So what’s the next step in making for-purpose business simply ‘business as usual’? We have to go to the heart of strategy and understand business model design.

In this four part blog series, we unpack the what and how of for-purpose and social enterprise business models in our new internationally recognised For-Purpose Business Model Workbook.

In parts one to three of the series we explored your impact model, your customers and your products and services. In the final part in the series, we unpack why collaboration matters, and how to balance your model.  Get your copy of the workbook.

The eight steps in for-purpose business model design

Every for-purpose business leader should be able to answer the eight core questions relating to the eight steps in for-purpose business model design:

1. What social impact will you create for which beneficiaries (what’s your theory of change, what’s your corporate strategy, and how do they link)?
2. Who are your customers and what do they want?
3. What products and services will you offer?
4. Who are your collaborators and what are the market dynamics?
5. What is your for-purpose business type/s?
6. How will you finance the model and design your pricing?
7. How will you organise your resources and design your operating model?
8. Is your portfolio streamlined and balanced?

Let’s explore steps four to eight.

Step four: understanding the market and deciding on your approach to collaboration

A fundamental difference between a for-purpose business model and a corporate business model is your approach to collaboration.

For a traditional business, the goal is to acquire and defend. For a for-purpose business, the goal is to contribute to the ecosystem so that all for-purpose businesses working to the same goal are enhancing each other’s impact. The higher the tide, the more all boats rise.

The first step is to identify all the players in the ecosystem and markets where you operate. This should include your competitors, partners or collaborators and any others that play in your space.

The second step is to map all those organisations into the power matrix. Using an excel table, give each organisation a score from 1-10 for their level of ‘interest’ and their level of ‘influence’.

• Interest = concern or care for your mission
• Influence = ability to support or resist you in delivering your mission

Once the scoring is complete, you can plot all the market players into the competitor and collaborator map below.

While this analysis will give an overview of the key competitors and external stakeholders in the marketplace there is still some more analysis that will be useful in getting your business model completed. You can find advice on tools that will help with this process on pages 28-30 of the workbook.

Step five: the 16 for-purpose business model types

Through our research and practice we have identified 16 for-purpose business ‘types’ (you can find all of them on pages 33-34 of the workbook).

The idea at this stage of the process is to use those types to generate ideas about how you might structure your for-purpose business, using the inputs from steps 1-4.

Exploring for-purpose model types is more than an academic exercise. The value of the different ‘types’ at this stage is:

• Recognition that there are a diversity of ways to achieve social impact through a for-purpose business and that there are ‘different ways to make and bake the cake’.
• Recognition that your for-purpose business may combine different ‘types’ to achieve your social impact(although fewer types is always simpler).
• Ideas and precedents that can provide a valuable ‘proof of concept’ to inform the development of your own for-purpose business.

This is the point where you should test your assumptions from steps 1-4 (strategic architecture, customers and products/services) and tweak your thinking if needed.

Step six: financing the model and designing your pricing strategy 

Step six in the process is all about answering the vital question: how will you finance the model, including designing your pricing. There are four things to consider at this point:

• Revenue model: how will you generate financial income?
• Financial projections: what revenue do you need to cover all your costs over what period of time to ensure you always have cash (cash flow is the most important element of financial projections – run out of cash and your business stops!)?
• Sources of finance: how can I avoid debt-finance, and what other funding options are available for a for-purpose business?
• Costs and price points: what will it cost you to generate revenue and subsequently what price will be sufficient to cover costs while at the same time be acceptable to your customer/markets?

Depending on whether you’re already an established for-purpose business (in which case completing this step will not be new to you) or at start-up stage (in which case you may want to see if you can get some pro bono support at this point) financial modelling tools are pretty much the same whether you are in the private, public, charity or for-purpose business sector.

For advice on pricing strategy and resources for financial modelling, check out page 36 of the workbook.

Step seven: creating your operating model

Once you have sorted the finances out, the next step is to sort out the major operational issues and answer another question: how will you organise your resources?

If you’re a start-up, this will require you to be clear about what type of legal structure you want to be and whether or not you think there may be value in registering your organisation as a charity.

This is also the point to consider your staffing model, organisational structure, legal and other legislative compliance issues, partnership and stakeholder management and a range of environmental and trade issues including:

• Health & safety
• Environmental impact
• Qualifications & skills
• Relevant legislation
• Security
• Insurance
• Terms and conditions of supply
• Waste disposal
• Contract management

At this stage you may have that line from a Coldplay song replaying over and over in your head – ‘nobody said it was easy, nobody said it would be so hard’. But the good news is, if you’ve got this far you’re nearly there!

Step eight: balancing your portfolio

Finally, you can now look at your for-purpose business model portfolio as a total package. To check that you have a financially and socially balanced portfolio we suggest you use the for-purpose impact and profitability map.

This map allows you to identify where your products/services sit on a graph that measures profitability and social impact. It’s an enhanced version of what was once called the mission/money matrix. it can be used repeatedly to check that your portfolio of activities are maximising both impact and profit.

You can see how the mapping process works on page 41 of the workbook.

Putting your for-purpose business model on the page

Now that all eight questions have been answered and the workbook tools applied, you can bring it all together with your ‘business model on a page’. It looks like this:

What to do next

The tools provided here offer a guide to developing a viable for-purpose business model, to help executive teams wanting to build a purpose-driven business.

The original motivation for creating this workbook arose from the bigger question of how to create a more sustainable and fairer economy – one where profit is an enabler of social impact, rather than profit being an end in itself. For-purpose and social enterprise business models are one way to step towards that reality.

Building a fairer and more just world will take all of us. Changing our economic system is a result of work that is greater than the sum of its parts. No one business, industry, or sector can do it on their own. It’s a mosaic, and all the pieces of the mosaic are crucial (with no gaps, and no overlapping pieces).

So, the question to answer is what piece of the mosaic of a fairer world will you build?

Designing a for-purpose business model is never finished. It requires constant monitoring, review and tweaking as the environment and markets change. For-purpose business models are inherently tricky to design well, particularly striking the right balance between social impact and profitability.

But therein lies the immensely rewarding opportunity: to create business models that not only balance the books, but effectively build a fairer and more just world.

For all of us.

Get your copy of the for-purpose business model workbook.

The post For-purpose business models part four: balancing your model, and why collaboration is crucial appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

So what’s the next step in making for-purpose business simply ‘business as usual’? We have to go to the heart of strategy and understand business model design.

