Benetech :: About Benetech :: President's Update

Jim Fruchterman
Benetech President and CEO

November 2005

Benetech is going through its planning process for 2006, and we are looking forward to significant growth and bigger impact. My current expectation is that Benetech will grow by almost one third next year as our current enterprises continue to expand and as we bring several new projects from seed stage to active implementation. That’s dramatic growth, and we’re abuzz with plans to make it happen.

We have been revising our marketing messages, website and branding, as part of an effort underwritten by the Skoll Foundation. Looking back over the last five years since we sold Arkenstone, we have accomplished most of what we expected to do during this period. But, it was time to revisit our concepts for Benetech, given that we’ve gone from one social enterprise to six next year. Our new website will launch in a few months, but I can give some previews!

We conducted interviews and focus group efforts with key players in literacy, human rights and philanthropy to assess where Benetech stood. We received positive encouragement about Benetech’s reputation while at the same time getting constructive feedback that will help us grow stronger. An important message we heard is the need to prominently present the human impact of our work because it was being overshadowed by the business and analytical side of our projects. This has always been a key part of everything we do, but we tended to leave it implicit. We will strive to communicate more widely the positive impact and benefit to humanity that are at the core of every project we undertake.

Our team then got together and brainstormed a new elevator pitch:

Benetech creates technology that serves humanity by blending social conscience with Silicon Valley expertise. We build innovative solutions that have lasting impact on critical needs around the world.

As time goes on, we’ll be blending in more of the heart side of Benetech with the head part! Now on to the highlights of the last few months and what’s coming up in the new year:

Recruiting a Chief Technical Officer
Human Rights Program
Literacy Programs
Funding and financing

Recruiting a Chief Technical Officer

Our next major move toward strengthening our management team is adding a CTO/VP Engineering. I’m hoping to find someone with heavy technology credentials who is looking to make a large positive impact on society. We won’t formally open the position for another one or two months, but if you know a top technologist with a strong interest in helping humanity, please put him or her in touch with me.

Human Rights Program

Our unique ability to turn data into knowledge about human rights abuses is in increasing demand around the world, and we are trying to figure out how to meet these needs. Patrick Ball is spending a significant slice of his time teaching, to spread the knowledge about how to do what we do well. I just attended a lecture by Patrick at the Central European University in Budapest, and it’s great to be reminded about the big picture rather than our normal daily challenges of projects all over the world.

A story from Colombia illustrates why we do what we do. One of our strong partners in the country is a group named EQUITAS, the Colombian Interdisciplinary Team for Forensic Work and Psychosocial Services. They concentrate on recovering the remains of the many people disappeared during Colombia's complex and violent internal conflicts. EQUITAS is under particular pressure just now because of its involvement in an excavation of remains on a ranch near San Onofre, a particularly sensitive site that may hold the remains of hundreds of disappeared people from the region. The site has already yielded dozens of bodies.

One of the EQUITAS staff was assaulted last month multiple times. In one incident, her taxi was hijacked in Medellin and her computer was demanded. She and her taxi driver were taken to a remote location where her computer, cell phone and other property was stolen, but thankfully, she and the taxi driver were released unharmed. EQUITAS has been among our most innovative Martus adopters, and many of EQUITAS' documents were secured by our Martus software. Whoever stole EQUITAS' computer got nothing but encrypted bits for the data stored in Martus, and EQUITAS has already recovered their materials from the server to their new computer.

Literacy Programs

There’s so much going on with Janice Carter leading our literacy efforts. Here are some highlights:

Approaching 25,000 books in Bookshare.org, thanks to our dynamic volunteer community
Actively working to expand access to textbooks through our work on the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Standard: I’ve been personally playing with this new XML standard, and I think it’s going to have incredible benefits for students with disabilities!
Books on iPods: one of our users has devised a free piece of software to load our digital Bookshare.org books onto iPods as audio recordings of synthetic speech: very cool. We’re looking at how to do this better, while keeping the publishers happy.
Bookshare.org just started working with the Open Content Alliance, one of the large book scanning programs with Yahoo! and the Internet Archive
I’m speaking at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia this month on improved access to books for disabled people around the world, as we begin to actively expand Bookshare.org outside of the United States
On that international note, we just signed a letter of intent with a nonprofit group to establish Bookshare.org.in for people with disabilities in India
Route66 Literacy is the new name of our ALL-Link literacy software, and we should be launching a public beta test of the content in the next couple of months.

There are many stories about how Bookshare.org has changed the life of our users. I really appreciated the thoughts of Chancey Fleet, who has been in pre-law at William & Mary College. Chancey recently needed access to an LSAT study book to prepare for that law exam, and our team really worked hard to deliver this to her. Chancey shared some of her thoughts about this in an email, which I quoted recently on the Beneblog.

Funding and Finance

Highlights from the funding and finance side of Benetech:

We received a clean audit without a management letter: our CFO, Teresa Throckmorton, is justifiably proud of running an incredibly tight accounting ship. We’re happy to share our latest financial documents on our website.
Recent support includes funding from the Flora Family Foundation and Dr. Armand Neukermans for our landmine detector project, as well as $250,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation for our new environmental project, the e-Adaptive management software. This last grant has some matching challenges, which we’re working to meet to take this project to the next stage.
We’re working on a $500,000 line of credit to support our income earning enterprises, and hope to have it in place early next year.
Peggy Gibbs, who joined us as VP Business Development earlier this year, has many exciting developments in process, and I look forward to sharing more of these as they come to fruition.

Conclusion

This whole field of social entrepreneurship makes me think of a new technology industry on the brink of busting wide open: there is so much action, energy and excitement in the air. I appreciate the encouragement and support from the many people I’ve had the honor to meet over the years, and hope that we can do our part in supporting the growth of this field. It will certainly be for the benefit of humanity!

Jim Fruchterman
President and CEO, The Benetech Initiative
Email: [email protected]