ClearlySo fourth annual social business conference

Date: 12 November 2009 Location: London. Venue: Mary Ward House

Many thanks to all who attended this year's conference.

We look forward to seeing you at next year's event!

The ClearlySo conference brought together nearly a hundred people from all over the social business and enterprise world. We had start-up social enterprises along with more established ones, co-ops, limited companies and mutuals, employee-owned businesses and CICs, as well as investors and the media.

With the focus, as ever, on giving practical help to social businesses and enterprises, the event had something for everyone - see below for more.

Here's some of the (overwhelmingly positive!) feedback:

• “Very useful, informative and great learning experience to help me help other people.”
• "Finally! A conference with social entrepreneurs!"
• “Great mix of attendees and good format – value is in the questions”
• "I really enjoyed the conference - high quality discussion from great people in a huge variety of roles and organisations."
• "Speakers who had something to contribute, were articulate and who (I think) had been reasonably well prepped. Also, engaging and challenging moderators. This makes the biggest difference in a panel discussion and you do it very well."
• "A quick note to say how much I enjoyed and appreciated the conference on Thursday. You are to be congratulated on such a good event and interesting bunch of people. I have been using my 45-second pitch in all sorts of ways and am grateful for the stimulus to have had to do it!"

We've also been written about:

• Our CEO Rodney Schwartz blogged about the conference and the great range of attendees
• Beyond Profit, a new social enterprise magazine with a global view of the sector,  focused on the theme of progress through the chaos
• Social Enterprise Magazine flagged up Damien Roussat's proposal for a new international focus for the sector and reignited the debate on the importance of structure for social business, started by panellists Jonathan Guthrie and Nick Temple.
• Social Enterprise Magazine also published views expressed at the conference regarding the sector's attitude to the current and future governments
• For all you francophones out there, Damien Roussat has a blog in which he writes about and analyses new initiatives in the social, scientce and technology worlds. Damien wrote about the Social Stock Exchange, a phenomenon he first heard of at the conference
• Gloria Charles from Kids First Trust blogged about the experience of pitching here
• And the conference had its share of comments on Twitter as well!

This year's theme...

...was Progress through the chaos.

2009 was an interesting year as far as the economy goes, but especially for social business and enterprise: the world is calling for us all to have a conscience and it seems like social businesses are popping out of the woodwork left, right and centre.

So with this our fourth conference we looked at how the social business sector had been weathering the storm,  and showed some of the great strides in growth and awareness the sector made.

The conference was part of National Ethical Investment Week.

The schedule

The day was divided into sessions on the following themes:

• Introductory speech: Social business, an international phenomenon
• Cutting through the hype: The political and public policy perspective
• Strategic brilliance in times of recession: Alternatives to ‘battening down the hatches’
• Keynote speech: Ella Heeks - Reflections on building Abel & Cole
• My model, your model: Advocacy of different approaches for social businesses and enterprises
• Investor speed pitching: 45 second  pitches, where social businesses and enterprises can pitch for investment and identify other opportunities.

To see the pitches and a short trailer of the conference, see ClearlySo's videos.

Networking and pitching opportunities

ClearlySo aims to facilitate the growth of the social business and enterprise sector.  One of the ways we do this is by bringing the right people together; networking is an integral part of the day.

Last year, one company secured two new non-executive directors for their board as a result of the speed pitching exercise and many other useful connections were made. All we can say so far of this year is that a lot of business cards were exchanged, but we'll see!