In part one and two of this series we explored the need for for-purpose businesses and articulating your impact model via a strategic architecture. Part three covers your customers, what you’ll sell them and how to wrap it up in a value proposition. Get your copy of the workbook.

The eight steps in for-purpose business model design

Every for-purpose business leader should be able to answer the eight core questions relating to the eight steps in for-purpose business model design:

1. What social impact will you create for which beneficiaries (what’s your theory of change, what’s your corporate strategy, and how do they link)?
2. Who are your customers and what do they want?
3. What products and services will you offer?
4. Who are your collaborators and what are the market dynamics?
5. What is your for-purpose business type/s?
6. How will you finance the model and design your pricing?
7. How will you organise your resources and design your operating model?
8. Is your portfolio streamlined and balanced?

Let’s explore steps two and three – your customers and your products or services.

You know what impact you want to create, so how do you make it financially sustainable?

In some for-purposes businesses, the beneficiary group receiving the social impact you’re creating will have the ability to pay for the services they receive. More often than not, they won’t. This is always the case if your social impact is environmental. In this situation, a separate paying customer group is required to balance the business model.

Every for-purpose business model must have a customer group that can pay. A clear understanding of what customers want and how they want it is fundamental to a successful business model. Without creating value for customers there is no profit to generate social impact.

Step two in your for-purpose business: how to identify paying customers

This step in the process starts by brainstorming a list of potential customers. To identify potential customers, consider the strategic architecture you have developed in step one, and ask yourself:

1. What unique resources and capabilities do you have (core competencies), and who might pay to access them?
2. Who has a business need to access your audience or network that might pay for the privilege?
3. Who has a reason to pay for the social impact you create? Who already pays the financial cost of the social problem you’re addressing? (For example, if your impact is improving mental health, consider businesses that pay the cost of poor employee wellbeing through sick leave.)

Once you have identified a long list of potential customers, they should be evaluated for their potential according to the criteria in the for-purpose business target market grid (criteria below).

Start by listing all customer groups (including your beneficiary group if they are willing and able to pay). Then give them a score of 1-3 (1 being low and 3 being high) against each of the criteria:

1. Identifiable? Are there characteristics that define this customer group that you can use to put boundaries around it?
2. Reachable? Do you have the ability to access this group via your promotion and distribution channels?
3. Stable? Is this group/sector predicted to have strong future revenues / disposable income?
4. Actionable? Is this group likely to want or need the products or services you could offer?
5. Significant? Is the market size large and is there growth potential?
6. Beneficiary impact potential? Is there possibility for this customer group to help you generate social impact for your beneficiary group?
7. Mission aligned? Is there a values alignment between your vision/activities and theirs?
8. Goal fulfilment potential? What are the goals of the customers in this market and what’s the likelihood you can fulfil them?

If you want to see what the target market grid looks like you can find it on page 20 of the workbook.

Step three in your for-purpose business: how to identify profitable products & services

Once you have identified the social impact you want to create, and the highest potential customers, the next step is to explore which products and services you could offer.

You may be wondering why the customer comes before the product or service you will offer.

The traditional business start-up manuals nearly always commence with identifying your product. However, over the past three decades this approach has been turned on its head, and the development of new products has focused on customers first. Companies such as Apple, Samsung, Google and GE are just a few examples of customer-centric business models. These businesses first identify what their customers want, then identify ways to fulfil their needs, wants and requirements with the products and services that they offer.

To identify possible products and services, we use a three step process, involving three ‘business model potential maps’. The mapping process will sort your product/service ideas into three groups:

• Future-proof: products that should be future proof and therefore move into full feasibility analysis and business case.
• Revenue generation spin-out: these products/services could work as discrete projects for revenue generation, however would need to be managed separately to usual operations to avoid distraction from social impact activity.
• Sandbox: products/services that have social impact potential, but require further adaption to create financial viability.

This step requires time and focus – it’s not a quick fix approach. You can check out how the process works on pages 22-26 of the workbook.

Designing your value proposition

The analysis and data you will have pulled together in steps two and three, along with the social impact analysis in step one, provides you with the information you need to arrive at a value proposition.

To identify a value proposition, we use the following basic formulas:

Value proposition for beneficiaries: “For (beneficiaries) that need (social impact) we offer (products/services) that are (point of difference).

Value proposition for customers: “For (customers) that want (customer needs) we offer (products/services) that are (point of difference).

Note that if your beneficiaries are also your customers, you will only need your beneficiary value proposition here, as it will serve both purposes.

If you want to see how the tools work in practice, grab a copy of the workbook.

The post For-purpose business models part three: who are your customers and what will you offer them? appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

So what’s the next step in making for-purpose business simply “business as usual”? We have to go to the heart of strategy and understand business model design.

In this four part blog series, we unpack the what and how of for-purpose and social enterprise business models, taking the lessons from our new internationally recognised for-purpose business model workbook.

In part one of the series we explored the need to build and strengthen for-purpose businesses. In part two we cover how to design your strategic architecture with your impact model and strategy all on one page. Get your copy of the workbook.

The eight steps in for-purpose business model design

Every for-purpose business leader should be able to answer the eight core questions relating to the eight steps in for-purpose business model design:

1. What social impact will you create for which beneficiaries (what’s your theory of change, what’s your corporate strategy, and how do they link)?
2. Who are your customers and what do they want?
3. What products and services will you offer?
4. Who are your collaborators and what are the market dynamics?
5. What is your for-purpose business type/s?
6. How will you finance the model and design your pricing?
7. How will you organise your resources and design your operating model?
8. Is your portfolio streamlined and balanced?

 Let’s start by exploring step one – your impact model.

A changed theory of change

The tool we have developed in this step combines a traditional theory of change with traditional corporate strategy – leading to one “strategic architecture” for the business.

First up, what’s a theory of change?

The theory of change tool originated in the discipline of theoretical and applied development in the evaluation field in the 1950s. It was the 1955 US-based Aspen Institute’s Roundtable on Community Change that led to the publication of New Approaches to Evaluating Comprehensive Community Initiatives. In that book, Caroline Weiss popularised the term “theory of change” as a way to describe the set of assumptions that explain both the mini-steps that lead to a long-term goal and the connections between program activities and outcomes that occur at each step of the way.

Fast forward 65 years or so, and the use of a theory of change is common, especially in the international development context, the broader for-purpose sector and more recently the impact investing sector.

A theory of change is essential for the for-purpose sector because it forces you to articulate your hypothesis of how your activity will lead to the social impact that you want to achieve. This is the key area where a for-purpose business model differs from a corporate business model.

