Hello Social Edge community, I'm excited to host this discussion on the development of innovative tools to support social entrepreneurs. Please post your thoughts below. I'll be sure to respond quickly and/or bring in the right people who have relevant expertise. All the best, Peter

Ironically, the use of the internet to engender a new model of doing business was one of the themes of our founding paper in 1996.

http://www.p-ced.com/about/history/

As a UK business using profit to fund our pro-poor activism in Eastern Europe, we could greatly benefit from business endorsements. With my own 40 years experience of technology and my colleague's pioneering profit for purpose approach, we are not short of the expertise, but have yet to be procured by another social enterprise. The concept of building a social economy exists as words, but is rarely seen in practice, even where SE became part of government policy in 2002.

It's seemingly impossible to be published in any social enterprise publication, even comments submitted to editors are disregarded.

Yes, ordinary people might help connect, but then if they can't find us and don't know what we're doing that probably won't happen. The efforts which will draw most public attention will come from the large organisations that have an abundance of promotional resources.

Jeff

Hi Jeff, I would hope that the representatives of large organizations and companies reading your response can see the opportunity here.

If I'm not mistaken, you are saying that corporate philanthropy / cause marketing / social marketing could be rewired to support social enterprises.

In this department, Advanta has demonstrated tremendous leadership already. The credit card company has poured 100s of thousands of dollars into Ideablob, a crowdsourced platform to award creative business plans (many of which are social enterprises). I would never have known of Advanta without Ideablob. Nor would I have encountered a wealth of entrepeneurs using Ideablob to draw attention to their creative businesses.

Who will be next? Which corporations will take the step of moving their corporate philanthropy dollars from supporting nonprofits to supporting social entrepreneurs? And when they do it, will they simply fund the social entrepreneurs, or will they invite ordinary people to get involved in the work of these budding organizations?

You raise a lot of important questions.

We're in the position of a small social enterprise serving large organisations and government. Many of these are involved in CSR activities of their own or actually sponsor nonprofit type social enterprise and at the same delay or renege on payment for contracted services. This is not deliberate, of course. Just a failure to apply a business wide awareness of the social commitment.

On another business network a conversation with a CSR journalist had her acknowledge that CSR is brand associated and would not trickle down to social purpose business. In that I believe she's correct having been asked to remove a reference to one of our corporate customers (still in arears) from our website. I guess they surmise that we might undermine their business by association.

And yes, the support of social enterprise, engaging them as suppliers is a very new idea. Too new for most to take in I suspect.

I'm a big fan of the transparency that Kjersten Erickson and FORGE is going through right now and love the fact that Curtis Chang is sharing his consulting thoughts with the rest of us to provide an in-depth look of the challenges of FORGE and what might be done. I think this is a great way for the rest of us to learn from the challenges of FORGE and also share our experiences and individual areas of expertise.

Kjersten isn't the first one to blog about her experiences as a social entrepreneur, but she is one of the few that has had the courage to say, "I don't know what to do and I need help." There is a false perception that entrepreneurs need to know everything and many who start enterprises for the first time, think they're supposed to have all the answers. As a result, many social entrepreneurs don't know how to ask for help when something goes wrong (what do I tell my investors and employees? how do I admit I made a mistake?) and when giving the pitch, don't know how to ask for honest feedback. (I know this from personal experience, as someone who started a social enterprise as part of the business plan competition process, and as someone who has TA'ed several classes in social entrepreneurship). We admire those social entrepreneurs that believed that they were right when others were wrong (just read Bornstein's How to Change the World), but we forget how many social entrepreneurs believed they were right when they were actually wrong.

Now that I've graduated and have been working in the philanthropic sector, I see firsthand the importance of being able to integrate multiple viewpoints into the decisionmaking process. It's not enough to surround yourself with people who tell you what you're doing is great - if everyone's not worried, then there's probably something wrong with the methodology of who you're choosing to ask, since starting a social enterprise is inherently a very risky proposition. That's why I think selecting an open-minded, intelligent, and diverse group of individuals to your board is the most critical component of starting a social enterprise - something underemphasized in the social entrepreneurship collaboratories at the Stanfords and Harvards and the mainstream social entrepreneurship books, which focus on business plans and the qualities of the social entrepreneur (i.e. perseverance, good intentions, innovative ideas), respectively, rather than other determinants of success, like developing a strong team and designing good feedback loops.

