Let me just say – there are not a whole lot of small-time bloggers writing about social entrepreneurship out there. Most of the blogs or sites I’ve found are written either by a team of writers or by companies who specialize in working with social entrepreneurs. I did find a few one-“man” blogs, though the authors are usually mysterious and reveal little about themselves. Case in point is a blog titled Audaemus, which in Latin means “Let us dare” or “Let us be bold.” Audaemus’s mission is to explore social entrepreneurs around the world while also touching on related topics such as microfinance, international development, global philanthropy etc.
When I first began poking around this blog, I had no clue when this blog was started or who was the person behind it. There is no revealing “About Me” section and the dates of the blog posts show only the month and date. It took a lot of clicking and reading through comments to find these out. Upon starting this blog, the mystery author, who I later figured out to be Michael, was writing for a social entrepreneurship – focused private family foundation. Through this connection, the Michael brings an insider look to different social entrepreneurs and social ventures.
While clicking through “Older Posts” to find the very first blog posts (April 2006 fyi), I came across a variety of posts that touched on completely new ideas to me and also several posts that were very relatable to my own experiences. For example, I recently went on a volunteer service trip to Ghana where my group’s purpose was to aid in the sustainable development of a community fund. The people we worked with were very capable of helping themselves but since foreigners are always donating money and goods, it seemed like they were more concerned with and even expected us to give them free stuff. Audaemus captured my sentiment exactly in a blog post from more than 5 years ago entitled “Is charity harmful to development?”
The posts are relatively short, making it an easy read. The writer also provides links to related blog posts so I can “flip” through interesting posts rather quickly. Most of the blog posts are just long enough to pique interest and sometimes leave me so curious that I end up clicking through provided links and/or Googling to learn more.
It seems that Audaemus has lost its steam over the past few years. Alexa’s traffic rank for this blog is 3,585,029. Posts are sparser now at about once or twice a month than years ago when there were regular posts (at times even daily posts!). Even comments on recent posts are far in few between. The majority of the posts are informational in a let-me-tell-you-about-this kind of way. There were a few segments of posts that went against Audaemus’s traditional one-sided posts theme and those were the Audeamus Awards. These in particular were more involved because Michael asked his readers to vote for different social entrepreneurs. If I were him, I would definitely bring Audeamus Awards back so that the blog is less one-sided and more conversational.
Nonetheless, the content on this blog is a great start for my own research. There’s so much content on here that it would take a LONG time for a new reader like myself to lose interest. There are plenty of posts on Audaemus that profile companies and social entrepreneurs that I could refer to as I am researching social entrepreneurs/enterprises to blog about. My site will differ in the sense that I’m focusing on these profile posts while Audaemus has a variety of related topics that are also featured. I’m definitely keeping Audaemus on my blog list for inspiration and I can’t wait to get started!
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