A corporate business model has three elements:

• The product/service offered to customers (value proposition).
• The way the company is organised to deliver this product and service to its customers (operational model).
• The revenue model to generate a profit (value capture mechanism).

For-purpose business models have a fundamentally different starting point to their corporate business model cousins. Rather than a focus on the customer to generate profit and maximise value for the business owners, they have a clear intentionality around a social purpose for a beneficiary (people and planet).

The intent (or purpose) of a for-purpose business model must be social/environmental impact, and have identified beneficiaries. “Beneficiary” is a broad term referring to who or what you want to impact. That could include the environment, and it could be businesses (B2B) as well as individuals (B2C).

A theory of change is the anchor for a for-purpose business model. The importance of a clear theory of change can’t be underestimated. It should become the key strategic framework for the organisation, and guide all decision-making across the business. It must be organisation-wide, rather than having separate theories of change for separate products or services.

When it’s well operationalised, your theory of change keeps your business focused on your vision and provides a safeguard against mission drift.

Why our theory of change tool is different

1. Directly integrating vision and mission

Often a theory of change is developed alongside the mission and vision and is articulated in a different way. A whole range of new words are used, which may or may not be a similar way to express what’s already in your vision and mission. This is a mistake. The mission and vision should be fundamental to the model. If the impact you’re aiming for isn’t what’s written in your vision statement, and your mission isn’t designed to directly influence the impact areas that need to change to realise your vision, something doesn’t add up. At best, you’ll be creating tangents to your vision and mission that confuse your team and make it hard to prioritise. At worst, you’ll be directing your resources away from your ultimate vision.

2. Directly integrating (and informing) organisational strategy

Too often we’ve seen a theory of change designed in isolation of business strategy. Theory of change “purists” will say that it’s important that the theory of change is stand-alone. In this situation, the strategic plan and theory of change become separate documents that don’t always speak to each other. This again causes confusion amongst staff and difficulty prioritising (what’s driving decisions, the theory of change, or the strategy?).

3. Building the theory of change from the top down

We’ve often seen attempts to develop a theory of change from the bottom up (particularly in existing for-purpose businesses that already have a range of activities in place). Similarly, we’ve seen attempts to develop a theory of change where it’s created from the top down, but existing activities are simply retrofitted into the model. This leads to missed opportunities to focus on the activities with the highest impact.

What we need is a ‘strategic architecture’ (combining theory of change and traditional corporate strategy frameworks)

To solve the problems of integrating theory of change and strategy, we’ve created a template that combines them – a strategic architecture.

It involves six steps:

• Step one – vision: What problem are you solving and what will the world look like when you’re done?
• Step two – impact areas: What changes will have occurred in the world as a result of your unique work?
• Step three – mission: How will you generate the change identified in your impact areas? What unique role do you play?
• Step four – outcomes: What needs to happen through delivery of your mission, and what changes will beneficiaries experience through your work?
• Step five – outputs (strategic goals): What are your organisational strategic goals (that will generate the outcomes you identified)?
• Step six – activities: What are the most important activities you will deliver under each strategic goal?

Note the activities here may change as your work through development of your business model, and may also change over time.

Once the strategic architecture is completed it provides an overview of the “purpose” in your for-purpose business model, and how to get there.

Tip: You’ll need to revisit your strategic architecture as you work through your business model to check back on your activities and outputs.

If you’re ready to get started, get your copy of the for-purpose business model workbook.

The post For-purpose business models part two: creating your strategic architecture appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

So what’s the next step in making for-purpose business simply ‘business as usual’? We have to go to the heart of strategy and understand business model design. 

In this four part blog series, we unpack the what and how of for-purpose and social enterprise business models in our new internationally recognised for-purpose business model workbook.

Part one of the series explores the need to build and strengthen for-purpose businesses.  

For-purpose business is here to stay

You know an idea is taking off when the buzz words around it start to emerge. Shared value. Conscious consumerism. ESG. Sustainability. Conscious capitalism. Social enterprise. Social business. BCorp. There are now even roles called Chief Purpose Officers.

These are all forms of for-purpose business. And it’s taking off.

Corporate organisations are answering the call to make more than just profit 

The corporate world is facing a transitional moment where the conversation about ethical and sustainable business is shifting from ‘why’ to ‘how’.

The likes of the Economist and the Financial Times have started running stories advocating for a rethink of capitalism. Not so long ago 180 of the world’s biggest companies overturned three decades of orthodoxy to pledge that their firms’ purpose was no longer to serve their owners alone, but customers, suppliers and communities too.

According to Deloitte Insights the main measure of success in the eyes of CEOs has shifted to the impact on society, including income inequality, diversity and the environment.

One recent example is diagnostic technology company Mologic that has just become a social enterprise. The CEO said the transition was “a deliberate, logical and natural step for a company focused on delivering affordable diagnostics and biotechnology to places that have been left underserved by the relentless pursuit of profiteering”.

As Paul Polman said recently, “for 50 years, every business leader in market-based economies has been trained in one core ideology – that the purpose of business is to serve only the shareholder … this mantra is wildly unfit for today’s world and is ultimately self-defeating. We must kill the old philosophy. The sooner we understand this, the better.”

The time for change is upon the corporate world.

Charities are searching for more sustainable sources of income

From the other side of the economy, there is a growing challenge for charities to generate income beyond traditional fundraising and grants.

Global research from CAF showed that last year around a third of charities could continue for less than 6 months without additional support and around half said that they could last for less than a year. Even after lockdowns have eased, around 3 in 5 (58%) expect to see a continued loss of income sources.

Charities in all countries had to reduce services while experiencing an increase in demand for their support. The research showed that charities in most countries see the only option as looking for alternative funding sources and generating their own trading revenue.

The time for change is upon the charity world.

The good news – there’s a solution, and it’s called for-purpose business

As the Financial Times has stated, ‘this is certainly a moment’. But the key question is, what comes next?

The answer lies in the grey space in between the two sides of the ideological argument – the corporate capitalist model and the traditional charity model. It’s both/and. And it’s called for-purpose business.

It’s time for a mash-up. Organisations with the heart of a charity and the head of a corporate. These businesses use creative market-driven strategies to tackle critical social issues.

They are hybrids. They blend the commercial logic of the corporate sector with the social impact logic of the third sector. They are the practical vehicle for building an organisation that can deliver both profit and purpose.

For-purpose businesses run like normal businesses that make a profit, but also have a social or environmental mission. The social mission is embedded right across the businesses into production processes, products, culture, and relationships with employees, suppliers and customers.

