Robyn Scott is a social entrepreneur and author. Co-founder of OneLeap, she also co-founded Mothers for All, which she started with proceeds from her first book about growing up in Botswana.

Robyn is one of the Future 100 Young Social Entrepreneurs of the Year, announced today, Social Enterprise Day, as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week 2011. 

OneLeap offers Special Delivery for the web age - getting your pitch through to busy potential clients, employers, investors and mentors. Special delivery means getting guaranteed attention, while making a good impression. For recipients, special delivery recognises the value of their attention. It enables them to focus on high-quality messages from serious senders. And every message they read effortlessly raises money for their favourite charity. 

We spoke to Robyn about her recent £220,000 fundraising round.

TNW: Your angel round is not a standard one. You have a dozen different investors. They’re from the UK, Europe, the US and the Gulf. And none of them normally invest in technology companies. Why did you structure it this way?

RS: The first global open address book for high-value contacts. That’s what we set out to create with OneLeap. Which meant we knew, from the start, that we needed a variety of high-profile advisors, supporters and users – who would bring not only credibility and a broad range of experience, but also their invaluable contacts.

But getting through to these people – both to understand their needs as customers, and to engage their support as advocates – meant living the challenge OneLeap exists to solve.  

We were building a platform to enable serious people, whatever their background, to get their propositions through to dealmakers (potential investors, advisors, employers and clients) with the best possible impression and a guarantee of attention. The platform would simultaneously help the world’s time-starved dealmakers and influentials by singling out a limited number of high quality messages for better attention.  And while doing what they want to do anyway – read shorter, more relevant messages – it would allow them to easily generate real money for their favourite charity.

The problem was that we were the serious people trying to get through and make a good an impression.

The people we wanted were the dealmakers being deluged with masses of indistinguishable emails wanting something, who coped either by ignoring people like us or by living behind Fort Knox-like layers of gatekeepers. 

We resorted to the old (if time-consuming) trifecta of audacity (shamelessly asking advice from anyone vaguely relevant in our networks; anyone whose email we could hunt down), creativity (finding oblique reasons to meet people; ambush) and dogged persistence (sending those awkward follow-up emails; not giving up until we got a meeting).

It was slow work but once we got a foot in (or kicked down) the right door, it was that much easier to get through the next one. If in that first window of attention we put gave a compelling case, people were surprisingly generous with time and referrals. Even when they didn’t quite buy it.

OneLeap requires senders to pay a fee to send the equivalent of personalised “special delivery” message to a high value contact. The fee shows the recipient the sender is serious, and because it goes to the recipient's favourite charity, also shows personalised interest.  So  the sender makes an outstanding impression, and gets guaranteed acknowledgement that their message has received attention.    For the recipient, it's a great way to read high quality messages, at a volume they set, while easily making money for their favourite charity.

Seated in the office of the former head of two big corporates, we listened in amazement as considering our model he tried to determine the value of his attention should he receive a 400 word message: “£50? No.” Pause. “£500? Hmm… No.” Pause. “£5,000? No! £5,000 wouldn’t do it.”

For such senior people, we realised, we needed market-based pricing: £5 might mean special delivery for most people, but the price needed to flex when the  big cheeses set their maximum OneLeap messages at 5 per month (important to ensure they stayed in control), and 100 people wanted to contact them. Almost everyone we saw agreed to sign up for our initial alpha test. Possibly, in some cases, just to shut us up. But mostly because people, once you get their attention, like to help interesting ideas and serious people – one of the reasons we were so committed to creating OneLeap in the first place.

And of course the indirect but massive benefit of engaging customers who have resources and like bold new ideas is that they are also potential investors in your own bold idea. Our market research and testing thus doubled as a series of soft pitches. Without even being asked, about one in every five people we spoke with asked us to come back when we were raising money. 

TNW: So once you’d shown the value of the product to these senior people, how did you get from there to raising capital?

RS: We knew that before pitching, we had to prove the demand side.

The question everyone asked was would graduates and early entrepreneurs – already strapped for cash – be willing to put up money with to send a message to a decision-maker.

