-: My name is Lindsay Smalling and I am the CEO of SOCAP.
SOCAP is short for Social Capital Markets,
and it's best known for our flagship
Impact Investing conference that was started 10 years ago.
We've since launched a year-round series of events
called SOCAP 365, and also do a variety of media and events
to support the growth of impact investing,
social entrepreneurship, anything at the
intersection of money and meaning.
So, SOCAP is a 3 1/2 day event, it's really know as sort of,
it is the biggest convening
in the impact investing industry.
When it started 10 years ago it was really out of response
to a lot of foundations that were seeing these opportunities
to invest in the areas that they saw changing the world
socially, environmentally, but through investments
rather than grants, and then at the same time
there was this rising crop of entrepreneurs
who were finding these ways that through business
they could have a greater impact than through
a non-profit model, and then some venture capitalists
and other private capital investors who were also seeing
these amazing investment opportunities
that had tremendous social impact as well.
But none of these groups were talking to each other,
and so SOCAP was initially meant to bring
all of these players together
and be sort of the big marketplace.
So the funny thing about having a conference
as the primary thing that people know you for
is people either, who have been to the conference say,
oh my gosh, how do you put on this conference?
Or on the other side they say,
so your whole job is putting on one conference?
And both of those are equally valid so,
it is a lot of work and probably a solid nine months of work
to put on this one event, with the last six months
before the conference being, it's more than a full-time job.
Those three months after the conference, we spend
about a month debriefing and getting everything tidied up,
and then there's usually some projects that have been
neglected over the previous nine months, sort of
infrastructure pieces, or hiring new staff,
or adjusting to new leadership in the organization.
So, there's always something to do, I would say
we had our 10 year anniversary in 2017
and also went through an ownership transition
and so there's a lot of opportunities ahead for us
with the big brand that we've built, to build a more
year-round calendar, because we're already the place
that really, most people entering this space,
if they wanna learn about impact investing,
the response they get is, you should go to SOCAP.
So how can we make it not just a physical place
that they can go once a year, but a resource
for people to learn about this year-round.
Man: Absolutely.