How do we balance revenue and mission?

Most of you will be reading this via email which is not a good channel for a group discussion, or “throwing things out there” but our topic is balancing revenue and mission. A big and important topic, and one we think a great deal about how to do best. 

What if you want to end capitalism (that is not our goal, we are just using it as an example) and so you end up setting up an organization to end capitalism? If you want to be able to legally exchange money for work, or expertise, or anything else, you will need to go through some administrative processes. The more you grow the more you will need to pay people. Which means you will need money. How do you get it? You can ask capitalists for it, but that’s….fraught. You can sell stuff to make money but that’s a bit capitalistic. It’s not an easy question. 

Our species sickens the earth. The maniacal war for scaling-up and the profits that may come with that scale is so pervasive that we don’t often question what comes with it. We consider it normal for businesses to be completely amoral about how they treat people or the planet. Ventures that try to balance a mission with bringing in revenue are the exception. If all you measure is profit, then everything else is secondary. Success in achieving a mission is tougher to measure than revenue. And having two goals, revenue and mission, is more difficult than having one.

Revenue and mission are not in opposition. It is argues that in the long term they are complimentary. But some missions are easier than others. Ours is to connect people with where they are, with places and things they care about, to make them more knowledgeable, and to connect them with each other. A part of that is to help them learn and connect off screens. But almost everybody spends time on screens and screens are far and away the easiest way to connect with people at scale. 

There are a number of challenges to the task we have given ourselves. The first is that most people connect with screens via some giant for-profit company that performs that service. This way they can make money taking users' information and selling it to advertisers, by putting ads in front of them, and by forcing them into ways of consuming whatever they are consuming. We don’t like that whole system but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to deal with its reality. Is there a way for us to reach people who would like what we do, but that doesn’t support one of those corporations? We are thinking hard about this. But the fact remains that digital marketing works. We could advertise on Facebook and make more money than we are making now. Should we? 

Right now we sell t-shirts. Almost nobody buys them because we don’t know how to tell people that we sell them. Even if we do, maybe people won’t like them as much as we do, and so won’t buy them. But we love them, so are they worth buying? How do we connect with buyers who will want to pay for them but not via advertising through a channel that contradicts our mission. Any ideas? 

Maybe people will just give us money. It’s not unheard of. We are thinking about Patreon. And people can give us five or ten dollars a month for special content or merchandise. But each takes a good bit of investment, so we’d hope that it would at least pay for itself. And that may take time. 

All of this brings us back to our main question of how do we best balance revenue and mission? Tell us any thoughts you have about that in general, or specifically the best ways for us to bring in funds to pay for what we do.