It’s their position in the grey space between the corporate and charity sector that gives for-purpose businesses so much potential.

BUT – running a for-purpose business isn’t easy …

Balancing profit and purpose in practice is really tricky – arguably much harder than running a traditional business where the main metric is profit.

The problem is that traditional corporate business models fail to deliver the purpose imperative that drives the existence of organisations in the for-purpose sector. At same time for-purpose organisations that focus on their purpose imperative can often find themselves struggling to make their business model profitable.

The world of start-up for-purpose models has often been one that embraces that slogan made famous by a shoe company – just do it! Back of the envelope, business model on a page and cartoon style start-up guides are just some of the ways this ethos has developed.

Unfortunately, this has led to serious failures. And for the for-purpose businesses that disappear, we never get the chance to learn from their experience.

How do we solve this problem? We need to understand for-purpose business models

There are already thousands of for-purpose businesses around the world. But we need more of them. And we need the existing ones to scale. For that to happen, we need to go right to the heart of strategy and understand the business models that make them sustainable.

Business guru Michael Porter told us that the essence of strategy is choosing a unique and valuable position rooted in systems of activities that are difficult to match. It’s the business model that answers the question of ‘how’. It’s the lynch pin between strategy and operations.

Yet while for-purpose businesses face unique challenges and tensions that make business model development more complex, there’s an absence of ‘ready-to-wear’ business models for reconciling the tensions between social and commercial goals.

At The Dragonfly Collective we’ve experienced the challenges of for-purpose business first hand – as Directors, Board members, consultants and trainers. What we found was a lack of tools and guidance around building for-purpose business models.

So, we spent two years drawing on our four decades of practical and academic experience to develop a for-purpose business model workbook. And we’re gifting it to the for-purpose sector, because we want to see the sector grow.

Unlike other tools such as the social business model canvas, the workbook provides templates and guidance behind each step of the process.

Over the coming weeks we’ll unpack specific aspects of the workbook in Pro Bono to guide people through the process.

Let’s prove that there’s a better way to do business. Call it conscious capitalism, for-purpose business, social enterprise – it doesn’t matter. Just get started. There’s no time to lose.

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The post For-purpose business models part one: the what and why appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

Anyone who has been around the social sector for the past 30 years should be aware of the idea of systems change – it’s not new. But there seems to be a renewed interest in it at the moment, partly through Catalyst 2030 starting up in Australia.

Changing ‘systems’ is not a quick fix. The global systems we live with have been in the making for many years through the interplay over time of political philosophy, economic theory, ideology, theology and financial practices. These are all ingredients in the world’s current major systems –neoliberalism, capitalism, fascism, communism, or socialism.

It is not possible to understand what is happening in any of these systems by looking at their individual parts. To understand what is happening we need to understand how the different parts of the system interact and affect each other, which actors are affecting the system and what motivates them.

But how do you do that?

We propose two practical ways to get to to grips with systems change: combining ‘Critical Theory’ with the ‘power and systems approach’. Through that combination we can engage with global systems at a local level. The process must involve self-reflection as much as reflection of the external system we seek to change.

Top take-aways

• Activists need to become better ‘reflectivists’, taking the time to understand the system before (and while) engaging with it.
• We need to be clear what system we want to change and if we are part of or benefit from that system.
• The legitimate starting point for systems change is emancipation – to liberate people from the circumstances that enslave them.
• Global systems are changed by action at a local level.
• What climate change, gross inequality, or poverty are for us, slavery was once to the anti-slavery movement. Systems can be changed when small cogs in a large machine start to function differently.

Position paper: what is systems change and why should we bother?

The post Position paper: what is systems change and how do we do it? appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

So, after seven years in the Europe (based in London, when the UK was still part of Europe) and a year back in Australia, what have we learnt that can point to opportunities for the for-purpose sector in Australia (and the rest of the world)? (Note by ‘for-purpose’ we mean to collect the numerous labels used to define social enterprise, not-for-profits, cooperatives and purpose-driven organisations across the charity and business sector – phew).

With our passion to grow the for-purpose sector framing our view of the world, we see four opportunities:

1. End (or expose) hubris and ego
2. Replace noise with substance
3. Be realistic about impact investment as a source of new money
4. Balance the for-purpose challenge: mission and money

Opportunity #1 – end (or expose) hubris and ego

Donald Trump (remember him?) gave the world a fabulous lesson in hubris and ego. The outcome is he is no longer the President of the United States.

Boris Johnson is another clown of hubris and ego. Under his leadership the English have self-sabotaged their future through Brexit, for a world vastly less diverse and creative than they will enjoy on their own.

It should be no surprise if hubris and ego can be so potently on display by political ‘leaders’ that we find it in the for-purpose sector.

Jim Collins in his widely read analysis of the corporate world, How the Mighty Fall, identifies the first stage of decline as hubris born of success (although it appears we can also have hubris even without any authentic success). He writes “stage 1 kicks in when people become arrogant, regarding success virtually as an entitlement, and they lose sight of the true underlying factors that created success in the first place. When the rhetoric of success replaces penetrating understanding and insight, decline will very likely follow. Those who overestimate their own merit and capabilities — have succumbed to hubris”.

Both in the UK and back here in Australia there is plenty of opportunity for individuals and the sector to end hubris and ego as drivers in establishing either their own career or that of the sector.

As UK social entrepreneur David Floyd writes in his fabulous blog, Beanbags and Bullshit: “there are some problems with the current state of social enterprise. One is that in the necessary battle to get social enterprise noticed at all, advocates of social enterprise have too easily slipped into suggesting that it offers the solution to all the problems in the world ever. Whether or not this is potentially true, it’s definitely not true yet. Not least because the sector is currently very small.”

And he is writing that about the UK where, compared to Australia, the for-purpose sector is enormous.

A possible wakeup call to us all might best be summed up in a statement by an Australian government official responding to a market survey on the sector in 2020: “many so called social entrepreneurs appear to be more interested in social media than social impact”. Even more painful to read is the observation by Tim Smit, the well-known social entrepreneur and co-founder of UK eco-attraction the Eden Project: “I have met more incompetents in the world of social enterprise than I have met anywhere else”.

Learning #1: individually and collectively, we need to pause and ask what’s driving our actions. Is it making a name for ourselves or our sector, or is it an ambition to build a fairer world? A little humility goes a long way.

Opportunity #2 – replace noise with substance

In 2015 Social Enterprise UK (SEUK) announced its global positioning in its annual report: “leading the world in social enterprise”. This bold assertion certainly generated a lot of noise.