As part of providing a good feedback loop, I'd love to see something happen on Social Edge, where someone hosts a conversation each week where a real organization or a real social entrepreneur with a real (and particularly interesting) question is able to ask the Social Edge community for help. There are so many people here with unique ideas and experiences that I sometimes think it's not enough to have people blog about their experiences or spark conversation on a particular topic (as much as I do love and read the blogs and conversations here on Social Edge), but that somehow we have yet to really tap into the wisdom of the crowd, because we haven't directly asked the crowd for help. I'd like to see Social Edge or someone develop a successful crowdsource model where every week, an idea is selected and reviewed by the community, and possibly even funded. It would be even better if other resources were connected with this watering hole of sorts, but just having a place to pitch an idea and get honest feedback would be great (I've been to a couple venture capital speed dating events and asking people within my own network has been great, but so far, I haven't really found a good place to get good, solid feedback as a social entrepreneur in the startup phase besides the myriad of networking events, et al).

Tony, your response gets to the heart of the problem, and one that I hadn't fully considered when I was drafting this discussion intro.

For mass public involvement in social entrepreneurship to flourish, social entrepreneurs would have to be open to advice and transparent in what they do.

I'm coming at this discussion from a more nonprofit and opensource perspective. At Social Actions, I blog about everything we're doing, where we're headed, the challenges, the business model, everything. This creates the openings for people to share add their creativity, connections, (and sometimes capital) to the project.

I forget that social entrepreneurs who abide by a more traditional business mindset are often reluctant to bare all online in order to gain the support from a few good souls.

The Kjersten Erickson's are few and far between.

Your suggestion of a weekly 'critique my social enterprise' series on Social Edge is spot on. That would be a great starting point to encourage more social entrepreneurs to be transparent and open to support.

For those of us who are already open to individuals serving as full partners in our work, I maintain that new online tools should be created to systematize this kind of mass participation in our work.

Mild provocation:

Broad public involvement in supporting social entrepreneurs would permit the movement to achieve a scale and impact that even traditional business has yet to achieve. Secrecy and a guarded business plan stunts our collective impact.

Peter,

Great post and something I'm working deeply on now. Some things that have struck me in this process:

• we're ultimately talking about peer-producing organizations (social ventures) - for me that's more about the venture than the entrepreneur (that's what the entrepreneur needs support for) - i think the opportunity is in brokering a social venture's needs (to get things done that advance the venture) with the contributions of individuals (comments, cash, connections...) - if ventures expose their needs and it's easy for people to contribute... i think we'll have the initial conditions for this to happen

Some other side notes: - i think we are overly focused on ideas and smarts in our culture (actions are way more important to a social venture/entrepreneur) - ventures need to expose their needs (themselves) if they want to give people meaningful opportunities to participate in their production. This is very different than transparency which for me seems to come more from the funding/governance/control perspective. Maybe another way to frame it --- I think 'full monty's' are more fun that xrays. :-)

Great stuff... thanks for leading this conversation!

Hi Michael, Thanks for weighing-in on the conversation.

For people who missed it, Michael (@igniter on Twitter) has a presentation on what peer production of social ventures would look like, and it dovetails very well with this discussion.

Please have a look here:
http://igniter.com/post308

On Exposing needs versus Encouraging transparency, I appreciate you drawing a distinction. In the nonprofit world, there are plenty of organizations that are happy to expose their needs without being transparent in the least. And there are groups that aspire to transparency without exposing any opportunities for people to get involved in making a difference.

In short, I think the right conditions for inviting people to support the work of social entrepreneurs would require a good dose of both transparency and exposing the needs on the part of social entrepreneurs / social ventures.

I also appreciate your emphasis on action, and not just advice. The tools that I'm envisioning would be geared toward taking action on behalf of a social entrepreneur (see the brainstorm of actions listed above). Are there other actions you think people could take support social ventures? Could they be systematized... ie, 'click here to introduce this social entrepreneur to someone in your LinkedIn network' or 'click here to make the business plan more inclusive and environmentally friendly'.

