03/21/15: 6:23 PM
This week I read further into Social Entrepreneurship and found some interesting topics.
I read about, financing social ventures, achieving objectives, cultivating talent, and measuring the impact of social entrepreneurship.
To finance social ventures, most entrepreneurs go to a variety of sources. The most often place they go is to people that they are close to like their family and friends. They also sometimes turn to the internet. There are places that will give micro-contributions to people to start a project.
I thought this was really interesting because it reminded me of Kickstarter.org. To me, it is a really cool idea to get support from others because I think that is a big part of social entrepreneurship. I think that it should be sponsored by the people and for the people.
To achieve financial goals, and of course the goal of the project, entrepreneurs sometimes mix them together. This is what Bornstein dubs "blended value". This can help the social entrepreneurs to "benefit from the strategies of traditional business entrepreneurs."
I found this an interesting strategy. This is because I was wondering whether or not their would be a conflict of interests because my thought was that social entrepreneurs do work solely for the good of the community and are not looking for monetary reward.
Cultivating talent reaffirmed my belief about the monetary reward. Bornstein explains that the reason talented people are convinced to work with social entrepreneurs is because they are promised meaningful work. This is what I was originally thinking of when I though of social entrepreneurship, that their type of work is meaningful with monetary compensation.
The last section I read through was about how to go about measuring the impact of social entrepreneurship. I think that this was the most pertinent section to our class because that is a big part of how we are being evaluated. Bornstein shows how there are multiple ways to measure impact and he believes it is a mixture of data and storytelling. The data can show the quantitative measure of your impact and the story can explain why the impact was made.
More next week!
C4E Associate
Noah Mark
I'd be interested in hearing more (from you) about this question of measurement. It's one I've been trying to figure out myself.
ReplyDeleteThe big breakthrough recently for social entrepreneurs is the realization that one CAN run a non-profit like a business. Decent (but not decadent) salaries are necessary to lure highly skilled workers, workers who will be getting competing offers from for-profit ventures. Yes, most people who are s-entrepreneurs care deeply about their cause...but they also need to make a reasonable living so as to be happy enough to do the work they want to do. Right?