Sustainability need to be championed from the top level, but employees also need to care about it or any efforts will quickly flop. Employee (or community or consumer) buy-in happens when you’re brought-in. It’s not about positioning your strategy, it’s about involving people in it. Here’s how three different companies, eBay, GoLite and ConAgra, use their employees […]
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Use Community to Build Your Social Enterprise (Why Stealth Mode is For Suckers)
Arm yourself. Surrounding yourself with other social entrepreneurs is the next best thing to learning-from-doing. A community of people with similar goals adds to your knowledge bank, provides feedback, offers shortcuts, referrals and product discounts, and pushes you forward. When Jill wanted to implement an IRA program for the employees who ran her coffee shop, […]
Mission Statements for Social Entrepreneurs (From Other Social Entrepreneurs)
You can read articles and books on how to write your mission statement, but not here. This is a collection of ideas that worked for other social entrepreneurs and what they would do differently next time. It’s what they wished they’d had when defining their mission. Most mission statements sound like a sixth-grader’s attempt to […]
Turning Wine Into Water: A New Online Retailer With a Purpose–With Ryan Bettencourt
Click the player to listen to the interview or right-click and save for the MP3. Get the Mp3 Player Widget widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox! Not seeing a widget? (More info) Like this interview? You can thank Ryan on Twitter like this. I do a lot of name calling here: for-profit, nonprofit, […]
Foolish Social Responsibility Is The Best Kind
Put aside social responsibility. Forget about best practices or which term best describes what you do. Much of what I write is tactics, examples and inspiration to help you create and grow your business. But there’s no edict for social responsibility. That’s the rad (and at times frustrating) element. It’s a comparatively new idea that’s […]
On the Drawing Board: How to Build a Purpose-driven Business
I’m creating a guide to starting a purpose-driven business. This guide is aimed at you, the entrepreneur or small business owner. You can help shape it by: Sharing what worked for you and other suggestions you have to entrepreneurs in the early phases of company building. I can feature you by name or anonymously. Email […]
What’s Your Vote for the Best Socially Driven Companies?
With the blogs I read, the experts I interview and the networking groups I belong to, I figured I had a pretty accurate count of U.S. companies that are crushing it with their social mission. But I don’t. And I need your help. Which companies or entrepreneurs do you know that we can learn from? […]
Should Your Business Use an e-Commerce Philanthropy Platform? What You Can Gain and What to Be Wary Of
Yesterday I wrote about some of the ways that small startups with limited resources can create a social mission. Today, I came across a tool that makes it easy for your company to try out a buy-one-give-one model called B1G1. Traditionally, buy-one-give-one refers to like products. TOMS Shoes and Sunnight Solar are great examples. Every […]
What Your Startup Brings to the Table: A Social Mission With Few Resources
If you’re running a small startup, you’re tight on resources and hungry for any competitive advantage you can find–a broader audience, high-quality employees, brand differentiation, media attention and evangelizing customers. I won’t spend time telling you that social mission programs like cause marketing and employee volunteer programs can yield all this. That you know. But did […]
I'm Olivia Khalili. I created Cause Capitalism to show you how to grow your business by incorporating a social mission. I've worked extensively with both nonprofits and for-profits. I found that when you combine the two, you grow your profits, impassion all your stakeholders and do good in the world. Read more.
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