When we were in Tanzania in 2013 we visited a fabulous social enterprise that combined recycling and catering to offer decent work for local people in Arusha. By bringing together able-bodied people with less able-bodied people, they created jobs, amazing glass work, great food and a profit. They had never heard of SEUK.

Today SEUK proclaim on their website: “we are the leading global authority on social enterprise”. Not at all unlike the English in general, many of whom continue to consider they lead the world through the British empire.

But this noise lacks substance.

In 2015, we were working with a very small charity in the north of London that wanted to be accredited as a social enterprise. This was on the basis that people with learning disabilities made candles that were sold at Christmas. We paid $75 on their behalf and applied for SEUK accreditation. We were intrigued to see if the organisation ‘leading the world in social enterprise’ would conduct any due diligence to accredit this small charity. Within less than a week we received a sticker – ‘accredited social enterprise’ – and found ourselves part of that leading social enterprise global authority. However clearly the organisation that had been accredited was not a social enterprise. But it did want to join the noise.

It is unfortunate in life, that along with hubris, comes a lot of noise.

The great opportunity for social enterprise is to recognise that substance can overcome noise. Australia’s social enterprise certification framework developed by Social Traders is a good example. And there are many fabulous examples of social enterprises with real substance all around the world. Caritas Europa for example. They don’t make a lot of noise. But their work on the social economy, their European wide impact and the focus they have on the integrity of their work more than makes up for the lack of noise.

Learning #2: we have the opportunity to ensure our work has substance. Any ‘noise’ we are hoping to generate will follow. It is rare however, for substance to follow noise.

Opportunity #3 – be realistic about impact investment as a source of new money

A lot of effort is currently going into the emerging social investment sector. And it’s no surprise that the UK’s Big Society Capital – established during the reign of David Cameron as PM in 2011 – is regularly referenced in Australia as an outstanding example to follow.

Since 2011, impact investing has grown by leaps and bounds in the UK to the point where at a ‘debate’ we attended on the ups and downs of the impact investment market, one gentleman from a social impact fund made an impassioned attack on what he called ‘free money’. It apparently was a blight on society perpetrated by out-of-date and left-wing ideology. Free money, or philanthropy as some might call it, was the enemy of debt finance for the social sector. ‘Debt finance’ was rebranded as ‘impact investment’.

Whatever you may think of that debate, the reality is that impact investment opportunities will be largely irrelevant to the majority of social enterprises and for-purpose organisations in this country.

According to the November 2020 survey of the for-purpose sector from the Centre for Social Impact, 47% of social enterprises have between 1-4 employees, 29% have between 5-19 employees, 19% have 20-199 employees. Only 5% have over 200 employees. Out of these four categories, who do you reckon impact investing will target? Who do you think will most likely be ‘investment ready’?

Unless you can handle an investment loan between $500k and $1 million and be able to repay it at a rate very similar to that of your local bank, then impact investing will be very, very elusive.

There are real lessons to be learnt from the UK that suggest impact investment may not be the golden nugget that solves social challenges in the way it often promotes itself.

In a paper from the World Economic Forum focused on the 6 things holding back the social enterprise sector across the world, we find this: “in the social sector, investors come to a social entrepreneur and say: ‘we love what you have built, but here are our priorities that must be included in your business execution’. Social entrepreneurs are then tasked with bending their models to serve the needs of the funding community over the needs of those it is their mission to serve. This misalignment is distracting to the scaling efforts of social enterprise and does not allow the entrepreneur to direct growth in the most efficient and effective manner to meet social needs . . . In addition, there are persistent doubts about whether an enterprise that must deliver significant returns can be free to pursue and prioritise social change.”

Learning #3: let’s be realistic about impact investing. Let’s work tirelessly to ensure that investment, ‘free money’, and the good old ‘a hand up not hand out’ approach ensures that small and emerging for-purpose organisations, especially those start-ups being run by minority social entrepreneurs, get a fair go when it comes to accessing sources of ‘new money’. 

#4 – balance the for-purpose challenge: mission and money

Ever get a sense that there is a fearful focus on money across the for-purpose sector? Ever get a sense that the more the for-purpose sector grows, the more it appears to attract people from other sectors – like the big consultancies, corporates and banks, especially at the Board level – who are focused on finance with little or no exposure to for-purpose mission?

We all know that a Finance & Audit Committee has the responsibility of assisting the Board to fulfil their corporate governance and oversight responsibilities in relation to financial reporting, internal control structures, risk management and external audit functions. Finance and Audit Committees are a crucial function in organisations large and small across all sectors to assist in guaranteeing financial health.

But in the for-purpose sector, there’s a whole other (arguably more fundamental) driver of organisational success: social impact. So, what about a committee in for-purpose organisations with at least equal standing to a Finance & Audit Committee called a Mission Audit Committee?

The global corporation Danone provides a good example of how crucial this can be.

Danone become the first listed company to adopt the ‘Entreprise à Mission’ model created by French law in 2019. This embedded the legal ‘entreprise à mission’ (in English – ‘company in mission’) framework within its articles of association. It included a new governance arrangement to oversee the progress of its environmental, social and societal goals. The significance of the ‘mission audit committee’ at Danone is that it constitutionally enshrined its mission. This safeguarded the company from recent shareholder activism (focused on the money and advocating for a change in the company’s approach to ‘doing business for good’) that attacked and removed the CEO, Emmanuel Faber. But this activism has not been able to derail the company’s environmental and social mission because it was enshrined as a legal constitutional requirement.

What can we learn from this European experience?

As more and more of the for-purpose sector is influenced by sectors outside its experience and focus, it can and should robustly scrutinise and hold to account its mission performance as well as its financial performance. This is more than just an endless set of statistics rolled out to prove numerical ‘impact’, like another spreadsheet.

A Mission Audit Committee with a strong representation of ‘practitioners’ (those with real life experience of delivering services that address the real challenges of inequality and environmental decline), will ensure mission and social impact is measured and achieved. A complementary Finance and Audit Committee will ensure that the organisation remains financially viable. Both are fundamental, but for some reason, parts of the for-purpose sector have adopted the for-profit mantra of: money first, mission when we can afford it.

Learning #4: a Mission Audit Committee that includes social impact practitioners, can provide a great balance to a Finance & Audit Committee and avoid mission drift.

Four opportunities no more?

There are many other opportunities that we can explore including what good governance is in the for-purpose sector, how we can combine individual outcomes with systemic change to achieve collective impact, and how networks can be used to integrate not disintegrate. And many more.

