Simple, Powerful Search Tool for Social Entrepreneurs

Social Edge is proud to introduce and feature the Social Entrepreneur Search widgets.  In collaboration with Social Actions, Exygy, and the organizations participating in the Social Entrepreneur API – Civic Ventures, Draper Richards Foundation, PopTech, Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and Skoll Foundation – we are pleased to present these quick, useful tools for social entrepreneurs, funders, and finders (people who want to learn about and support do-gooders). 

Here is how it works:

Funders, who are known for their successful efforts in finding, researching, and funding social entrepreneurs, have come together to pool the information on all their vetted social entrepreneurs in one place.  This open source database is available to anyone who wishes to query, syndicate, or republish the data on their own websites.  To make it super simple, we have created widgets so anyone can search and add a real-time list of social entrepreneurs to their webpage.  Take your pick of Full Social Entrepreneur Search, Funder Fan Club, or the Instant Social Entrepreneur List.

Why is this a win?

For emerging social entrepreneurs: 
“One stop shopping” through the Social Entrepreneur Search helps them find others in their field, issue, or region so that they may learn from other business models, find ways to collaborate and complement each other, and build coalitions for change. 

For vetted social entrepreneurs included in the database:
Same as above, but additionally, inclusion in the database increases exposure for themselves and their organizations.  Whether being contacted by others working on the same issue, being discovered by journalists, or being funded by family funds or other philanthropists, the database showcases their credibility and helps them be found and gain support so they can do more.

For funders:
Funders are hugely proud of their grantees and are committed to helping them scale their ventures and impact. By including their awardees in the Social Entrepreneur Search, they are helping their folks to be found and funded. Funders also invest heavily in finding and verifying the impact of these social enterprises.  This due diligence effort is hugely valuable to smaller funds and philanthropists who may lack the time or staff to carry out this important work.  Sean Stannard Stockton called it "following the smart money." By participating in the Social Entrepreneur Search, funders are helping strengthen the field of social entrepreneurship, and are also gaining broader recognition for their ability to identify successful social entrepreneurs.

For journalists and other writers:
Whether investigating a story on a major issue facing the world or a region, the social entrepreneurs search allows you to quickly find organizations on the ground that truly understand their issue and community.  The discovered social entrepreneurs can be a source of information and referral.  Including a list of social entrepreneurs alongside an article also gives readers a chance to connect with real people working on solving big problems. They may decide to donate or volunteer, or even become inspired to start their own social venture.

For researchers, corporations, emergency response…
Once data is aggregated in one place, the opportunity for learning is fascinating.  Studying why are there more vetted social entrepreneurs in one country than a neighboring country could be enlightening and identify a gap in needed services.  Corporations with employee giving programs wishing to expand options could add this list of vetted social entrepreneur organizations to their donor choices.  In an emergency, rather than driving all donations to the Red Cross (as amazing as they are), the Social Entrepreneur Search could help interested donors give to social entrepreneurs already on the ground, with a vested in interest in both response and long term recovery of their community that they know so well.

That’s great you say, but could it be better?  Yes!

Adoption:  We need your help to show "proof of concept”.  By adding a relevant widget to your blog post, Facebook page or website, we can see if inclusion in this database can really help social entrepreneurs and help donors save time and discover organizations they would like to support. We would like to show the value of bringing all the vetted social entrepreneurs into one searchable database, so any anecdotal evidence that discovery, funding, or some other impact (for the social venture or the sector) resulted from the Social Entrepreneur Search would be helpful and welcome.

Expansion:  We would like to add more feeds, fields, analytical tools, and other ways of making the Social Entrepreneur Search useful, while still keeping effort involved in maintaining the database low and efficient.  We will be adding The Tech Laureates and Global Social Benefit Incubator winners shortly and in breaking news: Echoing Green announced they will be adding their Fellows to the Social Entrepreneur Search API.

Other additions we have discussed include adding “finalists” who have been vetted but were not one of the few winners selected due to limitations of funding, fit, or stage of organization. Other field additions may be quite simple, such as representing the number of years the organization has been around, or number of paid staff, which could help investors and donors search for organizations at a specific stage. There is also interest in adding actions that people can take to support social entrepreneurs and giving social entrepreneurs access to updating this information directly.

Innovation:  We would love to have developers start pulling the data directly and creating their own value added layers to the data, such as creating a seamless interface to facilitate donations.  One of our beta-testers is looking at other ways of displaying the data including visual representation on a global map.

Inclusion:  This data specifically leverages the research and vetting done by funding organizations to demonstrate credibility and effectiveness of social entrepreneurs.  However, someone could take the same template used in the Social Entrepreneur Search and create a database of self-identified social entrepreneurs.  They could come up with different ways of demonstrating credibility that could be showcased such as testimonials from beneficiaries, references from board members and influential people linked through social media, as well as credentials such as 501c3 status or independent verification of organization budget, management, and/or impact.

We are very proud of this essential first step in creating a searchable database of social entrepreneurs.  Through thrifty and selfless management by Social Actions, initial support of the Peery Foundation, and the forward thinking participation of Civic Ventures, Draper Richards, PopTech, Schwab, and Skoll, we have created this open source aggregation of social entrepreneurs. The widgets created by Exygy and funded by Skoll Foundation make this data even more accessible. 

But with so much more we would like to do, it does raise the critical question of who funds projects that help the whole.  We are looking for supporters who understand the importance of investing in “actionable knowledge” and want to see this resource grow.   We are ready to build from this substantial accomplishment, but need to find financial support to take the Social Entrepreneur Search to the next level and truly demonstrate the potential of this rather incredible collaboration. If you would like to be part of the visionary leadership that takes the Social Entrepreneur Search and open philanthropic data to the next level in 2010, please contact Social Actions by email or review the funding proposal online.

Comment here or join the discussion on the web:

PopTech : The New PopTech Social Innovation Widget
"Happy social innovation searching!"

Skoll Foundation : See the Funder Fan Club widget in action on the Skoll website and their comments on their blog.

Take Part :  The Power of Search: New Social Entrepreneur API Encourages Collaboration
"I'm personally invested and interested in innovation in education, and want to find people working in North America. A quick search brings up three... with one more click I can donate ... it's a perfect match."

Echoing Green : Announcement they will be adding their fellows to the Social Entrepreneur Search API -"we’d love nothing more than to see this spread"

Tipping Bucket :  Social Entrepreneur Search
"The project gets plenty of “cool” points in and of itself, but here are some reasons I find it truly remarkable...collaboration...catalytic capital...the potential to raise the profile of social enterprise..."

"The search may also inadvertantly reinforce what Charles Light calls the social entrepreneurship “cult of personality”..."Still, the search is undeniably a step in the right direction–and may well provide both a solid foundation and a jumping-off point for genuine collaborative efforts that will help expand the field and magnify the impact of social entrepreneurship in this next decade."

Exygy talks about why they were thrilled to build the Social Entrepreneur Search widgets: “our true passion lies at the intersection of technology and social innovation”

A. Fine Blog by Allison Fine, author of Momentum - Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age says, "A group of funders working together to share their databses of people and organizations in whom they’ve invested is a welcome development. Making the database sharable through the widgets is a great idea. And enabling social entrepreneurs to connect with one another by geography or issue area is an important step in the creation of a more cohesive field."

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