Virgance: Developing for-profit activism

Carmel Wroth | May 2009 issue

Virgance co-founder Steve Newcomb wants to make social activism profitable.

Photo: Virgance

Through their start-up, Virgance, Steve Newcomb and Brent Schulkin want to make social change campaigns into profitable enterprises. Inspired by the online success of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, Virgance uses the power of the social Web to channel the good intentions of millions of individuals into specific causes. One of its first causes was Carrotmob, an effort to convince businesses to improve their environmental policies by organizing mobs of shoppers via social networks. “A hundred years from now, people will look back at this movement and everyone who participated in it and say, ‘That’s our new greatest generation,’” Newcomb says. The 38-year-old serial entrepreneur points out that social networks like Facebook and MySpace have hundreds of millions of participants, giving activists unprecedented access to masses of people to foster “social change at scales that wouldn’t have been possible even two years before,” he says.

So far, Virgance supports four campaigns, one of which is 1BOG (One Block Off the Grid), which organizes neighbors into groups to buy solar power installations at a discount. Virgance brokers the deals and gets a cut. But thanks to arrangements with a major bank, a typical homeowner can get a solar setup for an outlay of only $1,000. Virgance’s newest project is a green news site that will aggregate the best environmentally conscious writing and reporting online. To stay on message, Virgance hired a former Obama campaign staffer, Kanyi Maqubela, along with a team of 14 under-25-year-olds.

Schulkin and Newcomb, it appears, have thought of everything. “If we go public, how will we involve our volunteers in the decision-making process? What if we become evil and need to be overthrown?” they’ve asked themselves. That’s easy. Someone will start a social Web campaign to bring them down.