Karis Gill On Promoting Social Enterprises Through Gift Baskets With A Story To Tell
Karis is the co-founder and director of award-winning social enterprise Social Stories Club, a gifting company making an impact.
Karis believes social enterprises are the future and she is on a mission to make social enterprise a household name by sharing the social stories behind the products through exciting gifts.
Experienced at tackling the marketing, sales and HR-related challenges that social enterprises commonly encounter, Karis recruits people who often face barriers in securing employment. She believes in value-based growth, having seen her own start-up grow by 100% in just one year.
Karis is passionate about supporting women to overcome the unique challenges they come up against in business, and runs the Power Her Up programme at the University of Edinburgh. She also runs the Startup Summer Accelerator with Edinburgh Innovations.
Karis discusses how the social enterprise model can help people surpass challenges to securing employment and why providing exposure for impact led initiatives is crucial to the success of the global social business movement.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - Could you please share a bit about your background and what led to your interest and work in social enterprise?
[Karis Gill] - My background started from an interest in charities, volunteering and then separately entrepreneurship. When I found out that those two areas of interests could be married in the middle with social enterprise (a business led by social impact instead of just profit), I just knew that this was my calling and was what I was meant to do in life. There's actually 471,000 social enterprises in the UK (where I'm based), and what we realised is that nobody knows who these social enterprises are. Nobody knows their stories and people couldn't even name one. When we did a survey, we spoke to over a thousand people, and we found that less than 1% of people knew what a social enterprise was. What I did was started off by thinking how we could bring people to support social enterprises, because social enterprises are changing the world. The concept was so exciting for me because while I was volunteering in charities, I found that charities were very reliant on donations of time, money and volunteers. Social enterprise was a way to create impact in a financially sustainable way. An example is we're a gifting company, and in the process, we hire individuals with barriers to employment who pack the gifts and the products inside our social enterprise supporting different social causes. On top of that, we offset the carbon and all profits are reinvested back into the social enterprise to create more impact.
We introduce the world to social enterprise through our gifts, and we found that it is the very best way to connect people with social enterprises. We show that social enterprises are here, you should support them and learn their stories because they are the future.
In the future, I envision every single business will be led by a social mission, and we need to band together today and start supporting these social enterprises. We need to create social enterprises and embed social missions into companies that already exist.
Could you share a bit more background about the Social Stories Club and then also what activities you were performing more specifically that are generating a positive social impact?
I started Social Stories Club with my co-founder Aayush Goyal back in 2018. When we started Social Stories Club, it was all about focusing on the positivity of social impact. We found that a lot of social impact stories out there were based on sad stories and were begging for donations. We wanted to show that social impact could be such a positive thing, we wanted to show the positive stories of changes being made throughout the world. We wanted to create a gift that people were excited to give and receive. Additionally, they could open up this gift and every single product inside would support a different social cause. There's teas helping to educate girls in tea growing regions and soaps empowering individuals with disabilities, and the receiver could read about all these stories in a story booklet that was included inside of the gift, and they could share these stories with others.
The stories were really the key to helping paint a vision of a future where every business is a social enterprise. Stories give hope and stories can really unite people behind a cause, and Social Stories Club has grown from strength to strength. We've provided over 3,000 hours of employment to individuals with barriers to employment, and we have introduced over a million people to social enterprise. We are growing year on year, and we're adding more social enterprises to our range constantly. It's just a knock-on positive effect with the social enterprises who are benefiting from their products being inside of our boxes and spreading their social cause, but also ourselves with hiring and providing those opportunities for individuals with barriers to employment and providing training where they may have really struggled to get jobs otherwise.
You manage an accelerator program through Edinburgh Innovations. Why should entrepreneurs consider becoming involved in accelerators and what benefits are created by those experiences?
I'm really passionate about accelerators, mainly because they bring entrepreneurs together and entrepreneurship is a really lonely journey. Going through accelerators (I've been through a few myself), you can make friends and have conversations which you can't have with people who are not going on this journey with you. These are conversations you could only have with entrepreneurs. The first thing I'm going to say is a benefit of accelerators is conversations. I'm not just talking about your experiences with investors, I'm talking about accelerators introducing new ideas to your business that you wouldn't have previously thought of. In the Edinburgh Innovation Start-up Summer Accelerator, it was really important for me to do a lot of work on embedding impact and our social mission into the companies that were coming onto the accelerator. For some of the companies, they were already convinced that social impact is the way forward. For others, they needed to be convinced and shown that this is actually what investors are looking for. Investors in Edinburgh are wanting companies that are seriously considering their social impact and minimising their negative impact on communities and the environment. I also do diversity challenges, which is something that many entrepreneurs wouldn't have considered before. An example of what I do is ask them to name five people in their lives who they spend the most time with, and the five people in their lives who influence their business the most. In the first category, it could be friends or family, and in the second category, it will be more likely business mentors, employees or co-founders. Then, I ask that for each of these individuals they write down the gender, race, education, language, ability and sexuality for each of these people, and see what common themes emerge. Many found that there were enormous biases in those who are having an enormous influence over their business. They found that all the people in their business relationships were white men, and they found that all of their friends were often of the same age.
They realised there were certain conversations and influences that weren’t happening in their business, and what we set out to do is ask what gaps and influence are present in our company?
What conversations are we potentially not having, what influence is not coming into the conversations regarding our business, and how can we start these conversations now? This challenge has been such a breakthrough for myself and my company, and it's actually led towards myself making our packaging more suitable for individuals with disabilities who may struggle to open things. This is because I realised everyone on my list was able-bodied and this wasn't something that we'd seriously considered. Instead of wrapping with tape and paper, we changed our packaging to a biodegradable mailer bag which is more friendly to individuals with disabilities.
