Marty Donkervoort is a Manitoba based social entrepreneur and educator. He's founded multiple worker co-ops and social enterprises, done consulting and teaches courses on social enterprise and sustainability.
Marty suggests that social enterprises cannot thrive without the business skills to compete in the marketplace. He also explains his story of transitioning from being an executive in a multinational corporation to working in the social sector.
Read MoreWho is your competition?
In some areas of life, there is an easy answer. If you play on a football team, clearly the other teams are your competition. If you are a football league commissioner, then it’s a little more complicated. You could see other team sports as your competition, from rugby to soccer to baseball. Beyond even that, if you’re a coach of a community team for 15-year olds, you’re trying to compete for the attention and focus of your players. You’re competing with school, music teachers, video games, and raging teenage hormones.
Competition is not as clear cut as we might like it to be. The same applies to marketing.
Read MoreShaun Loney is a Manitoba based social enterprise developer. He has started several social enterprises, and has been an advisor for many more. He has also written three books on the subject.
Shaun urges us to examine the systems within which we live and work. He has encouraged me and many others to try to work towards finding solutions for the problems that are caused by our systems.
Read MoreStarting a new year is a great natural break point. Most people at this time are naturally reflecting on what happened in the past year and are at the same time looking to what the new year will hold. I took some time over the holidays to take a break from client work and focused in on what Strategy Made Simple is about and where I’m heading with it.
I’m sharing my process here so that you can use this check in format for your social enterprise. It also has the added benefit of giving you a sneak preview of the things I’m hoping to work on in the upcoming year.
I recommend doing a check in like this at least once per year if you’re a small business, but as you grow it might help to do this check in more frequently. At the end of this post I’ve included a couple different sections you might want to add depending on what kind of business you’re running.
Read MoreWhat do our stories say about us? How do we show our values through our stories? How can we change the way we feel about ourselves by changing how we talk about ourselves?
These are all things that Cate and I talk about in this episode of the Strategy Made Simple podcast. Find out how you can tell better stories about your social enterprise.
Cate Friesen is the person behind The Story Source. She does coaching and facilitates workshops to help you or your organization find your story and teach you how to tell your story.
Read MoreKathryn Kimbley is pursuing a PhD studying nascent social entrepreneurs, in addition to running her own animal assisted therapy social enterprise called HumAnimaCIC. She is based in the Midlands in the United Kingdom.
She spoke about her personal story of getting into social enterprise, what it looks like for people to participate in animal assisted therapy, and how social enterprises might be able to incorporate animals into their operations. We also talked about the gaps between academics and practitioners, and the lack of a solid definition of social enterprise.
Read MoreMike Toye is the Executive Director of the Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCED-Net). Through his work, he attempts to bring together diverse perspectives on Community Economic Development and share successful innovations across the national community.
I got a chance to speak with him while attending the CCED-Net Manitoba Gathering, a national conference where CED academics and practitioners get together and share ideas and perspectives.
Read MoreCommunity Based Social Marketing (CBMS) is a system for promoting ideas and advocating within groups of people. It has been used by advocacy agencies to understand where their efforts are most likely to produce the results they are looking for, and whether people are likely to respond positively towards their initiatives.
Teresa Prokopanko is the Composting Coordinator for Green Action Centre in Winnipeg. In this episode she explains how small organizations can use CBSM practices as a framework for their impact campaigns.
Read MoreFrank Atnikov is the program coordinator of Social Enterprise Manitoba, an initiative of CCED-Net Manitoba. He helps connect social enterprises with resources to help them with developing their business, and coaching them through the stages of starting and growing a social enterprise.
In this episode of Strategy Made Simple, Frank walks us through a different definition of social enterprising, how to align the incentives within an organization with desired outcomes, and when it might not be a good idea to start a social enterprise.
Read MoreOn this episode of the Strategy Made Simple podcast, I interviewed Siloh Moses and we spoke about how to align your business operations with your desired impact. More specifically, we spoke about how to find out what kind of impact your business should pursue, and how to amplify the existing impact you are creating.
Siloh Moses is the founder behind WeWin360, a social good consulting agency. His book Better Than This is available on Amazon.
Read MoreRaY or Resource assistance for Youth is a non-profit based in Winnipeg, Manitoba that helps youth get into the workforce. They use several social enterprises to provide workforce training for their Level Up program. Caryn Birch is the manager of their newest social startup: Level Up: Gift and Thrift.
