January 26, 2006 | Read Time: 7 minutes
The Skoll Foundation was looking for an almost impossible combination of skills when it began seeking an executive director to oversee Social Edge — its Web site for social entrepreneurs.
The position required someone with Internet savvy, to be sure. But the foundation also needed someone with experience in the online media, a track record in business, and an understanding of and passion for social entrepreneurship — the practice of using business techniques to solve social problems.
And — just to make the search even more difficult — the Palo Alto, Calif., foundation wanted someone who had lived and worked overseas and could speak several languages, so it could make sure the Web site was designed to appeal to people around the globe.
The search, which began last January, unearthed several strong candidates who fit many of the criteria, says Sandy Herz, the Skoll Foundation’s vice president of marketing. But it produced only one person, Victor d’Allant, who could realistically say that he had all of the skills and background for the job.
Mr. d’Allant, 50, was born in France and has followed a diverse career path, working as a photojournalist and World Bank researcher in locales such as Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, and Yemen; as an advertising sales director for Reader’s Digest in Belgium; and, most recently, as chief executive of Ascribe, a service that gathers information from charities, foundations, and other public-interest organizations and makes it available to journalists and others. Through it all, he has maintained an interest in helping bring resources to the world’s least fortunate.
“To be honest, I wasn’t sure we were going to be able to find all of those aspects in one person,” Ms. Herz says. “But in Victor we found someone who had all of these aspects — and more.”
Mr. d’Allant, who was named Social Edge’s executive director in the fall, now faces the challenge of using his array of skills to move the two-year-old Web site past its startup stage and transform it into an established global online gathering place for social entrepreneurs who are looking to connect with their peers around the world for advice, inspiration, and discussion. The site (http://www.socialedge.org) was started in 2003 as a project of the Skoll Foundation, which was founded in 1999 by eBay’s first president, Jeffrey S. Skoll.
The foundation, whose goal is to promote social entrepreneurship worldwide, has assets of $540-million. It provides office space and other resources for Social Edge and pays its staff, which includes Mr. d’Allant, whose annual salary is $150,000; a half-time Web designer; and a person who oversees efforts to build online conversations.
Mr. d’Allant’s goal for the site is simple. He says he wants it to become the key resource for social entrepreneurs around the world who want access to practical information that will help them effect change. The site has about 5,000 active users, and he says he hopes that number expands, particularly in parts of the world that do not have the resources that are available in the United States.
Reaching that goal requires creating a site that is multilingual and easy to navigate. Mr. d’Allant, who speaks five languages — English, French, Spanish, Turkish, and Arabic — says he believes he can help make that happen. But getting there will be, at times, a deliberate process that will require him to use all of the skills he has accrued during his wide-ranging career. It will also require him to learn more about how people around the world use the Internet and what they need from the site.
“I’m relying heavily on my social anthropology background,” he says. “I’m doing lots of field research. I’m asking lots of questions. That’s the best way I can learn. Travel and talk to people. Ask them why do we do it this way. Why does this make sense?”
In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. d’Allant discussed his vision for Social Edge:
What do you want Social Edge to become?
We want to expand it and make it grow as quickly as possible; make sure it grows and becomes global.
I have a fairly clear strategy in my mind of what it should be. I want to create a practical, global network. That’s where I would take Social Edge. In the past, it was very highbrow; too much to my mind. When I was in Africa, I would have loved to have a tool like Social Edge, but it would have to be much more practical than what it was when I arrived.
We’ve changed a lot. We run a lot of features on how to get online donations, how to get media coverage. Every discussion we have during the course of a week usually starts with “how to.” That’s what we’re trying to do to make it much more practical.
Where does the content come from?
I just don’t want to spoon-feed information from the top down. It should be social entrepreneurs helping each other as much as possible. Let’s make sure the community owns the community. It’s not for me, it’s for them. That’s why I want to make sure there’s networking as much as possible. The people that we’re talking about are on the ground. Those are the people we are trying to reach. They can connect with other organizations that have the same mission in other parts of the world. They have the same goals in life and they have reached different solutions.
What has surprised you the most?
The quality of the staff. The people I am working with are extremely talented and bright and driven. Coming from the profit-making side, they laugh at the nonprofit side. But these people are extremely bright. We use a lot of business metrics here. All the skills we are using are similar to the business world.
What is Social Edge’s biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge I would say is the networking part of it: How do we get entrepreneurs on the ground and how do we get them involved in the community?
We are talking about a digital divide here. We live in the Bay Area. We have Yahoo on one side and Google on the other side. Now we’re trying to connect with people in Africa and Asia. Because of this, we need to think slowly and make sure what we are doing is appropriate for our audience. Part of that is knowing what not to use. If it’s fancy and it’s exciting and it’s hot, it might not be useful.
How will you know if you are successful?
We have about 5,000 active members — people who have registered with their e-mail addresses. But we have many more people who visit but aren’t as active posting questions or comments.
But it’s not the number that’s important. It’s the quality of the discussions. We have a social entrepreneur in Kenya who is trying to build a school for girls. If we can connect her with other social entrepreneurs who can answer her question, then we are being successful.
This kind of qualitative data is almost more important than the quantitative at this point. If we know that people are using the information and putting that on their own board, then we know we are heading in the right direction.
ABOUT VICTOR D’ALLANT, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SOCIAL EDGE
Education: Earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in social anthropology from the Sorbonne in Paris and his master’s in business administration from the University of California at Berkeley.
Previous employment: Mr. d’Allant most recently worked as chief executive of Ascribe, a news service that delivers information about public-interest groups. He previously worked as vice president of business development for AudioBasket, an Internet audio news service; as an international media consultant; as an advertising sales director for Reader’s Digest in Brussels; and as managing director of San Francisco magazine. His early career included work as a photojournalist in Paris and as a researcher in the Middle East, India, and Burkina Faso for the World Bank.
What he’s reading: Mr. d’Allant says he reads every issue of The New Yorker and The Economist magazines. He recently read How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, by David Bornstein.
