Tag Archives: social enterprise

How Getting Serious About Sustainability Brought GoLite Serious Growth–with Kim Coupounas

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) Kim Coupounas ran a conscious company.  GoLite gave money to the community and recycled. Its employees biked to work, served on […]

The Bright Spots–From the Social Enterprise Alliance Summit

By Lee Fox for Cause Capitalism. I sit in a room filled with a SEA of bright minds, who just like me, aspire to change the world for the better one way or another.  Over 700 of us are gathered at the Social Enterprise Alliance Summit & World Forum to hear Chip Heath, author and professor at Stanford Graduate School of […]

Are You Making This Mistake? You Have a Company, Now You Want an Advisory Board

Find your Yodas before you build your company. That’s the piece of advice that entrepreneurs offer about advisory boards that surprises me the most.  To find your Yodas, you need to be clear about who you’re looking for and how they will further your vision, and you need to meet them where they are. While […]

Catalyzing the Field of the Social Enterprise: From the Social Enterprise Summit

I asked Lee Fox to share ideas and conversations from this week’s Social Enterprise Summit.  We’ll post additional blogs video interviews next week with social entrepreneurs from Chemists Without Borders, Universal Giving and Donors Choose.  If you’re at the conference say, ‘hi’ to Lee and ask her about her social venture, KooDooZ. The Social Enterprise […]

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 […]

Figuring Out the “Enterprise” in Your Social Enterprise (Because A Mission Is Not Enough)

Now that you understand how your business will benefit from having a social mission, think about what value your business can provide others.  It’s not enough to build a business on your social passions and values alone; your business must also meet a demand in the marketplace.  Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation suggests asking yourself: […]

10 More Social Venture Capital Firms You Told Me About

“A BUSINESS THAT MAKES NOTHING BUT MONEY IS A POOR BUSINESS.”  — Henry Ford In response to an email I received asking about sources of social venture capital, I published this list of 15 social investment firms. Based on tweets and suggestions I got from people like you who are using business to meet social or […]

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 […]

15 Social Venture Capital Firms That You Should Know About

Building a business is hard. Getting the funding you might need is tough.  But, as you know, when your business satisfies a social or environmental need, your options for funding are even scarcer.  One of the things I hear a lot from social entrepreneurs is the tough time they have finding people willing to fund […]