We’re excited today to announce two of Vancouver’s most prominent mission-based consultancies are joining forces!

Octopus Strategies is Swimming into a Merger with Junxion Strategy!

Octopus Strategies has earned a reputation for values-driven leadership, award-winning marketing, and the development of leading brands for a long list of remarkable social enterprises and NGOs.

Junxion Strategy has long been respected for its diligent mission to build environmentally and socially responsible organizations—in both the business and not-for-profit sectors.

Each firm has been recognized with numerous awards and accolades, including Octopus’s recognition this year among Think London’s ‘100 Companies to Watch,’ a list compiled by London’s foreign direct investment agency to recognize companies they think are “most likely to grow and flourish in the global economy.” Octopus was named in a category that also included Panasonic and LinkedIn.

“This already has been an incredible year for us,” explained Mike Rowlands, Founder & President of Octopus Strategies. “By uniting with Junxion Strategy, we’ll accelerate our growth, expand our reach and position ourselves to deliver an even greater impact with our work.”

Peter ter Weeme, Junxion Principal, agreed: “Together, we provide an incredible resource for leaders of 21st century organizations that are wrestling to achieve financial, social and environmental goals. The reality is that leading brands and enterprises in the years to come must be responsible to all three.”

By combining our companies, Octopus and Junxion are solidifying a powerful suite of services designed to help drive the successful brands, organizations and movements of the 21st century:

• Social Purpose consulting, to support the social enterprise and corporate social responsibility movements
• Sustainability strategy, to help organizations adapt to environmental imperatives that really can no longer be denied
• Outreach & Engagement, to help organizations of all kinds to market their products and services, develop donors, and build loyal followings

With a combination of offices in Vancouver, Toronto, London and Delhi, we unite world-class expertise and experience with a significant international reach. The new company will operate as Junxion Strategy.

We look forward to sharing more insights in the coming months, as we merge our operations… and announce more great news!

On Friday morning, July 29, W2 Media Café will open for business. This marks the end of an eight year journey to establish this important new social enterprise.

Part cafe, part gallery, part immersion in global electronica, W2 is an internationally connected media arts centre. What appears at first as a coffee shop par excellence is but the first step into an ambitious organization.

W2 Media Café is a euro-styled coffee house experience—a large scale space that has already begun to host and curate diverse social and cultural activity. On this weekend alone, W2 will play host to a Pride World Dance Party, an Artist Talk & Presentation by Pia Massie, and the launch of the Surge Festival of Urban Digital Culture. The café itself is an open, modern and welcoming space, where people can connect with stories, art, ideas and each other. (And fabulous coffee and food, or course!)

W2 will engage people from throughout its Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, and from other communities across the city. Local residents will be able to access media and arts tools and support, to discover compelling arts experiences, to decide for themselves the programming W2 will deliver—co-creating the centre’s work. Some of the anticipated programs include instruction in social and digital media; a micro-enterprise incubator, where aspiring social entrepreneurs can learn from experienced mentors; access to the ideas and work of artists who will take up residence at W2 from time to time; and training and access to a letter press machine that once belonged to the Woodwards store.

W2 is located where the renowned Woodwards store used to stand. Vancouverites tend to associate Woodwards either with the great shopping experiences of the 70s and 80s, or with Woodsquat, the activist occupancy of Woodwards, in protest of housing policies and programs in the Downtown Eastside. W2 Media Café sits today at a symbolic meeting point—where Vancouver’s world class waterfront meets the working class neighbourhood that’s so significantly misunderstood by so many Vancouver residents.

W2 is determined to address some of these misunderstandings, and to bring people and communities together. Today is the beginning of another important chapter in W2. Why not join us there for a cup of coffee and a conversation about the city we all love?

Octopus Strategies has been proud to work with W2 during the past few months, in the leadup to this opening. We heartily congratulate the team for all their hard work, their perseverance, and for holding so closely to the intent of the collaborative that formed eight years ago to achieve the vision that today is opening its doors to the city.

During the recent hockey-disappointment-induced riots in Vancouver, Canada, and in the days that followed, the transparency and rapid news dissemination capabilities of social media were made abundantly apparent.

As the riot itself unfolded on live television, the riot’s instigators and youth caught up in the fray made countless posts to Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, recording and documenting their activities. Some of the images they posted were bizarrely compelling; others were undoubtedly evidence of criminal activity. (The ‘social media vigilantism’ of the following week has also been an interesting topic of vibrant discussion.) News of the riot quickly spread around the world, making cover stories in Australia, India and elsewhere. Vancouverites collectively hung their heads in shame that their fair city—which had received accolades for its positive celebrations during the 2010 Olympic Winter Games just 12 months before—should again showcase an ugly side.

