FUNDRAISING FOR NGOs

Social Entrepreneurship
1.- Introduction
How did we get here?
•Revolt at NGOs against
• Big structures
• Tyranny of donors
• New ideological speech
•Social Network Revolution (2.0)
• Empowerment
• Youth
• Networking
• Disintermediation
• Dishierarchization
• Blurred limits between private and social
• New approaches of Social Innovation
• Design Thinking
• Lean Startup
• Sharing economy
• co-Working

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_entrepreneurship
Mixed-race nature
•Corporation or ngo?
•Big or small?
•Profits, yes or no?
•Participatory governance, maybe not?
•Donations or self financing?
•Social Impact, what’s that?

Social entrepreneurship is a company (sometimes an ngo), usually

small (but it can be large), whose main objective is to achieve a
social impact (more or less credible), with participatory governance
(or not), which does not look for much benefit ( but it can have it),
and who intends to self-finance its activity (but it can accept
donations)
Corporation or ngo?
•In order to be a corporation, you need to sell something
• As in any company, the fundamental focus must be customers, revenues,
the validity of the business model
•Otherwise, it is better to create an ngo
• If the desired social impact in on human rights, culture, political
participation, usually a corporation is not the right solution
2.- Actors at the ecosystem
Entrepreneur
•Key figure
•Necessary skills:
• Business acumen and social sensitivity
• Strong leadership and people management
• High interpersonal skills
• Commercial and admin skills
• Resilience
•Summary, the perfect person does not exist
Social Context and Stakeholders
•A social enterprise must be contextualized in its environment
• It is born to solve a real problem in their environment
•It must incorporate the inputs of all the stakeholders
•The analysis of its mission and vision is very similar to that of an NGO, similar
techniques can be used (logical framework, etc.)
• funnily, many commercial entrepreneurship tools also coincide, proof
of the current "blurring" between sectors
Support Organizations
•Promotion Entities: Ideation, Bootcamps and contests
•Training Entities: Incubators and accelerators
• Technical-financial training to develop Business Plan
• Accompaniment, coaching, mentoring
• Presentations and pitching
•Residence Entities: Hubs and coWorking / coCreation space
• Networking
•Assessment
• Good will and desire to move forward
• Lack of experience and excess of experimentation
• Customer orientation often poor
• Absolute need to mix between them
Financing
•Types
• Grant
• Loan
• Capital

•Sources
• Impact Investment Funds
• Crowdfunding
• Large NGOs and / or international institutions
• Public investment programs
• Business Angels and private investors
 Financing:
Impact Investment Funds and Venture Philanthropy
•Emerging phenomenon that is taking a great amplitude
•Many large global investment funds propose dedicating 1% to Social Impact
projects. This generates a huge stock of available capital
•Large funds "subcontract" this percentage to specialized funds

•There is a brutal cultural mismatch between this financial sector and the social
enterprises that receive the investment. This generates conflicts and confusions
•It is necessary to improve the dialogue and the relationship between these two
sectors
Academia
•Great (excessive?) academic focus on social
entrepreneurship
• There are more research articles than real
companies

•This allows an enormous popularization and

globalization of the concepts of social
entrepreneurship
3.- Content of Support Organizations
Promotion
•There are many international entities (interestingly, most are NGOs) for the
promotion of Social Entrepreneurship
• Enactus, Injaz, Hult
• Ideological bias?
•Ideation Sessions and Bootcamps
• Youthful atmosphere

•Contests
• Most of the promotional entities hold contests, sometimes international,
about projects
Training
•Output
• Business Plan and/or Business Model Canvas
• Pitch
• Question, what’s the purpose?
•Incubators and Accelerators
• Perhaps better adapted to commercial entrepreneurship than to social
entrepreneurship
• The trend towards sector specialization of many incubators is more difficult
in the social sector, due to the lack of critical mass.
•Coaching and Mentoring
• Use but not abuse, the entrepreneur must fly alone
• They must cover both social and business aspects
CoWorking Spaces
•Social ventures require even more networking than
commercial ventures
•This networking is a little different
•CoWorking Spaces specialized in social matters?
4.- International networks
International networks
•There are many international networks in social
entrepreneurship
•They facilitate networking and collaboration among
entrepreneurs, and especially among support organizations
•Some examples
• Ashoka.org
• Mouves.org
• Unchartered.org (previously Unreasonable Institute)
• Skoll Foundation –Centre for Social Entreprenuership
• The Young Foundation
• Global Social Entrepreneurship Network
References
•Articles
• Adnen Bel Hadj “Social Enterprise Ecosystem in Tunisia : The Way Ahead” El Space 2019
• Ashoka 7 Questions

•Videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ecKK3S8DOE&t=26s Social Entrepreneurship (2 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_g5RqwW51I Social Entrepreneurship (3 min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdrfMqBRfEQ&t=65s Reclaiming Social Entrepreneurship |
Daniela Papi Thornton | TEDxBend (17 min)