Thanks again Michael. I'm glad you're voice is part of the discussion.

Peter - i certainly agree that transparency is helpful and important - and in the context of getting people to meaningfully engage there need to be meaningful actions they can take in building the venture. The more transparent the venture the higher the trust and the more able the contributor will be able to make a valuable contribution.

Ironically, I'm actually less interested in a platform that tries to match skills or tries to group types of action. My sense is that people will act based on affinity with specific organizations and find tasks by 'following' ventures they like and tracking the needs they 'expose'... making many contributions to the same venture over time. I think this is a core difference - and maybe a bit more like http://tradevibes.com.

I think too that the tools have to be simple and as much as possible not require anyone to come to a single destination.

Thanks for prompting this because I'm right in the midst of feeling my way through this. We're working with stocktwits.com as a base platform model and will focus on the simple ways to build out venture profiles as well.

Hi Michael, I agree. Multiple points of entry and building long term relations with specific entrepreneurs / social ventures are key. A platform or collection of tools can make this happen.

The alternative is that social entrepreneurs and ventures expose their needs in a one-off and uncoordinated basis, and a result, people have a hard-time finding their way to those opportunities.

Of course, an aggregated approach to identifying those exposed needs could also solve the riddle.

All the best,
Peter

Oops -- Make that "i'm glad your voice is part of the discussion."

People may also be interested in this post on Change.org,
"Support a structure for entrepreneurs to support entrepreneurs"

http://socialentrepreneurship.change.org/blog/view/featured_idea_support_a_structure_for_entrepreneurs_to_support_entrepreneurs

Excerpt:
Marc Dangeard, the founder of Entrepreneur Commons, has posted an Idea for Change in America that I'm really excited about. His idea (which is the idea animating Entrepreneur Commons, as well) is that entrepreneurs make the best mentors for other entrepreneurs, and that we should help build alternative startup support structures that bring entrepreneurs together. Check out his informative thoughts below:

What's the idea ?
The idea is to provide a platform to allow entrepreneurs help entrepreneurs through mentorship but also new funding opportunities, with an inclusive funding mechanism for entrepreneurs (instead of just luck or the competition model offered by VCs and Angels).

And btw - I love what Marc is doing with the Entrepreneur Commons - particularly the mutual support - reminiscient of the most successful 'forum' components of the Entrepreneurs Organization and Young Presidents Organization. The mutual investment model is very interesting as a way of mitigating risk and encouraging mutual support.

I am finally finding time to get into this discussion. Thank you for mentioning Entrepreneur Commons :-)

On the social networking side we do have a discussion group which could be the beginning of a place where people talk and share ideas and experiences about their social business. However we have been focusing mostly on building real relationships with real people in various location so far, because my experience with online is that while it is a great place to start conversation, nothing replaces the live interaction in the end.

And since change.org is mentionned, I would like to say that this is so far the best user interface I have seen for networking online. But as mentioned at the beginning of this whole discussion, it is unfortunately geared today towards pure non-profit. You have to be a 503c to be listed there, which is too bad. But can be explained by the legal issues that come with trying to fund online anything else.

On the funding side and dealing with for-profits, there are places like prosper.com, zopa.com and lendingclub.com that have ventured into the peer to peer lending but this is still very early stage, and the problem is so complex that they have not been able to expand beyond a very simple product so far.
Prosper is now placed on hold by the SEC, which is a good demonstration of the fact that this is a complex issue.
LendingClub did a better job on the legal side and they have now introduced a secondary market place, increasing the level of liquidity for the loans by allowing people to resell their loans to one another. A major improvement in what is possible online.
Then for accredited investors there is http://www.pcmexchange.com/ which is also just starting. Another great possibility, but again it will have to mature a bit before it gets out of the mainstream investment to open up to social investment.

One the big issue I find is in the definition of what a Social Business is. There is a huge bias towards the definition that Muhammad Yunus has focused on in his book "Creating a World without poverty", which is mostly related to helping with poverty. Meanwhile I believe that any business that decides to focus on being profitable and help the community instead of focusing on maximizing profit is a social business. There is a discussion coming up next week on Social Edge on just this subject I invite you to join and contribute your thoughts on the issue then.

