Social entrepreneur seeks to buy lighthouse
Photo/Courtesy Bob Muller
Ram Island Ledge Lighthouse in Casco Bay is being auctioned by the federal government
A Brunswick businessman is deploying an experimental financing model in an attempt to buy Ram Island Ledge Lighthouse in a government auction and keep it in Maine hands.
Bob Muller, a consultant with a background in IT and high-tech image mapping, is scrambling to crowd fund between $75,000 and $150,000 in individual $49 donations in order to buy the lighthouse in Casco Bay, which the U.S. General Services Administration is currently selling at auction. He launched a website yesterday and has begun a social media marketing blitz.
His challenge is raising the money in a matter of days. The government has set a preliminary auction end date of Thursday, but will roll it back if higher bids continue to come in. Getting between 1,500 and 3,000 people to donate $49 each is a tall order, but Muller thinks it's possible if he can convince people to buy into his idea.
One of Muller's main goals is to keep the lighthouse, which was built in 1903-04, under local ownership. The high bid at the time this story was published is $30,000 from a couple from Connecticut, according to the Portland Press Herald.
Muller's vehicle for this experiment in social entrepreneurship is Landicity-Maine LLC, a company he founded in early 2008. He has spent the last two years working on its business model, founded on the principles of community, sustainability, green commerce and technology. The Ram Island Ledge Lighthouse Community is Muller's first project using the company's model.
The idea behind Landicity is to create a model that would allow people to buy a membership stake in a remote place they would then be able to experience through technology and the Internet, says Muller, who used to work at Delorme. "The whole concept is to get people to have a stakeholder position for the benefit of nature, the benefit of the community and to provide some economic value to the community," he says.
Muller envisions deploying myriad sensors to the lighthouse and island, which is no more than a rocky ledge, to enhance people's experiences. A simple webcam can get boring after a while, he says, so he would add to that streaming audio and sensors that capture the pressure and sound of the waves, the wind velocity of a storm, or the warmth of a sunrise. Members would log on to a website to tour the island virtually and track data. It's technically possible, Muller says, but the unknown is whether people will be willing to pay to experience the novelty of owning a piece of a Maine lighthouse and being able to check in on the rocks and waves from their desktops.
Muller's new model is, in part, a response to his belief that traditional models of conservation are flawed -- "they don't engage the people directly," he says.
"The important part is we think people need to have a stakeholder position in this. They're not going to make money on it, it's not real estate, they won't be able to flip it and sell it or anything like that, but if they own a piece of it, they're going to be more caring of it," Muller says. "If it's your island as opposed to an island, you might take care of it a bit better."
Though Muller's vision is traditionally more in tune with a nonprofit's vision, Landicity is registered as a for-profit corporation, but one that values triple-bottom-line thinking. "You don't have to be a nonprofit to do this stuff. Matter of fact, we might have more flexibility as a for-profit," Muller says. "Nonprofits are always going out looking for more money. We're going to use marketing power to generate the money that we need to do this."
Members only need to pay a one-time fee to join, so his business model requires other revenue-generating ideas, from merchandise sales to fundraising events.
Muller believes his model is unique, though aspects of it appear in different forms, from the business that sells naming rights to stars to Second Life, the computer game that generates millions of dollars by selling real estate pixels in a virtual world. A similar model is an organization in Fiji called Tribe Wanted, which owns an island and sells remote nature timeshares.
Rich Brooks, owner of Flyte New Media in Portland, turned out the effort's website in a matter of days and is now using social media tools like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to connect with people. "It's one thing to get somebody to like you on Facebook, but another thing to get them to pony up a donation," Brooks says.
Muller isn't naive about the challenge of raising the money in such a short time. He gives himself a 50-50 chance. But in a world of Internet fads, the unknown factor is people. "You never know about people," he says. "I don't think $49 is a lot of money to own a piece of a Historic National Register lighthouse."
Most Recent
Most Recent
Comments