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An Untapped Tactic to Boost Your Company’s Social Mission–With Alice Korngold

What does a nonprofit board of directors have to do with your company’s social mission?  If you think  Not much, then your company is missing out on an effective tactic to boost your social mission. Your company can matter more. Encouraging your employees (management or executive level) to join nonprofits boards facilitates leadership development, supports […]

In Response to ‘What’s Your Life About?’ He Founded Good Capital–With Kevin Jones

I created Cause Capitalism to answer the question of how you can have a stronger business and help change the world.  The problem with such a nifty concept is that it’s still new, which means that all the ‘market mechanisms’ aren’t in place to help your early social enterprise scale to serve more people. As […]

Doing Good Isn’t Always Hard: How iStock Made An Easy Segueway Into Micro-donations

Get the Google Audio Widget widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox! Not seeing a widget? (More info) Click the player below to listen or right-click and save for the MP3. I spoke with iStockphoto to learn how it lobbied for and justified its new micro-donations platform to give customers and employees an easy […]

Your Competitive Advantage Lies in Your Social Responsibility–with Seventh Generation’s Jeffrey Hollender

I started Cause Capitalism to convince you that having a social mission will help grow your business and to show you how. I want you (and me) to be able to create a sector-changing business like Jeffrey Hollender did with Seventh Generation. Long before it was fashionable, Jeffrey took toilet paper and dish detergent and […]

Start With You: The Easiest Way to Build a Social Mission–with Renee Spears

“Why build a business with a social mission?” For Renee Spears, the reason was because she wanted a great place to go to work everyday. She didn’t conduct extensive market research and she didn’t wait until she had an MBA. She just built what she liked. It worked and now she’s helping other companies do […]

7 Steps to Building Partnerships From the People Who Are Ending Hunger

If you truly want your company to have a great impact, you can’t go it alone. You need to have partners. But what type and how? Scott Henderson and his colleagues Anne Bertelsen and Brian Reich seem to be wizards at creating partnerships and drawing out the best from each party. Together, they launched  WeCanEndThis.com, a year-long campaign […]

The Mission is Greater than the Business: How to Tap the Power of the Gort Cloud–with Richard Seireeni

If your company doesn’t have the money (or inclination) for traditional marketing you can join the ranks of companies like Seventh Generation, Tesla Motors and Stonyfield Farm in the Gort Cloud. ‘The Gort Cloud’ is Richard Seireeni’s term for the invisible force powering today’s most visible green brands, as well as the title of his book, […]

Be Unreasonable, Change the World, Enroll Now–with The Unreasonable Institute’s Teju Ravilochan

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable persists in adapting the world to himself.  Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. –George Bernard Shaw . After talking with social entrepreneurs about the challenges they faced in building their businesses, I invited Teju Ravilochan to Cause Capitalism to share his vision for […]

Start with $10K, Grow the Pie, Sell to eBay–with Siddharth Sanghvi

The last part of this post’s title should be Provide Women with Access to Capital.  This is the success story of a social enterprise created from a market opportunity, which proved its mettle by serving artisans in developing countries and attracting American companies like Disney, Hallmark, Whole Foods, and ultimately eBay.  Last week World of […]

How Elemental Herbs Built a Social Mission Without Really Trying–With Caroline Duell

Sometimes, as social entrepreneurs, we’re reluctant to show our passion for the social side or our business. We get caught up in trying to appear soundly strategic or business-minded or we over think our messaging, “Will this look like cause-washing? Can customers get behind this? How will we measure and track our results?” There’s merit to the […]