Meanwhile this current bias in the basic definition explains a lot of why there is this gap in the tool provided. It is good that discussions like this one here help bring some light on the issue.

By the way, and since it was mentioned, another way to raise awareness on the issue would be to make the Entrepreneur Commons idea I submitted on Change.org visible enough that we make it to the top 10, so if you read this please vote:
http://www.change.org/ideas/view/sponsor_a_structure_for_entrepreneurs_to_support_entrepreneurs

Thanks for adding your comments to this discussion. I'll be keeping a close eye on The Entrepeneur Commons to see how it develops.

On the Change.org side of things, I would be surprised if you see them expand beyond the 501c3 category of social change organizations in the coming years. Their model of high quality blog content plus actions is very sticky. Once proven in the nonprofit space, I'm sure they'll be looking for areas to expand into.

Prosper, LendingClub, Zopa all seem to have a strictly monetary support focus. I'd like to see a platform developed that focuses equally on the transfer of creative ideas and connections as on the transfer of money. Fortunately, creativity and connections are less problematic from an IRS perspective.

Thanks again for joining the conversation.

Hey Peter et all!

Great discussion! Thanks so much for hosting it. These are really important issues and at the heart of a lot of the blogging and conversation we do over at the social entrepreneurship portal on Change.org

One of the things that I think is key about all this is that even if we did have the platforms that enable direct contributions that connect individual skills with social entrepreneurs that need them, we would need to remember that platforms for giving are different than reasons for giving. This is why even though something like GlobalGiving provides an incredible platform for international development project funding, it still needs to find specific contexts like competitions to drive people to provide.

One question then is what are contexts that could be leveraged for this type of social entrepreneurship support? The University setting is one of the best. campusCatalyst (www.campuscatalyst.org) is a great example of how you can take the universities "learning" context and overlay a social mission to create positive change. With cC, teams of 5 students learn about social innovation, nonprofit work, etc and then play a "consulting" role for Chicago-area nonprofits.

What do people think are some contexts - classroom settings, holiday giving competitions, weddings, etc - which could be leveraged to get people to think about coming together and sharing their resources to help social entrepreneurs achieve specific goals?

Hi Nathaniel and Peter,
I am enjoying the conversation and the excellent feature suggestions for Social Edge! However, Nathaniel, I think you hit my question spot on. If Social Edge, or another platform, were to offer Open Advice - peer advising for the featured social entrepreneur venture of the week, how could we ensure that the expertise needed was provided?

In other words, what kind of incentives could be offered or what value (besides the intrinsic joy of helping) could the person offering expertise receive? I think for this kind of resource matching to work, there has to be something in it for both parties. A reason to come back and a way to be notified when their specific expertise is needed. Do you think we can come up with that value or do you think there needs to be stipended/paid expertise on-call in addition to peer and community crowd-sourced knowledge to make something like this work?

Your suggestion of the university setting as one context is a great example of this. As with the Global Social Benefit Incubator (whose competition is hosted on Social Edge and begins in January - less than a month away!), the academic partner is key. Not only do they provide expertise, but they learn and the students learn from the experience as well. It's a fit with their curriculum and a value to them as well as the applicants.

Another context might be consultants and service providers, who by sharing pro-bono expertise in this sort of open advice forum, could get, more or less, "marketing" and new clients. Would that be enough motivation? Would they have the time and interest?

In sum, what would take it take to make a successful resource/expertise matching venue? What would give social ventures and "the experts" the incentives to create and maintain a profile and level of participation in such a site? And why isn't there a successful model of this already? Can we in the field of social entrepreneurship together build a prototype of this that others in the nonprofit or larger activist communities could then copy?

Hi Jill, Great questions, and even better answers. Adding value for the would-be supporter of the social entrepreneur should could come in many forms.

The exposure value for consultants providing pro-bono support is an excellent point.

I also wouldn't underestimate the feel-good return on helping. People lend on Kiva because it feels good, and the money boomerangs back. If you were to build out this toolset on SocialEdge, you might want to include the lending model. Users could lend money (and get it back when/if social entrepreneurs succeed), and then they could add their connections and creativity to increase the likelihood that they'll see their money again.

