The Story behind OM Guarantee
Being a humanitarian for the last 39 years, it comes with the territory that I am always thinking of ways to help my charity. As a result, my social entrepreneur career has stretched over 29 years.
Starting with a web design and development business, my attempts at business success include a merchandising business, hosting service, numerology consulting, real estate, and a variety of affiliate startups.
However, all through these efforts, one idea kept coming back to me from a project that got stalled way back in 1993 in Australia. At that time, I was running a local Food for Life project in the Hunter Valley of NSW, Australia. I planned to sell a mini snack bar called the Food for Life Bite, and with the profits of each sale, we would provide a meal to one child in need. The tagline would be: “Take a bite and feed a child.” It was a brilliant idea and, to be honest, revolutionary, considering that back in 1993, there was practically zero cause marketing going on.
After I moved to the United States and established the headquarters for the charity, Food for Life Global, the need for donations kept making me think about the mini snack bar idea. I approached several vegan snack food companies, and for one reason or another, they turned the idea down.
And then I had an epiphany!
This great idea had nothing to do with the mini snack bar; what made it a great idea was the social impact that would come with selling the snack bar!
And thus was born the OM Guarantee Certification of social good. OM stands for Output Measurable, so what we would sell to socially-responsible companies was a cost-efficient way for them to give back in a measurable way and get certified for doing so. It was a win/win offer — children in need would win, the company’s brand reputation would win, and customers of that company would win, knowing that because of their patronage, something extraordinary had taken place in a child’s life in need.
The fact is most consumers today demand that companies not only be socially responsible but that they give back in a meaningful way. 71% of young consumers will even change brands if one is more charitable than the other. I knew I was onto something awesome, so once we created the OM Guarantee certification process, we would focus on extending the opportunity and being a value-add to existing transaction systems.
The OM Guarantee needed to be managed by a separate company, so we formed OM Guarantee Inc. and introduced the world to the kindness ecosystem, which aims to add value to the world’s payment services with certified measurable social impact.
I got working on developing the system to certify the social impact and always knew that since transparency was essential to the certification, we would need to implement blockchain technology. At first, I assumed that would mean building the entire platform on the blockchain, but that was too expensive at the time.
I then took a step back and realized that we could build the certification system using traditional web technology and only include blockchain when recording the critical moments in the sales process that required social proof. For example, when the company pays for the social impact and once again when the charity delivers the social impact. We also extended the social impacts to address world hunger, animal abuse, and deforestation.
Finally, I my seed idea to attach cause to sales was realized, some 28 years later!
To learn more about OM Guarantee certification and how your business can get started with measurable cause marketing, visit www.omguarantee.com