The moment we figure we have no more to learn is the moment we need to go back to the first opportunity – end hubris and ego and try some humility and lifelong learning.

The post Seven years in Europe, four opportunities for the for-purpose sector appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

In December 2019, Ms Rose Blossom was awarded the Pride of Brent Award for its Fly Girls project, a social enterprise providing services for black women and girls in Wembley, London. Amanda Epe, a black woman, is the founder of Ms Rose Blossom. How did she do it?

Amanda was the first member of the Social Enterprise Ideas Development (SEIDs) Hub – a social enterprise incubator in London, but not as we know it. SEIDs is designed for people from disadvantaged backgrounds who have a social enterprise idea, but who the traditional social enterprise ecosystem isn’t set up to support.

The social enterprise system favours the white middle class

Social enterprises often focus on creating job opportunities for people who are living with disadvantage because they do not have sustainable income from work. The general approach is to develop opportunities that create jobs for people who are out of work. The work is provided by those with the resources – especially finance – to do so.

In the social enterprise sector access to resources – financial and otherwise – are more readily available to white middle class “heroic” entrepreneurs, who create new social businesses as a result of their access to these finances and resources.

But where are the opportunities for people with scant financial resources, no savings to invest, living day-to-day on totally inadequate welfare income, who have a business idea? With no available cash or any other resource to access the support they need to commence their own social enterprise or ethical small business as a pathway out of poverty and unemployment, where do they go?

Is it even feasible in a “business” or “impact investing” sense to consider that people living with day-to-day disadvantage and poverty could have a business idea? And that given the right support and opportunity this business idea could provide them, and others, with sustainable income from work and a secure future?

There’s a different approach – feasibility indicator one: a government inquiry

Released in August this year, the Inquiry into sustainable employment for disadvantaged jobseekers (Parliament of Victoria, Legislative Assembly, Economy and Infrastructure Committee) paints a grim picture: “… types of employment barriers experienced by jobseekers facing disadvantage will persist and are likely to intensify following the COVID-19 pandemic. Increased competition for fewer job vacancies will also make it harder for these jobseekers to gain employment”. Add to this the analysis by Deloitte Access Economics that 150,000 fulltime job losses are predicted when the coronavirus supplement ends and the grimness is confirmed.

So how to respond? The Inquiry into sustainable employment for disadvantaged jobseekers makes two relevant findings:

• Finding 52 – Social enterprises that employ jobseekers facing disadvantage provide an important stepping stone for these jobseekers to move into mainstream employment.
• Finding 54 – Assisting jobseekers from disadvantaged backgrounds to start a small business helps them gain financial independence and can lead to creating jobs and employing jobseekers from similar backgrounds.

Both these findings suggest that assisting job seekers from disadvantaged backgrounds to start a social enterprise or ethical small business will assist them to gain financial independence and can lead to them creating jobs and employing jobseekers from similar backgrounds.

There’s a different approach – feasibility indicator two: SEIDs Hub Wembley

In 2015, I visited a disused building in Empire Way, Wembley, London with the director of Caritas Westminster.

The building – previously an Irish Catholic Social Club – was dilapidated and run-down. “What would you do with that?” I was asked. I suggested that with a bit of work the premises would be a great space to host a social enterprise incubator – but not one of the traditional types already on offer around London.

What followed was several papers focused on options and strategy, a feasibility analysis, a business plan, several grant applications, numerous conversations and discussions with staff and board members, and key internal and external stakeholders, especially the local Wembley community.

The result was SEIDs – Social Enterprise Ideas Development – a new social enterprise hub, open for business on 1 October 2018.

SEIDs is different… and it works

The differentiator for SEIDs amongst other social enterprise “hubs” is its offer of financial support packages to people who would otherwise be excluded from access to business development and support to commence their own small business /social enterprise as a pathway out of poverty.

Since 2017 SEIDs has attracted capital funds of £600,000 to refurbish the premises in Empire Way, £230,290 from the Brent local government Neighbourhood Community Infrastructure Fund for specific programmes, £224,000 from trust and foundations to provide financial support packages, and £280,000 to underwrite operational costs from the project sponsor Caritas Westminster – in total £1.4 million, the equivalent of approximately A$2.6 million.

SEIDs Hub has 65 members after 22 months of being open for business (the last six-months impacted significantly by COVID-19). The majority of members are those who have qualified for a financial package (valued between £3,750 ? $6,700 AUD) and who are from a Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) background – in Australia the equivalent cohort is identified as CALD – with around one-third of members self-financing their engagement with the hub. This mix of self-financing members and those on a financial support package is another “differentiator” at the hub.

What’s on offer at SEIDs?

All members have access to a physical space with individual and collective work desks, break-out space, private and group meeting rooms and a separate fully equipped training facility. Additionally, two tailored programmes are offered for those who are eligible for a financial support package: The SEIDs Pre-Start Up 12 Week Program for 15 participants delivered in partnership with the School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE). The program offers seven free practical weekday evening learning sessions over 13 weeks, a £500 grant, and a community of other people starting up projects in Brent to meet regularly, gain peer support and work through challenges together.

The SEIDs 12-month Start Up Business Program offers up to 25 participants the tools, resources, networks and confidence to set up and develop their own business. This program is for anyone who is unemployed, on benefits or who has been struggling to find enough work and who can access a financial support package. The program offers 12 workshops, a £500 grant on completion of a viable business plan, access to specialist mentors, access to a business coach and open access to the SEIDs co-working space. The first program that commenced in September 2019, and the current program commencing this month, are fully subscribed with a waiting list for the next cohort to commence.

Both the 10-week and 12-month programs have been designed with and delivered by people from the Brent community and others who are outside that community, to ensure accessibility and appropriateness of language and content.

The learning approach and style is focused and tailored to the needs of all its members, particularly BAME (CALD), migrant and refugee communities as well as the long-term unemployed. The focus is on peer-to-peer learning in communities of trust, support and collaboration – an ecosystem or ethos different to the “traditional” social enterprise incubators/accelerators.

With few exceptions, support for social enterprise start-ups and scale-ups follows a particular pattern – a series of workshops followed by refinement of the enterprise idea and then a pitch to a panel of potential “impact” investors. This approach is entirely unsuited to people from disadvantaged communities.

The competitive pitch approach to potential investors after a series of business grooming workshops favours a particular “style” and personality profile that is more likely apparent amongst young middle-class “changemakers” than other particular cohorts of people, and difficult to negotiate for BAME (CALD), migrant and refugee communities as well as the long-term unemployed. Ashoka some years ago ditched the pitch in favour of what it now calls “informed conversations” where everyone is around a table – not one person out front competing via a pitch performance.

