What is a Social Entrepreneur?

I think even social entrepreneurs aren't entirely sure whether they're community saviours or business entrepreneurs but here are the standard definitions

• Ashoka: Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems.
• Skoll Foundation: The social entrepreneur aims for value in the form of transformational change that will benefit disadvantaged communities and ultimately society at large.
• Wikipedia: A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change.

Personally I think these are all just exercises in the use of big and fancy words.

I see the social entrepreneur in a more simplistic light. I see it as anyone struggling with the conflict between making a social difference (connotation ethical) and making money from it (connotation unethical). If the money thing isn't a factor then you're essentially just social, and if the social aspect doesn't drive you then you're probably just an entrepeneur.

It's a weird dichotomy that I have to admit to facing myself. I'm not really interested in anything unless it has a positive human impact and the whole business of making and managing money gives me the willies, but at the same time I really don't think I could go back to being paid an average wage again. I wonder if I'll ever resolve this properly or if I'm destined to keep walking this slightly uncomfortable tightrope?

Are you a social entrepreneur? Tell us what you think!

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Dummies Guide to Startups: Bridging the gap between Brand and Strategy

The reason I'm sharing so much on brand is because today brand is key. You could be the most unique start-up and the first to do something, but if your brand experience isn't right, you leave massive scope for someone else to come along, do the same thing as you and walk away with your market because their branding is more compelling and memorable. Unfortunately social impact organisations regularly miss this point as you can see from this other post of mine on how social organisations get their branding wrong. 

Anyway here's a really interesting presentation on bridging the gap between your brand and your strategy.

The Brand Gap from coolstuff

In summary here's what it says about what a brand is

• It's not a logo, entity or product
• It's your audience's gut feeling about your organisation, product or service
• In other words it's not what you say it is, but what they say it is

The presentation then highlights the 5 disciplines of brand building:

1. Differentiate: Focus
2. Collaborate: 1+1=11
3. Innovate: Zig when others Zag
4. Validate: Use focus groups plus cheap, dirty, quick tests. If your audience can't verbalise your concept then you've failed to communicate it.
5. Cultivate: Develop and influence the character and not just look and feel of the brand

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Dummies Guide to Startups: 5 Steps of Brand Building

There are 5 key steps to understanding and building your brand

1. Situational Report: A situational analysis is designed to take a snapshot of where things stand at the time you're developing your brand. An easy way to outline and create this is through what's called a "4C Analysis" - Company, Customer, Competitor and Channel.
2. Positioning Statement: A Positioning Statement is a one to two sentence statement that conveys what you do for whom, and why. It is useful as it requires you to identify, and then briefly articulate your distinct value to your customer in relation to your competitors.
3. Growth Vector Analysis: This describes product alternatives in relation to market options and is one of several means to classify strategic alternatives. Basically a growth vector matrix contains three market options and three product alternatives so that there are nine different combinations or vectors in all.
4. Growth Driver Analysis: Checks whether assumed growth in your market is a reality or just an illusion. It should also help identify if and how you can influence growth in your market.
5. Action Plan: This is your short and long term plan for developing your brand, based on outputs from the various analyses you've completed.

The vector and driver analyses are a bit more complicated than the others, so my advice is give them a thought but focus on getting the situational analysis, positioning statements and action plans right. Searching on Google will provide you with lots more detail on all these, but I'll put up some more bullets on each as we go along.

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Dummies Guide to Startups: 5 Key Components of Branding

There are basically 5 key areas you need to know about and count for when creating your brand

1. Brand building and re-evaluation: The title is self-explanatory and the process essentially consists of a Situational Report, Positioning Statement, Growth Analysis and an Action Plan
2. Brand tracking: This is about going through a process to understand out what key customers think of your brand
3. Designing Value: What you need to know to ensure that your brand increases the value of your enterprise
4. Messaging: What do you want to say, with what, and to whom
5. E-Marketing: Marketing to your customers/subscribers/members online

We'll take these different aspects apart in more detail as we progress, starting with brand building next week. Meantime if you urgently need more information on this just drop me a line.

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Dummies Guide to Startups: Brand, Design and Usability

Here's a really good Google presentation on "How To Design For Branding" that I thought was worth sharing as we talk more about creating a brand online.

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