Bookshare: Making Money by Making a Difference
Bookshare: Matching Social Sector Needs With Profitable Goals
At Benetech, we look to fill the gap between what’s possible and what’s profitable with technology. We address the market failure that occurs when the needs of the social sector don’t match the goals that for-profit companies consider worth pursuing. We use our New Project Framework to identify one project each year that offers the greatest chance of making a difference.
To explain our approach, let’s look at Bookshare, our accessible online library for people with print disabilities.
When Bookshare was first created, most people with print disabilities read printed material via books on tape or hardcopy braille books. Converting and delivering these accessible books was expensive and time consuming. Only a tiny fraction of print materials were made available in accessible formats. As a result, people with disabilities were left behind, facing insurmountable barriers to opportunities in education, employment, and social inclusion.
With support from our stakeholders, Benetech changed that reality. The Bookshare breakthrough put our users in charge of the collection with a crowd-sourced library built by—and for—the people it serves. Instead of deciding what people with disabilities should read, we let our users decide which books to scan and share with each other.
Our lower cost model allowed us to invert the power structure.
As a result, we quickly became the world’s largest online library for people with print disabilities. We developed strong relationships with publishers who share our values and voluntarily submit high quality digital files directly to Bookshare. Now, when a person who is blind needs a specific book, s/he is likely to find that title in Bookshare—in the format they need—with Benetech delivering it for less than one-fifteenth of the cost of previous approaches.
The New Project Framework Model
Here’s how Bookshare maps to the top seven considerations in our New Project Framework:
1. Chance for Revolutionary Change
Lowering the cost of delivering a social good by a factor of 10 or bringing a technological capability to a community that didn’t have a technology solution at all: now that’s worth doing! In the case of Bookshare, we’ve gone from solving a sliver of the problem to most of it, while hitting more than an order of magnitude reduction in cost.
2. User Needs and Product
We must understand our users’ needs and how the new product will thrill them and affect the social outcomes we (and they) desire. Prior to Bookshare we built affordable reading machine for the blind, so we understood our users’ needs well. Then, with Bookshare, our users decided (and still do) what books they want in the collection.
3. Distribution and Go-to-Market Plan
Our product will only matter if we can get it to the people who need it. With Bookshare, we knew that a web-based platform would enable us to get the product to scale and into the hands of hundreds of thousands of users today.
4. Partnership Plan
We engage cross-sector stakeholders who help us ensure that our product truly creates social change.
Bookshare is a global asset we built in partnership with our user community, and then the publishing industry jumped on board to help.
5. Sustainability Plan
Every product needs to sustain itself on revenues after the initial donor investment in building and bringing it to market ends. We planned for Bookshare to be viable on individual subscription fees, but eventually found that focusing on serving students with disabilities is the key to the library’s sustainability.
6. Exit Options
Each of our new ventures needs at least three exit options. For Bookshare, it could sell out to publishers, merge with one of the traditional libraries, or even convince the publishers to solve the problem and reduce the need for us to do it.
7. Low Technical Risk
We focus on applying existing technologies to bear on social needs. To develop Bookshare, we hired Silicon Valley engineers who had built something similar more than once for one of the major early commercial ebook companies.
Each year, we look at the pipeline of dozens of good, new project ideas and measure them on this framework. We choose a few ideas to further research and develop and then zero in on the one we think is the top contender to create maximum social return on investment.
But our measure of success goes beyond what any one of our initiatives alone can achieve.
At Benetech we want to help catalyze the creation of many new products and many new organizations that do great things with technology. Our aim is to be part of a larger movement—one that harnesses the power of technology to improve the lives of all people across the world. Check out Creating Good Work, our new book. We hope you’ll join us in this movement!
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