What we have learnt

We have discovered many women and men are excluded because of their financial circumstances from access to social start-up support. We have also discovered that given the opportunity, they can be the authors of their own change, their own story and successfully deliver a social enterprise or ethical small business that rivals any other.

Given the impact of COVID-19 on the current and future levels of unemployment and disadvantage in Australia a SEIDs project would appear to fill a significant gap in the “social”, “for-purpose”, “impactful”, “changemaking” sector. It would generate more and more opportunities for the Ms Rose Blossoms of the world to take charge of their own futures.

We would love to hear from anyone interested in getting involved in exploring Australian opportunities.

The post Why we need a different type of social enterprise hub in Australia appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

We left Australia in 2013 to explore social innovation, social enterprise and systems change in the UK and Europe.

What we found was a mature impact sector. There are multiple well-established specialist intermediaries that produce hundreds of tools and resources, and an event and conference schedule that no one could keep up with. There are sector specific funding bodies, a maturing social impact investing marketplace and emerging financial models like community shares. There’s a legal entity tailored to the social enterprise model. While Government could always be more engaged, there are well developed campaigning efforts that see new government money flowing and supportive policy in place.

Some of the things I learnt in my time there were:

1. In a crowded marketplace where everyone shares the same vision, partnerships are a game-changer.
2. Without intermediaries that speak for the sector, bring it together and support it to grow, the sector will stay small and vast amounts of innovation would never happen.
3. Enabling the sector to speak in one voice, with a shared ‘brand message’ is the best way to get engagement with audiences beyond the sector itself.

My UK and European experience was invaluable – a defining time both personally and professionally (more on the wider learnings in another blog). But after seven years it was time to come home.

We landed back in Australia just as COVID hit. Despite the more than unusual and challenging times, what we found was a social enterprise sector full of energy, optimism and action. A sector with talented and passionate people doing inspiring work – game-changers, risk-takers, and never-give-up-ers. My kind of people.

It’s been a privilege to be welcomed back home to the Australian sector with such open arms and to join the fabulous Social Traders team. It’s been quite surreal being stuck behind a computer screen. But in every new conversation (tech failure or not!) I’ve left feeling inspired and energised by what’s possible for the social enterprise sector here.

The Australian social enterprise sector has a different opportunity to the UK. Australia’s sector is more emergent and the intermediary market that supports it is less crowded. And that’s exactly why it’s exciting.

Rather than creating a marketplace with overlapping offers and competing campaigns, we can grow together in a more coherent and more impactful way. We can shape the market strategically and collectively.

We all want to see a future world where social enterprise is business as usual. For me, it’s my career purpose.

In the wake of COVID, now is the time to be bold. For social enterprise to claim and celebrate its role in building an economy that is fairer, more just and more sustainable.

We all know that social enterprise was made for this. It’s a ready-made solution that’s been breaking disadvantage and changing lives for decades. It’s not socialism or charity. It combines profit and purpose in one business model, using the market to create impact.

Now is the time for the social enterprise sector to unite, organise and build on its past success. If we don’t make the most of this unique moment in history, we will look back and wish we were braver, bolder and more ambitious.

Most important, now is the time for us to work together. We’ll never achieve the scale of impact that Australia needs if we don’t combine and align all our talents, efforts and experience. And we’ll definitely never achieve it if we work at odds with each other.

We are an ecosystem. Like a mosaic, we all hold a piece, but it takes all of us to create the complete picture – to be more than the sum of our parts.

I have loved rediscovering that there’s a strong spirit of collaboration in Australia. In only my first four months, there have been a string of new collaborations forming with a long-term ambition to build a strong social enterprise ecosystem for a fairer Australian economy.

It’s a pivotal moment for the Australian social enterprise sector. It feels like a key point in the next phase of the sector’s evolution, building on the foundations in place. What we do now will shape the sector for the next decade and beyond. Let’s build a market where our efforts reinforce each other, so social enterprise can claim its place as a crucial part of our economy.

I can’t wait to see what we can achieve together.

What a time to be home.

The post Never a better time to come home to the Australian social enterprise sector appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

Not-for-profit sector, for-purpose sector, impact economy, social enterprise sector, social businesses, ethical enterprises, conscious capitalism, social progress sector, difference-makers, changemakers, the social economy – these are all terms used to deliberately position a particular type of organisational, economic and social activity and differentiate it from the broader political-economic context of “market-driven for-profit capitalism”.

But does this proliferation of terms, words and language for the sector, in order to define itself as not “market-driven for-profit capitalism”, matter? Does it strengthen the sector(s) and provide a clear identity, or does it confuse and disintegrate?

One clear fact is that when it comes to “market-driven for-profit capitalism” there is no confusion about what it is or isn’t.

Whether it is Friedrich August von Hayek, Milton Friedman, Margaret Thatcher, Tony Abbott or any of the captains of capitalism, the language is clear. Free markets, small government, deregulation, privatisation and individual responsibility sum up the neoliberal ideology – the only responsibility of business is to increase its profits. As Milton Friedmanproclaims: “the only responsibility business has is to its shareholders… businessmen that take seriously their responsibilities for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution… are preaching pure and unadulterated socialism”.

There is no confusion in the language describing the for-profit sector. Therefore it has no difficulty identifying its purpose or intended impact. It has a clear identity.

Identity in its simplest form is widely framed by the two common questions used when we’re asked to describe ourselves – what is your name and what do you do? The reply creates an instant “identity”. Language not only expresses identities but also constructs them, argues David Evans in his work Language and Identity.

“My name is David” and “I am a bus-driver” generates an almost immediate identity for David the bus-driver.

Imagine if in response to these two most commonly used questions to frame a person’s identity the answer given was: “My name is Mary, and Francis, and Mia and Zara, and I am a tractor-driver, nurse, sailor, window-cleaner and dentist”. Politeness would usually inhibit the observation that there may be a confusion of identity here.

It is hard to argue against the premise that a broad connection exists between language and identification. Language defines the group that we belong to, our status in the social stratification, and also determines the power we hold in our society. Our social identity is created by our language and also our future possibilities are framed by language. Language plays a major role in determining who we are and what we do.

Recently I was contacted by a person who wanted advice about how to set up a social enterprise as a “for-purpose, for-profit charity”. When I explained that perhaps the ACNC might have some issues with this description, the response was, “Well I’m new to this and I am very confused by the language used to describe what it is I think I want to do”.