Yet at the same time as the riot was unfolding, so too was the Clean Up Vancouver campaign. Launched on the night of the riots on Facebook, this simple campaign invited positive Vancouverites to come downtown the following morning to help clean up after their not-so-positive fellow citizens. By 7:00am, hundreds of people were downtown with brooms and dustpans; by noon, some reports suggested more than 10,000 had joined the Clean Up. Plywood boarding over the broken windows of one major retailer became the ‘Love Wall,’ on which people wrote messages of apology and respect.

This Jekyll and Hyde capacity of social media is both powerful and puzzling. It’s powerful in its capacity to rally thousands of people to positive action. Yet, it’s puzzling, because it as easily can be used to drive disruption. However and organization might choose to use social media and its unparalleled reach, posts and other content are there forever, for anyone to see. And it is precisely this unprecedented transparency that gives organizations pause. Should we open up?

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In an insightful article published by The Guardian today, Octopus client and Everyclick CEO Polly Gowers makes the case for bringing private sector technology and innovation to bear on the pressing challenges of charitable fundraising:

Public sector cuts, restricting funding and stagnant donations means that it’s now even more important for charities to find new revenue streams. In particular, technology innovation has, and will continue to support our charities and enable them to find ways to increase funds.

In a political / social context where government funding for charities is shrinking, and during an economic period when individuals have less money to share with their favourite causes, innovative approaches to fundraising are essential to charities’ operations. Gowers argues–and we agree–that social enterprise is a valuable part of the solution.

Her firm, Everyclick, “turns search-based advertising into a revenue stream for any charity.” Everyclick’s Give as You Live tool, which Octopus helped to brand and launch, operates in the background as users shop as normal. Without changing their habits at all, Everyclick facilitates the donation of a small portion of their purchase price to the charity of their choice. The application alone has the capacity to raise £1.25 billion in unrestricted funding for UK charities this year.

Read more of Gowers’s Guardian article here. Or learn more by contacting us.

A Celebration of Renewed Vitality

Octopus Strategies is pleased to be sponsoring Vertality, “a celebration of the New Year for and by Vancouver’s change-maker community: people who believe that business can lead the way to a prosperous future by fostering an economic model that values the pursuit of profit equally with the pursuit of sustainability.”

After the shock of 2008, the uncertainty of 2009, and the turbulence of 2010, 2011 ushers in new optimism, and brings new opportunities to build on our successes, and to drive important missions forward.

Begin 2011 with a flourish! Celebrate the new year. Make new connections in an incredibly engaged community. And revel in the Vertality!

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Octopus Strategies is proud to release the first ever Social Enterprise Marketing Toolkit to support the enterprising work of leading social sector organizations in Canada.

To make this meaningful contribution to the emerging social enterprise sector, Octopus Strategies partnered with Enterprising Non-Profits to produce the Social Enterprise Marketing Toolkit, which we unveiled on November 5 at the first ever Social Enterprise Meetup in Vancouver.

Throughout Canada’s western-most Province of British Columbia, there are some 240 established social enterprises, each dedicated to addressing or supporting vital social and community projects and priorities. ‘Social Enterprise’ is defined as a traditional business, operated by a not-for-profit either to directly fulfill its mission, or to channel funds back into the purse of the not-for-profit itself.

In other countries, social enterprise is well established—especially in the UK, where it’s now seen as a vital priority for the national government. By contrast, it is a slowly emerging sub-sector in Canada. Yet in a context of economic constraint, and amid budget cuts to government funding for arts, cultural and social organizations, social enterprise presents significant opportunities.

Made up of five videos and a series of accompanying worksheets, the Toolkit introduces foundational marketing theory, and presents specific examples from BC’s social enterprises and some of Octopus Strategies’ proprietary tools. Some of these tools, such as the Value Spectrum™ and the Message Matrix™ involve approaches that have previously been available only to paying clients.

The Toolkit has been designed to make marketing and communications expertise accessible and applicable for social sector leaders who often have no training or background in marketing. They get pragmatic and actionable techniques they can apply immediately in their social enterprises.

The Toolkit has been launched as a ‘beta’ product and is available online at Octopus Strategies or at Enterprising Non-Profits. Feedback and suggestions for improvement or clarification can be sent to info@enterprisingnonprofits.ca or setoolkit@octopusstrategies.com.