Social entrepreneurship

Step 1: Is social entrepreneurship something for you?

Social entrepreneurship is an upcoming phenomenon around the world: organisations that implement social projects, and at the same time take care of their own financial resources. The work they do, is often also the product or service they ‘sell’ to society. That is new for most NGO’s and CBO’s that still rely on (foreign) funding to be able to carry out their work. In order to become more financially independent, it could be interesting to look at a more entrepreneurial way to the mission you fulfill in society.

Social enterprises share several characteristics:

• They focus on the social or environmental change they need to keep the business running, and continue the change
• Often have mixed sources of income, both revenue, sponsor-incomes and funding. Or even independent from subsidy and funding.
• Use profit to adjust and refine a business case.

Checklist

There are three important questions to check if social entrepreneurship is something for your organisation:

• You believe that you are solving a problem in society with your social mission;
• And therefore: you have a unique service or product to share with the world;
• You feel the need to become more financially independent from (foreign) funding and donors.

Three times yes? That could mean green light for further research. Luckily, there are some smart tools that can help you to do step-by-step research.

In this toolkit we work with the tool: The Business Model Canvas, which you can download in the next step. Watch this short video to get introduced to the Business Model Canvas.