An Overview of SOCAP11: At the Intersection of Money and Meaning

One way of getting to SOCAP11 this year at the Fort Mason Center was via the Bus 30 stop in San Francisco. Veering right, then left, and hiking a mini super hill would lead you to this view of what would become your new home campus for the next few days:

SOCAP11: Money + Meaning = ?

September 6-9th 2011 marked the 4th annual Social Capital Markets Conference (SOCAP). SOCAP connects social innovators including investors, social entrepreneurs, foundations, non-profit institutions, designers, ‘social’ media, and thought leaders.

As the best attended SOCAP to date—with well over 1500 attendees—this year’s conference focused on impact investing and featured a number of sessions that explored the financial angle of investing in social ventures. It also took a look at the big why—why it matters to invest in projects that have meaning or create some material positive impact. And it delved in to the big how’s—how to design for social innovation, how to build audience, and how to secure seed funding and investment.

Outside Insider

SOCAP11 was an insider’s conference—with plenty of financial-speak, legalese, design lingo, and social innovation buzzwords to tire out your Twitter fingertips.

And SOCAP11 was a place for newbies too, providing a guided path into the world of social impact investing through a broad variety of session tracks, ‘open space’ time for impromptu sessions, and plenary group sessions to bring everyone together and to help distill the deluge of useful information.

In fact, there was a balanced buffet of tracks an attendee could choose from to explore their interest in the field, and even partake in a few “Wild Card” sessions that didn’t squarely fall into a track but were topics of interest. And you could mix, match, sample, and float in and out of tracks based on your preferences.

SOCAP11 Tracks

• Design for Social Innovation
• Technology: Inclusive & Investable
• People-Powered Capital
• Money,  Meaning, and Impact
• Polycentric Solutions: Local in the World
• Green 2.0: Sustaining People & Planet
• Leveraging the New Media Currency
• Entrepreneur Track 

Doing Well By Doing Good

A huge focus of the conference was exploring the meaning behind social innovation. And time and again individuals from various niches mentioned this phrase…”doing well by doing good.” It seems to be the call that social entrepreneurs, designers, socially-inspired professionals and impact investors alike are determined to answer.

Tweet-casting

After tweeting live from Dreamforce and appreciating the experience as a way to share and learn from various perspectives, I joined a number of other regulars tweeting live from #SOCAP11. It was a great way to connect in real-time. There was even a “tweet-up” to meet the fellow tweeters live.

Parse, Share, Repeat

I met a number of interesting innovation start-ups, learned even more about the benefit corporation movement, and was introduced to a plethora of new keywords. I look forward to parsing out the ripe picks and sharing them with Innov8Social readers. So, don’t change that dial—I will be sharing my experience through photos, video, informative posts, buzzword drilldowns, and reflections on Innov8Social in the upcoming days. To stay connected, just click the SOCAP11 tag to see all Innov8Social coverage of the event.

Catch Up on SOCAP11

There are a number of ways to get your fill on the conference and individual sessions.  Here are a few:

• Social Earth coverage of SOCAP11
• Care2 report from Day 2 of SOCAP11
• Social Finance coverage of SOCAP11
• NonProfit Law Blog list of SOCAP11 posts
• Innov8Social stream of tweets from SOCAP11