7 Tools For Running a Startup Social Enterprise

I've been meaning to write this for some time. A lot of people have been asking me lately about how Samasource operates on such a lean budget. Here are 7 things we can't live without:

1. Interns -- this year, we recruited 10 people from Stanford, Yale, USF, and Georgetown to work as unpaid interns in our office. We put most of them through several rounds of interviews with volunteer staff. Our interns have done everything from organizing files to researching new business opportunities.

2. Twitter -- we use it to find work for our partners, to spread the message about what we do, and to get on the radar screens of thought leaders.

3. Facebook -- our Facebook Causes page has raised about $5,000. That's enough to pay our office rent for the better part of a year. And we trained some of our partners to test Facebook applications for a couple of app developers, making the platform useful from a sales perspective, too.

4. Dropbox -- can't afford your own server for filesharing? Dropbox lets you share folders with teams for free, and their synch tools are unbeatable.

5. Drop.io -- ever need to share just a few docs with a sub-group within your organization, like your board? Use Drop.io. We use it for everything from intern materials to sharing video drafts.

6. Salesforce.com -- they license a free version to nonprofits, which is simply a skin on top of the main enterprise edition. We use it to manage a distributed sales team across many time zones.

7. Basecamp -- we'd be goners if we didn't have a way to keep everything together. Basecamp helps us manage over 30 projects with 13 partners around the world, tracking time, documents, and milestones. There are free project management tools out there, but none offer the ease of use and integration of Basecamp. Sadly, no discounts for nonprofits.