In connecting communities and corporates to one another and vice versa, MCSISA is looking to help overcome the challenges of corruption, poverty, unemployment, education, housing and development, health, animal welfare and environmental issues that are undermining the sustained welfare of the country.
South Africa is not alone in facing these challenges, but it is perhaps one of the first to launch a comprehensive initiative to focus attention on the other side of the coin – that of the tangible good that is being done.
“Recognising that businesses have been a major contributor to the problems we currently all face - driven by profit that is often at the cost of people and the planet - the founders of MCSISA have created a niche opportunity that has far reaching consequences and broad appeal,” says Glenda Mansfield, co-founder and marketing director for MCSISA. “We cannot rely on government and a shrinking NGO sector to shift the change that is needed in South Africa. We are therefore calling on businesses and communities to collaborate and share the responsibility of growing self-managed communities. We all need to become agents for change if we wish to have a better future for ourselves and our children.”
The founders of MCSISA (Trevor Müller, Glenda Mansfield and Carlyle Robertson) have spent several years researching their offering, having per chance (‘or by design’ says Mansfield), worked on a marketing project that involved them engaging directly with disadvantaged communities. The resultant support they received from everyone concerned initiated the formalisation of the MCSISA concept and now content hub.
“They say good news doesn’t sell, but we beg to differ. Prior to the official launch of the platform, we put out feelers to communities and corporates to request content for the portal and have been flooded with responses – there is so much good news out there. What’s more, everyone we have spoken to would choose reading a good news story over being hit with a bad news headline first thing in the morning.”
MCSISA is tapping into a growing trend, mostly driven by millennial audiences, for the authentic. The new buying power wishes to engage with those brands that are real and that go beyond the ‘talk’ of good, to the actual action of doing good and sustaining it. Through the portal, corporates will now be able to effectively promote their efforts through its various platforms (website, press office, social media, newsletter as well as a magazine that is on the cards for the beginning of 2017) to present their efforts towards change, while audiences can keep a watch on these brands to keep them on point.
