I fell in love with sales, at the expense of our mission.
I’ve decided to air my dirty laundry in the form of a blog post. It’s a bit childish, but I can’t afford a therapist — so the internet is my next best bet.
In May of this year I gave a presentation at a My Media all-hands meeting which set out some of our key 2020 goals. It was a three-fold plan:
- Work with national organizations, grow our profile, and grow revenue.
- Become a creative laboratory — pushing a culture of true out of the box thinking.
- Engage politically. Focus on being at the epicentre of important discussions, and drive social outcomes that we feel are genuinely important.
We did the first one. We’re struggling with the second. The third is debatable.
The problem is that we became an organization that was obsessed with revenue growth. More accurately, I became a leader that was obsessed with revenue growth.
We had no Key Performance Indicators connected to our impact. COVID drove us inside and decimated our loose community of creative spirits (we used to measure our growth based on how many people came to our weekly “community meetings”). Progress was articulated in a dollar figure.
This drove the whole team and I into a myriad of discussions about who My Media is. We realized that we were losing track of our broader mission: help re-balance access to attention in society. We also realized that as we grew, we were only going to dig ourselves deeper into this money > mission mindset.
The trajectory we are (were, might be, etc…) on is clear: a boutique marketing, design, and media production consultancy with a focus on non-profits and social enterprises. To make a living and grow there’s a solid likelihood we’ll have to work with large charities, and even do some Corporate Social Responsibility-washing.
What is that? It’s a solid way to make some money and spend a couple years. It’s not our mission.
Our mission is access. Access to learning and skills. Access to support and talent. Our mission is not about the people who could afford to pay Sid Lee or Cossette anyways. We want to help the soup-kitchens, the food banks, the local legal clinics. We believe that the health of a community is tied to whose voice gets heard in it. We want to amplify the voices that make for a healthy community.
How do we do that? Education is the key. Continuing our educational programming, and strengthening it far beyond where it is now. Connect more young people to non-profits that need their help. Solve for a lack of access to digital content, while teaching young people skills. This allows us to create more opportunities and scale our impact in a way that being a boutique creative services can’t.
Until then, we keep pushing both sides of the organization. The mission is still present in a lot of the work that we’re doing. The main thing to consider is the idea of “access” in our mission. A key element of accessibility is payment. I think that it’s extremely important that we can pay our creatives a living wage for the part-time work that they’re doing. Without that, they may not have access to this opportunity.
“Access” also means wide-reaching messages pushed out by knowledgeable creators. Part of our job is helping non-profits get “access” to attention in the digital age. We’re still in the business of getting messages out there!
We still aim to achieve those 3 goals, but I want to add two more.
- Work with national organizations, grow our profile, and grow revenue.
- Become a creative laboratory — pushing a culture of true out of the box thinking.
- Engage politically. Focus on being at the epicentre of important discussions, and drive social outcomes that we feel are genuinely important.
- Connect those who want to develop skills, with those who need help across the country.
- Stay true to our mission, and constantly judge our day to day actions against it.
Specifically, I want to thank Liam. He is the most mission-focused person I have ever worked with. He is the champion of that 5th goal right now. Going forward, we all need to be champions.