This prompts the question: do the multitude of terms used to differentiate the not “market driven for-profit capitalism” sector strengthen the identification of that activity, or do they confuse, disintegrate and weaken its impact?

One could argue that the proliferation of terms to describe the sector allows for diversity, and each of these descriptions are pieces of a bigger picture.

One might also argue that there is no problem with the terms currently in use.

While we don’t want to argue over semantics (let’s just get on with it and do the job), language and its power of identification shouldn’t be ignored. When language divides and disintegrates, when it creates confusion of identity and purpose it is worth asking the question: what language might identify the not “market driven for-profit capitalism” sector in order to consolidate its identity, both for those embedded within it, and for those who look at it with scepticism?

Let’s consider some of the terms in use.

Take not for profit. No matter what anyone does under this identity, if they never make a profit (or more politely, a “surplus”) they don’t exist anymore. Perhaps “not-for-shareholders” might be a better but more clumsy identification?

Take for-purpose organisations. Name any for-profit company, charity, social club, farmers’ market or week-end lemonade stand that doesn’t have a purpose?

Take the impact economy. Even McDonalds has an impact – indeed a global impact.

Take conscious capitalism, championed by John Mackey, the co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, in a book published in 2014 with the sub-title Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business. Conscious capitalism acknowledges that while free-market capitalism is the most powerful system for social cooperation and human progress, people can aspire to achieve more – like community social responsibility and adding stakeholders to shareholders. The problem is that Pepsi & Co is identified as a company combining “performance with purpose” and an example of conscious capitalism because they are investing in drinks that are healthier for customers. Is that conscious capitalism, or a pivot to meet changing consumer demands in order to continue to maximise profits and shareholder value?

Take social enterprise/business. Now here is arguably a point of difference that clarifies identity. A social enterprise (or social business) in simple terms is a business that trades for a social purpose. Social enterprises are businesses that trade to intentionally tackle social problems, improve communities, provide people access to employment and training, or help the environment. Yet even within this bubble of clarity there are repetitive and ongoing attempts – led mostly by the peak social enterprise body in England – to water down the definition, generating further confusion of identity. The move by Social Traders in Australia to certify social enterprises and Social Enterprise Scotland to be clear on what a social enterprise is not, is to be welcomed both by those in the sector and those outside it.

Given all this individual language to identify the sector as “not market-driven for-profit capitalism”, is there a collective integrated option that can be applied at the macro level and include all the various descriptions at the micro level? Is there a term that reduces confusion and provides a clear frame for articulating an alternative social-political-economy?

A collective term used widely in Europe, but that appears to be used in a limited way in Australia is the social economy.

The social economy is used by practitioners (and academics) to describe all the activities that collectively put people before profits. It collectively identifies those activities that invest in people, in their capacities and creativity, and empowers them, creating quality jobs and providing training as well as prioritising social objectives.

As in the free market economy where enterprises are meant to generate a profit, this is also true for the social economy. But the point of differentiation in a social economy is that profit gained goes toward meeting social objectives, not primarily toward generating individual wealth. Wealth is more evenly distributed with direct benefit for the many, not just the few. By prioritising social objectives, the social economy contributes in an innovative way to tackling social, economic and environmental needs in society that have been overlooked or inadequately addressed by the private or public sectors.

Most importantly the social economy includes all those actors and activities that work for an alternative economic reality to that of free market neoliberal capitalism, including all those activities that could be called “for purpose”, “impact sector” and “ethical enterprises”, along with social enterprises, cooperatives, owner-employed businesses with a social purpose, as well as self-employed women and men who use their entrepreneurial skills to lift themselves and others out of poverty.

Importantly it is more than a description of a single activity within an economy. It seeks to collectively combine all elements of a social economy from the supply chain through to the end customer into one complete mosaic – a social economy. This is a consumer-led movement where people intentionally embrace across their business models a joined up “movement” from supply to end product.

Engaging and participating within the social economy means purchasing with a purpose as well as selling for a purpose. A simple example is choosing to purchase from a social enterprise even though that cost might be greater than in the general market. The purchasing provides the economic stimulus to drive the social economy with its social objectives generating greater benefit for more and more people, not just the few.

More importantly the social economy provides an integrated marketplace that combines an alternative socio-economic reality with a joined up social movement and a shared language as well as rich content for all its stakeholders – creating new opportunities for dialogue, negotiation, and ideas that can improve outcomes for the social economy itself.

An integrated use of language with a single collective identity allows a range of actors across the sector to identify as one, in order to maximise the potential of their activities generating a significant impact with a purpose – a viable, collective, alternative marketplace to neoliberal capitalism and one that achieves mission and redistributes profits that benefit people and planet.

Identity is realising who we are at a personal level and also at a community level. To make such identification, language has been a salient feature of group membership and social identity.

Rather than confusing those of us embedded within the “social economy”, and even as a mechanism to generate collaboration rather than silos that compete, integrating identity will make the sector stronger. It will reduce confusion for those whose scepticism is facilitated by a disintegrated use of language. Clarity will also provide a powerful identity to describe a viable alternative to market-driven capitalism.

First featured in Pro Bono Australia

The post Why we need to think about the language and identity of the ‘social’ sector appeared first on The Dragonfly Collective.

Now is the time for social enterprise.

If we’re going to see more of social enterprises, and more of them growing, we need to go right to the heart of strategy and understand the business models that make them work.

We researched best practice on social enterprise business model design, and produced the social enterprise business model toolkit. It’s based on a review of 92 international journal articles and interviews with leaders of social enterprise peak bodies in the UK that support over ten thousand social enterprises. 

Social enterprise business model toolkit – three part blog series

“I have been in the social enterprise sector for 20 years and have never read such a good introduction to the issues faced by social enterprises and those that start them!” – UK social entrepreneur 

“In all the research I have done, the best guide to set up a social enterprise has been your publication.” – Australian social entrepreneur

Blog #1: the why and what

Part one sets out the core components of any successful social enterprise, and picks apart the trade-offs you’ll need to manage when it comes to governance, operations, management, stakeholder management or strategic decision making.

Blog #2: the 16 social enterprise business model types

Part two explored the four social enterprise business model categories and the 16 social enterprise model types. There is no magic formula (sorry!), but the types are designed to spark ideas for how you might refresh or build your own social enterprise business model.

Blog #3: the seven steps to social enterprise business model design 

Part three explores seven steps to consider when pivoting or building a social enterprise business model. There are plenty of tools and tips along the way.

Featured in

Download the complete social enterprise business model toolkit

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