I also think bragging rights will factor in as a value add for serial supporters of social entrepreneurs. I envision that the toolset would include the opportunity to become fans of a social entrepreneur, or add their latest project to your "portfolio". The portfolio could list the date on which someone starting supporting the social entrepreneur as proof that they 'saw the talent' before she reached the big leagues.

Finally, we should be doing some research to see where and how this distributed support of social entrepreneurs has already happened. Our goal is not to invent something new, but simply to systematize and replicate the one-off success stories from the wild.

All the best,
Peter

Jill, I think these do exist, though perhaps not specifically targeting social entrepreneurs in many areas. Unsurprisingly it's a subject that arose quickly in the network for co-creating opportunity that erupted from the readership of Daily Kos a couple of weeks ago.

http://kossacksnetworking.ning.com/

In the commercial world, I cite the example of Ryan Notz whose business featured in an Observer newspaper article. I had met up with Ryan when his project was just getting started in 2006. He'd set up Buildersite.com, now renamed MyBuider.com when finding himself in the US travelling long distance for work and knew there must be a way of finding local resources.

In the UK we have various membership organisations, some I believe fully government funded which solicit social entrpreneurs as members, there are some making rudimentary efforts to list their members businesses or services. That includes our Social Enterprise Coalition, who probably don't know themselves that we're a software development business.

One useful resource for promoting services I found is freeindex.co.uk but though I've suggested a social enterprise category there, nothing seems to have happened. As I've also discovered, feedback can only be derived from customers and not beneficiaries, so what one does in terms of a social output doesn't accrue reputation.

Thinking about the context of a campus environment, this along with a national scale policy for delivering social enterprise was one of the recommendations we delivered to the Senate Foreign Relation Committee in a strategy paper for Ukraine, where we're working now. What happened after was the launch of the East Europe Foundation which seems now to be creating all kinds of projects involving business in community endeavours. So, ironically it seems that although we may be able to influence social enterprise overseas, we face an immovable object at home in the UK where it's been part of government policy since 2002.

One last thought, on the idea of Open Advice. Something that seems to happen most in an informal way on Ned.com the former Omidyar network, and perhaps some of the other more recent cause promoting
sites. According to UK government there are more than 50,000 social enterprises in the UK alone, a thousand year project if they all turned up here. My impression, perhaps I'm wrong is that what we do see on Social Edge is the MBA graduate entrepreneur story and perhaps a tendency to assume that this is where most social enterprise innovation derives from.

Jeff

Thanks for the comments Jeff. You bring up a few points that I think are critical to designing successful solutions that enable people to offer meaningful support or take actions to aid a social entrepreneur venture.

The first is targeting. As you mentioned, the sphere of nonprofits is huge, social enterprise very large, so it is important to be able to narrow down to hybrid/nonprofit social entrepreneurs (including the range from MBA graduate entrepreneurs to more grassroots social entrepreneurs). People need an easy, manageable and clearly defined way to find and sort through innovative, systemic-change social ventures. (As you point out about freeindex.co.uk, without a category or way to filter/find social enterprise, it is less useful.)

The second is the redundancy. Because of the number of membership organizations (all providing great value), resource matching would be most beneficial if organizations only had to maintain one organization profile page that could be called/served up by all the membership organizations they affiliate with. Think of the time savings. Kind of an open ID for your Organization "About Me" profile page that could be visible and searchable from numerous sites. Then you would have a reason to keep it updated and have a greater chance of having your expertise requests met.

Which brings up the third point which is context. At Ned there is an informal exchange which works where people with shared interests find each other. If there were a way to facilitate offers and requests for help across sites and in a contextual way, this would help more experts see relevant opportunities to help. This is what is so great about SocialActions widget that automatically serves up relevant actions people can take based on the content of an article (such as an article about AIDS and kids in Africa where the widget finds actions a member of the public can do to increase awareness, fundraise, etc. to fight aids, help kids) What if when you were reading the Forging Ahead blog, next to it were Forge's requests for expertise, and requests from other social ventures working with refugees or aiding people in Zambia were there as well? One expert might be able to help all three and the social ventures might even be able to help each other. Multiply this contextual placement across the various social entrepreneurship sites based around the globe.

