3SC Chair’s Blog: Why Create A New Website?

Our new website is not about putting some top dressing on an ailing garden, in the hope that our newly planted bulbs will sprout and flourish. It goes deeper than that – it goes to the root of the matter.

3SC has been in existence since 2009, and – given the 2008 financial crash – a pretty rough ride it’s been, too. Maybe if the crash hadn’t happened we would have continued as we were. But although the crash was awful – for everyone, almost – for us it’s been a blessing in disguise.

It’s forced us to think: to reflect on what we do, how we do it and, most important, why we do it. It has made us more conscious of the need to forge partnerships with many different third sector, private, and public organisations, to work together for the common good. No social enterprise can effect necessary change alone. Only through greater collective action can we do that.

This has meant organisational change – a revitalised spirit.

We see the new website as crucial for announcing this, for embodying it. A website is like a room. If the furniture is tired with the stuffing come out, the enterprise behind it is probably much the same. Or perhaps it’s like a story, with different connotations that perhaps even the author was unaware of.

We needed to change, and to do that properly it has been necessary to think through and join up every element of what 3SC does, to make all the parts work together harmoniously. Of course, change is perpetual; a fish that stops swimming dies.

So our new website is not just a matter of window dressing – and therefore a waste of money – but is intrinsic to 3SC’s new working practices and business model. It’s about building links to create a better tomorrow.

We hope you will join us.

John Swinney, Chair