Organizing groups of consumers to patronize a merchant en masse - as long as the merchant agreed to put a percentage of the profits toward green projects - transformed Brent Schulkin’s from activist to entrepreneur. He called the first group Carrotmob, and within months, he was teaming up with Steve Newcomb—a fellow activist with a resume full of successful Silicon Valley startups—to start Virgance, an incubator for more efforts like Carrotmob. Although the pair are still looking for a way to monetize the Carrotmob model, they’ve started other sales-generating projects—which they call campaigns—designed to help activists achieve change by working with businesses rather than against them. Schulkin and Newcomb are dubbing the approach Activism 2.0.
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