Learning from The Blink Tank

Printer-friendly versionSend to friend

We invited the team from The Blink Tank, a social venture founded to jumpstart business models for organizations in the social sector, to meet with a few of our grantees today. Of particular interest is Mission Ad Works which is their socially responsible web advertising services business. Structured much like other businesses such as Federated Media, Mission Ad Works has a socially responsible filter on both the advertiser as well as the media partner.

Our interest is that a number of our community partners, such as Youth Outlook and Youth Radio, have community-created content that might fit with such a media-advertising model. One of the advantages is that Media Ad Works aggregates web traffic from different nonprofits to achieve better returns through pooled scale. This is a great idea and can help balance the diversity of nonprofits while still presenting a bundle to advertisers for purchase.

It’s great to see companies such The Blink Tank bringing this type of marketplace to the social sector.

(Looks like Laura Efurd blogged about it too. We were both at the same meeting.)