The fourth topic you bring up is reputation systems. In the private sector there is a growing number of "referral" based reputation sites (some like the MyBuilder.com you mentioned like Judysbook & Yelp, that connect people locally to review service providers and restaurants, etc; and other sites that aggregate activity data to make recommendations- people who bought this/liked this also liked this). In this case, I think it's less about referrals but there is still a need for recognition for quality contributions and a place for displaying credentials. Thoughts?

How important are these things? Is this overcomplicated? Is the real question - are there requests/expertise that social entrepreneurs have that are not being currently met?

Hi Jill, I don't think you've overcomplicated the situation. You've actually boiled it down to four areas that anyone building a p2p solution to support social entrepreneurs would need to consider:

- niche
- distribution
- placement
- reputation

I bet we could put together an incredible team to visualize what the solution could look like, and it would be really awesome to include the existing online hubs of conversation / support of social entrepreneurs, SocialEdge included.

Thanks for the shout-out about the Social Actions Related Ways to Take Action widget. People can find it here (and of course, we can do the same thing for 'ways to support a social entrepreneur'):

http://blog.socialactions.com/profiles/blog/show?id=2062983:BlogPost:5328

To answer your question, "Are there requests/expertise that social entrepreneurs have that are not being currently met?"

YES, emphatically so. Think about all the people who don't happen to live in the Bay Area (read = who don't run into well-connected, wealthy and creative people on a daily basis). The entrepreneurial among them have brilliant ideas simmering and the ware-with-all to make their social ventures happen. With the right online toolset, I feel strongly that we can create a "Bay area simulation".

The NetSquared.org platform has served this role for me, as I was launching Social Actions. I'm sure something more robust (all due respect to NetSquared) and more tailored to social ventures could unleash tremendous good.

People might have a look at the Pop!Tech Accelerator program. They are doing what I'm envisioning, albeit on a limited scale:

http://www.poptech.org/accelerator/

All the best,
Peter

Jill, Peter, Nathaniel, et al.

Wow. Very cool stuff! From Open IDs to niche sites, the ideas being proposed here are really, really cool. I still remember when group management systems like Yahoo!Groups and social networking sites like Orkut were the really fun toys to play with (now I feel old, hehe).

So, can we do what Peter's suggesting - put together an incredible team to visualize what the solution could look like - and actually do it?!? I think a team could put together a proposal, get a foundation or affinity group to fund the due diligence and possible development of the project, and make this a reality..

There are definitely requests/expertise that social entrepreneurs have that are currently not being met - everything from finding advisers, consultants, vendors, funders, etc. to board members, staff, sales channels that really could be facilitated by an online hub.

Hi Tony, I'm with you. After this discussion moves off of the homepage of SocialEdge, we should form an exploratory team (maybe in the form of a Google group) to start visualizing the solution.

Since posting this discussion, I have come across a number of networks that are in the process of creating something similar to what we're discussing here. The important part will be to include these networks in the exploratory team, and in fact, champion their projects instead of a new network where possible.

Zoombala is the latest online platform to support Social Entrepreneurs that I have come across:

http://www.zoombala.com/index.html

"Zoombala™ is a social network and online platform developed by Social Entrepreneurs for Social Entrepreneurs. Zoombala™ will connect aspiring social entrepreneurs to the financial resources, mentors, potential business partners, and educational resources they need to succeed.

Zoombala™ wants to increase deal flow. With real time link ups to Mentors and Investors the Zoombala™ Team believes they have a powerful solution to an all to real problem for early stage social enterprises."

It's so funny that you mention Zoombala - Zoombala was started by a good friend of mine, Jason Carvalho (we met at the Skoll Forum a few years ago and stayed at the same dinky hostel) and we had a similar conversation while we were both in Taiwan about many of the ideas discussed in this forum (making the network self-sustainable through monetization, making the network meaningful by increasing deal flow, etc). I'm surprised though that you stumbled upon it, because I didn't think it was on anyone's radar at this point!

Anywho, I think a Google Group is a good idea - and we should invite anyone here who wants to be a part of that conversation once we get the group up and running. My contact info is tonyjwang [AT] gmail [DOT] com.