Secondly with accelerators, you get introduced to mentors and investors, and I'll start with speaking about mentors. Some of these mentors with accelerators are paid to be there and are at the very top of their field. These mentors have been huge breakthroughs for Social Stories Club, and after being on these accelerator programs, these experiences have been the same for others and they’ve experienced similar growth. At Social Stories Club we are selling gifts to corporates, and corporate procurement teams were something that we didn't have any access to. One of the mentors we gained through an accelerator was the head of procurement for a corporate, and he was able to show us the language that corporates are expecting us to use, the process that they're going through when deciding.
We already knew some of these aspects, but he helped us really refine and understand that it's not enough for us to be a social enterprise for corporates to buy from us. We need to be high quality and deliver excellent customer service.
He was able to walk us through everything, and although we checked many of these boxes, we weren't communicating that in our materials. That was something we moved to the forefront, and we moved the social enterprise back. As soon as they knew we were a social enterprise, they were interested and wanted to know all of the box ticking things next. Mentors are absolutely key, and accelerators can introduce you to those. Thirdly, investors (are present) at accelerators. Businesses on this accelerator are often high-growth technology start-ups, and they were looking for investors. Investors get so many emails, so many people reaching out to them, and we put them right in front of the investors where they get to pitch to the investors. They get to learn about the investment scene very specifically in Edinburgh, what different investors specialise in, and they get to pitch to them. Many have gone on to these investors to go and get funding from these introductions. Those I would say are the main benefits of being involved in an accelerator.
How can the social impact community provide equitable opportunities for female founders to become involved and succeed in social enterprise?
40% of social enterprise founders in the UK are women, where with non-social enterprise businesses it is 32%. It is a higher percentage with social enterprises, but I've done a lot of research and I really recommend anyone out there who's interested goes and read The Alison Rose Review, it's all about women in business. There's a culture of women in business tearing each other down. For example, if there's one place on the board that a woman is currently holding, other women will believe that there's only one place for a woman on the board and then they will tear down other women to fight for that one place instead of banding together to say ‘all of us women should be on that board and we're going to stick together, support each other to make sure that we all get a position on that board.’ That's a problem with traditional business, women have to fight so hard to get these positions. But with social enterprise, we all have one goal that we're working towards, whether that is social impact, making the world a better place, transforming communities or the environment.
It's such a supportive place for women to be in, and I found that so many women and social enterprise founders who are at a further along stage than I are so happy to give me 10 minutes of their day if I need help.
For example, this happened when I wanted to move Social Stories Club into a warehouse. I knew nothing about warehouses, but I posted on LinkedIn and so many people responded who were happy to give me 10 minutes of their time. I think we're doing pretty well in social enterprise culture to help women really succeed and thrive in that environment.
Through your work in promoting social enterprises around the globe, where do you see potential for the social impact sector to grow sustainably into the future?
I think it starts with the private sector and corporates and then leads on to the public sector. Social Enterprise UK are running a Buy Social corporate challenge, and corporates have signed up to spend money on social enterprises committed to actually implementing social enterprise and incorporating them into their supply chain. What that is doing is giving social enterprises the opportunities to gain those sales, and when I've spoken to other social entrepreneurs, one of the biggest challenges is sales. I've already mentioned you don't just get the opportunities because you're a social enterprise, you also need to have everything else in place as well. But corporates are starting to actively look for social enterprises, and are working around the social enterprises capacity and needs. We've really benefited from this as a social enterprise ourselves, and these corporates have made orders with us which has been a game changer and really helped us get going. Corporates have fantastic buying power, so they already are buying gifts anyway for anniversaries, Christmas, welcoming staff to the office or back to the office. Instead, if they buy one of our gifts, they can create social and have a real positive knock-on effect.
But the public sector is somewhere I think this needs a little bit more work. These are often much larger contracts, and I think these contracts need to start considering and putting weight on considering social enterprises. There are many social enterprises out there that can reach the capacities they are wanting but are not given the opportunity to do so. Really the problem with social enterprises is we need to support them more! We need to buy from them more, and those who have enormous buying power need to come together and say, "we are actively going to try and buy 20%, 30% or 50% from social enterprises."
What organisations have you seen within your work that you believe are creating a strong social impact?
What we do at Social Stories Club is find these organisations, especially those in the food, drink and consumable sector, and we have them inside our boxes. If you head over to our website https://socialstoriesclub.com, you'll be able to find over thirty social enterprises that are making enormous differences in the world. One example is Tea People who create really lovely teas, and the daughters of the farmers who pick the tea are educated with the proceeds that are made from selling the teas. This is in places where girls are not given equal education opportunities to boys, and that's just one example of one of the great social enterprises.
What's great about the social enterprises we work with is it's something that consumers can really get involved with. If you already buy teas, soaps, gifts and chocolates already, you can just buy from a different company and create a social impact in the process.
You can empower individuals with disabilities, save the bees, rescue dogs and support reforestation projects. All the different stories are so inspiring! You can make an impact every single day, and it's one of the easiest ways to make a social impact. All of the wonderful social stories are inside of our gifts.
What books or resources would you recommend for our listeners?
I'm reading a book at the moment which I haven't finished yet, and it's called The Science Of Storytelling by Will Storr. Although it doesn't focus on social impact, I've had it at the forefront of my mind while reading this book. Stories are one of the best ways to change belief systems, transform societies and really get people involved in movements and charged up to make a change. Reading this book has been really helping me understand how we can make a positive social impact through the science of storytelling. I really recommend anyone out there who's interested in social impact or making a difference in the world that they utilise one of the best tools, stories, and understand how to do this really effectively.
