activity providers, projects, etc.) - for example, charging businesses a fee to list adverts and discounts on our platform.

We plan to raise funds in order to grow quickly.

• We plan to raise funds from Angel and/or VC investors in order to build a scale-able version of our MVP and onboard more customers.
• We plan to use grants to support our pilot projects, to launch our R&D effort and to collaborate with universities to test our product's efficacy.
• With a large audience of users, we will pursue equity crowdfunding for one or more of our funding rounds.

However, as a business, we will be self-sufficient on revenue made from selling our products and services. Currently, our clients will pay us fees based on the donations they receive through the platform. In the future, other revenue streams will come online as we include other local entities in our hub (e.g. advertising revenue from local businesses).

We are already onboarding paying customers.

N/a

We aim to raise $950k by end October 2020, ideally;

• At least $100k grant funding
• The remainder, i.e. up to $850k, capital investment

This money will help us:

• Q1 2021: Ship our MVP - we already have proof of concept from our work over the past 6 months
• Q2 2021: Build out our product development team, so we can ship improved product and new features to increase our impact
• Q2 2021: Make business development, partnership, and sales hires, to reach more community groups to serve with our product
• Q3 2021: Complete a research project in partnership with our university partner, to help not just improve our own product but also add to the world's knowledge base, particularly around how digital tools can best support club and community leaders to improve mental and physical health amongst the people they serve
• Q4 2021: Be serving 50 communities (30,000 reachable members) and have grown our waitlist to 250+ communities
• Q1 2022: Complete an equity crowdfunding campaign, so that those who have come aboard as our users and partners can own a part of our business - and we can build the team further to open up to serving our waitlist.

We are excited about the levels of interest we are receiving in our product at this early stage and really feel the Elevate funding would help us not just continue to serve the groups we currently support, but also accelerate how quickly we can be ready to go to market and extend our reach to new communities. We currently feel as though we are holding back a wave that is waiting to break and it would be an incredible opportunity to increase our development resource and effort to be able to serve instead of waitlist the interested communities as soon as possible.

We would also benefit from the platform and networking opportunities the Elevate prize would afford us. We are looking to find advisors who have pedigree in community building or behavioural science and would relish the increased opportunities to reach people of that calibre.

On a personal level, I would find the mentoring and coaching opportunities beneficial as I am new to entrepreneurship and am keen to learn new skills and improve my leadership techniques.

There are a number of areas with potential for partnerships.

Go to market

We know that partnerships with umbrella organisations and corporates will be vital when it comes to extending our reach. They’ll help us engage with custodians of community spaces, club leaders and individual vulnerable members. We'll be reaching out to organisations such as Sport England, the Village Halls Network and the National Churches Trust who can introduce us to their members. We'd also consider connections in other countries a vital part of our eventual global reach.

Community building

We'll seek to build partnerships with community organiser groups, cooperative business builders, the COVID Mutual Aid umbrella group and social media platforms like Facebook to reach people already committed to building and tapping into social structures.

Strategic partnerships

We're looking to partner with organisations that have complementary services to ours. For example Barclays Digital Eagles for their digital literacy training.

Product development

In the future, we'll need to partner with local businesses and practitioners to further boost our local events economy. These audiences are best reached by somebody already in the community, for example local government or parish council representatives. We'd also love to tie our solution into a member's other financial commitments for example encouraging them to choose a pension fund that supports local projects, with the support of pension providers like Aviva and Legal and General.

We also see partnerships with Universities, groups like VOICE and users from our target demographic as vital to our co-creation process.