OneLeap offers a guaranteed read (the recipient has to send an acknowledgement) or your money back in 10 days.  If you get a reply on top of that – that's great- but, we guarantee high quality attention, not the outcome of that attention.  The equivalent, offline, is grabbing the keynote speaker at a conference. They give you two minutes to pitch, because you’ve bothered to come to the conference. But it’s up to you to capture their interest and get a follow up. This window of attention is valuable but we needed to find out if it was valuable enough to justify putting your money where your mouth is.

We had very little cash and so build the simplest alpha we could get away with. We didn’t need to test the messaging system, the pricing algorithm, the signup or the search. We needed to test was whether people would part with their money. So we created an embarrassingly rudimentary database of the decision-makers we’d spoken with. Each picked a charity that could benefit from money put down to contact them. We shared this list with a group of MBAs at Cambridge. When they sent a message we took payment but then we forwarded the message to the recipient. When they replied, via email, we forwarded the reply to the sender.

Heath Robinson it was, but we got invaluable feedback. For guaranteed attention with the right decision-maker MBAs were prepared to easily pay £20 pounds – in some cases more.

We also cheekily realised we had an opportunity to get our customers to work for us. We successfully pitched the university to get an MBA team working for us as part of their course. We got a brilliant, international and connected team who worked for us for several months – surveying young professionals and small business owners around the world – and simultaneously paving the way for these people to become our customer.

The alpha results lead to several tweaks in our model. We dropped, for example, the option for the recipient of messages to keep the money. This muddied incentives. It meant losing some of our market, but we got more of the right people, participating for the right reasons. Once we made this decision, formerly tentative users, were much happier to put their money on the line.

Finally, we felt ready to pitch for capital. But because we’d steadily built up a diverse group of customer/supporters – some who were interested in putting up money – we decided that, rather than going the traditional tech angel route, we’d have a go at building our own angel syndicate, which strongly complemented our customer acquisition strategy.

OneLeap was, of course, only as good as its users. And while any tech investor is well connected, we wanted broad access to people in the corporate and finance worlds. Our prospective users in these fields had already been generous, but we figured they’d be that much more generous if they put some money in. So we started asking.

RS: What was involved in getting from this point to a syndicate of 12 investors?

Sequence: The order of pitching investors was crucial. Early on, one angel investor – a philanthropist and former banker who’d know two of us for years – offered to invest a significant sum in our round. She liked the concept, but essentially she was betting on the team. Her investment was not quite big enough to get us started, but it was meaningful and devastatingly effective in getting other investors interested. Once she came on board: locked or squeaky doors swung open without a whisper.

Credibility: We also wanted a very high profile investor – specifically Lord Dennis Stevenson, whose phenomenal career spans leadership roles in major corporates, the arts, the public sector and, currently, venture capital. We knew him through the Cambridge Business School and had soft pitched to him several times. He believed in the importance of established people being open to young innovative people, and he seemed to like us. But he hadn’t offered to sign a cheque.

It was an oblique pitch that finally did it. We run a series of ideas salons that bring together young movers and shakers from across business, politics, the arts and the public sector. The theme of the event in question was Smart Giving – and OneLeap was one example we showcased. The evening was a big success and the crowd that came, all ideal OneLeap users, were impressive and impressed with the demo. Among them was one of Lord Stevenson’s sons who’d been following OneLeap. The next day his father dropped us a line to say based on the feedback he was one board – a decision which seemed to relate as much to us being able to pull off a difficult event with great people, as to it shifting his view of the concept

Momentum: With our longstanding anchor investor and Lord Stevenson newly behind us, everything accelerated and we closed the round pretty quickly. Other investors who came on board included Adam Parr, Chairman of Williams F1, Rajan Jethwa, CEO of Virgin Health Bank, Wim Leereveld, founder of the Access to Medicine Index, Tarek Mouganie, founding partner of Tyndaris LLP, Ted Price, former Chairman of Lehmans India, and Lisa Spiro, President of the Women’s Network for a Sustainable Future. All these people have been fantastic opening doors to their networks, and because our initial approaches were in most cases to these people as customers they are unbeatable advocates – speaking not just because of their interest in the company, but also as beneficiaries of the product they’re helping us build.

Image of Robyn courtesy of Frances Baker