Insights from COVID-19 to help us re-purpose the future

The last couple of months have been a whirlwind for everyone. Here at Firstport, our goal in the early stages of this crisis was not to immediately pivot but to work in the background and support organisations’ resilience, watch how the crisis was emerging, listen to what people are saying, and analyse the data we are gathering to better understand how the world is changing in front of us.

In the first week of the crisis here in Scotland, we decided to temporarily pause our start-up programmes and take a role as the lead partner delivering the Scottish Third Sector Resilience Fund. Working in partnership with SIS and Corra Foundation we built and opened a £24mil+ fund in under a week, and at the same time we adapted our business advisory services as a Just Enterprise delivery partner.

Through these, and the continuing support of our everyday clients we are still working with, we have gleaned a detailed insight from thousands of organisations spanning social enterprises, charities, private companies, and the public sector. With this insight, we are now beginning to reshape the focus and style of Firstport and FirstImpact’s support.

Looking to the future

The world has changed and it’s impossible to go back to the old ‘normal’ or to ‘business as usual’. Based on the work we have done in the last couple of months, most of the organisations we have worked with seem to fall into two camps when it comes to looking at the future:

The first camp is planning and working towards restarting back where they were before they closed their doors, and as time drags on and the end of the pandemic moves further and further away, are pushing their re-opening plans into 2021 and beyond.

The second camp is pivoting its services and re-purposing their organisation for the post-COVID world. Some of these have already re-opened, gone online, or are changing the style of their work.

The problem we see with the first approach is that the data is telling us that some elements of the ‘lockdown’ world will be with us for years, and those in the first camp may never reopen without change.

What is needed is a grand re-purposing of how we do what we do. This is not easy for every sector, but in the end, every sector will have to do it.

The tools we need to rebuild are the same tools we needed before the crisis. Early in 2019, the Firstport for Social Entrepreneurs group launched a new strategy which was framed around being more enterprising, flexible and client-centric in our approach, using data-driven decision making, partnership working by default, and supporting digitisation. Our commitment and focus on those principles over the past year are the main reasons why we have been able to reshape and respond to new working environments and income models, and those are the things that companies across the world are now leaning into as they start to re-shape their offerings.

The economy of the future

The last eight weeks have also shown that the Mission-Led and Purpose-Driven economy is more relevant than ever. Earlier this year I wrote about how the drive to a new economy is speeding up both here in Scotland and around the world. But the current re-shaping of the economy is speeding up that process exponentially and the old frameworks of “triple bottom line,” CSR, and ESG are being rapidly being replaced with #BuildBackBetter narratives built around new holistic frameworks like doughnut economics of Kate Raworth, mission-oriented decision making of Mariana Mazzucato, and wellbeing economies of Katherine Trebeck.

There is no question that this is happening in Scotland with the new Mission-Led Scottish National Investment Bank and initiatives like Scotland Can B and the National Performance Framework, but calls from the global business community have ramped up in the last month. Whether you are a charity or a global corporation, the future is for those who put their staff, communities, customers, and the environment at the heart of their organisations, deeper than has been done before.

Over the next few weeks, our team will be working hard to continue to support those we were built to support and refocusing our effort to support the ‘building back’ of our world. We welcome any insights from you and the communities and sectors you work in. Whilst there are still many dark clouds on the horizon, I am confident that we, as a society, collectively have the skills to re-build and repurpose together.