Right now we are a very early start-up with very modest revenue, but even now, how can we “practice what we preach” and be more transparent?

What is Transparency?

To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what “being transparent” actually means and by no means am I an expert in this field.  I think a lot of my ideas on this subject stems from the open-source/open-content movements prevalent in the software development and blogging communities.  Personally, I believe transparency, as it relates to business (or more specifically, our business), boils down to a few things: 

1. Honesty: Simply put, we’re not out to pursue our business goals at the expense of misleading our partners, clients, customers, or users.  This at times is easier said than done, especially when next month’s rent is on the line.  Let’s say there’s a huge potential client that will only do business with us if we had proven success with previous large clients.  As a start-up, we may not have that data.  Sure, we can inflate our numbers or exaggerate the truth a little bit, but I’d argue that’s really not necessary and will probably be detrimental to us in the long run.  In my experience, being frank and open like saying, “To be honest, you are one of our first clients, but it only means you’ll get 99.9% of our attention and get to greatly shape our product to fit your needs” can really go a long way.  And even if they turn you down, they’ll likely appreciate and remember your openness and will likely listen to you when you’re in a better position to serve their needs.
2. Accessibility: We try to make relevant information as available as possible, and try to convert that information into knowledge.  This may simply mean making yourselves available directly to your customers if they have any questions or concerns.  This also means just making relevant information very visible, for example at GiveLoop we may want to share exactly what our business model is (i.e. no hidden costs/fees) or show how we use the money generated from our business.
3. Engagement (discussion/feedback/collaboration):  This would generally mean our customers are heavily involved in our product and business development process from beginning to end.  Instead of just being “accountable” by telling you what we did, we would tell you what we are planning to do and receive feedback from our customers throughout the development process.

Why Transparency?

1. Build our brand, make more money: Personally, I’d like to do business with those who are honest and open.  Even though they may not have the best product (however, see #2) or the best prices, I at least can trust that they won’t pull the rug out from under me and will do what they say they will do.  Transparency also puts a face or person to a brand, allowing you to build stronger, long-term relationships with customers.  Loyal customers generally lead to loyal promoters, which leads to more customers, and more money.
2. Better product: By including the customers in the product and business development process, naturally we should approach something that our customers would enjoy using.  This may not go to the extreme of crowd-sourcing or open-sourcing our product, but at least allowing our customers to voice their opinions and allowing us to listen to your customers is a good first step.
3. Karma (transparency can be contagious): I would love to see the companies and brands of products I use be more transparent, as well as individuals, politicians, schools, and charities that I support.  If we can show that it works, maybe it might spread.

So What Are We Doing Now To Be More Transparent?

1. Ask the question for every feature, every decision: Although many of our decisions aren’t that massively impactful just yet, I think it’s good practice for us to simply ask the question, “does this follow our mission of transparency” or “can this be more transparent?”  Or if we are not sure if we should do feature A or B, as a tie-breaker we just ask, “which one follows our mission of transparency?”  Our final product and business is really just a cumulation of very small single decisions and features, so if we want to be a transparent company, we must integrate it into our decision-making process.
2. Make ourselves fanatically available: We currently allow our users to call us directly on our cell-phones.  We also setup formspring accounts (mine, Todd’s) to allow our users and fans to ask us anything about our company.  Although this may not be that scalable, we’ll continually search for viable solutions for allowing our customers to talk directly to our team.
3. Solicit feedback: We’ve created a GiveLoop page listing out some things we’re planning on implementing in the future and their respective costs in a hope to create discussion around what we should pursue in the future while being transparent about how much it would cost us.
4. Honest about our business model (no hidden fees): We’ve tried to lay out our fee structure as clearly as possible, and give the power to the donor on how much of the fee they would like to cover.  Additionally, we are trying to educate our users on why there are fees and how they can reduce them.

We obviously have a long way to go and will continually explore new ways to tackle this idea of transparency.  We’d love to hear from our readers more ideas of how small (and large) businesses can be more transparent, and hopefully we’ll have more to share the next time we write about this subject.