Caryn walks us through some of the steps that were involved with setting up a new social enterprise, and what challenges are to be expected for anyone who is thinking about starting a social startup.
Gift and Thrift is a gift shop stocked with artists' works and thrift shop for the downtown community. It is based on the Graham Mall, the main transit hub for the city, just four blocks from the Winnipeg Jets' Bell MTS place.
Read MoreThis episode features Matthew Rempel as he explains some of the basic aspects of social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. He explains how social entrepreneurs think about how they solve problems through their businesses, and how you might be able to take some of the concepts they're using and apply them to your work, whether you're with a social enterprise or not.
Email: matthew@strategymadesimple.ca
If you want to do marketing for your social enterprise with confidence, and develop your business for greater impact, please contact me, and we'll build better business together.
Read MoreWhat do people in the social enterprise sphere think about business growth? I've asked 5 of my previous guests how they think about growth and how that impacts the way their organizations operate.
Guests include:
Carinna Rosales - SEED Winnipeg, an employment focused non-profit
Yacine Bara - Changewealth, a wealth management social enterprise
Philip Mikulec - Peg City Car Coop, a car sharing co-op
Sarah Leeson-Klym - Canadian Community Economic Development Network, a community industry network and advocacy group
Brendan Reimer - Assiniboine Credit Union, a for profit credit union.
Read MoreCarinna Rosales is the Co-Executive Director of SEED Winnipeg. She helps clients develop businesses to work their way out of poverty.
Carinna works at helping to build systems to teach leadership to potential business operators. Her main goal is to help clients build a stable income that can provide for them and their families, while working through the local markets.
We also speak about some of the big challenges of businesses and non-profits that seek to make an impact, and where the leaders of social enterprise movements around the world are likely to come from.
Read MoreThere’s a common occurrence when doing freelance design work. You’ll be meeting with a new client. Everything is going well. You’ve established the scope of work. you’ve shared some drafts to get a general feel for what they’re looking for and what they need. Then you bring up your fee for the amount of work they’ve proposed and this new client is shocked and appalled that you would bring up money. “Why would we pay you? We’re bringing you so much exposure!”
This should seem ridiculous to you as a social entrepreneur. You know that your work has costs, and that exposure does not put food on the table, nor does it keep the lights on. There can be exceptions when you have a reciprocal relationship where you provide service to each other, or when you are part of an extended network of support. These are exceptions, not the rule.
Knowing this, you have to price your products and services somehow, so how do you pick a price?
Read MorePhilip Mikulec is the operations manager of the Peg City Car Co-op. They provide hub based car sharing in the Winnipeg downtown area. We spoke about how financial capital can be difficult to raise for social enterprise and co-ops, and how we might begin to build systemic source of capital. We also spoke about how the Canadian shared mobility industry is actively collaborative in trying to find solutions to their shared problems.
Read MoreOne of the biggest parts of business is providing a product or service. Once you’ve decided what problem you would like to try to solve, the next step is developing the solution. Whether your solution is delivered as a product or a service, there will come a point where you have to release your product or service into the market. So, how long should you develop your product before you release? How small can your service be before you start selling? These are important questions, but there is a single key question that underlies all questions of this type.
If you’ve been paying any attention to social media in the past few years, you will have seen the huge growth of viral awareness campaigns. These were typically started by non-profits and other organizations that require donations to continue functioning. One of the most popular and effective campaigns was the ice bucket challenge that was created by the ALS association.
Awareness campaigns like this are based on a few key assumptions. The first is that people will share information about an issue once they find out about it. The second is that if people know about an important cause or issue, they are more likely to do something about it. The third is that once they want to do something, there is a good chance that they will donate or make some other kind of contribution towards the goals outlined in the campaign.
One of the challenges with these campaigns is that the assumptions aren’t necessarily accurate. Reports on the ice bucket challenge found that (in the UK) only 10% of people who actively participated donated towards the cause. So why did so few who were actively involved not follow through and donate?
Read MoreMy guest today is Brendan Reimer, and he is the Strategic Partner of Values-Based Banking with Assiniboine Credit Union.
Over the course of our conversation, he made sure to explain how important the individual is in the process of making change. No change happens without individual people deciding that they are going to make a difference, however big or small that difference is.
He then explained how he is able to help people reach a place where they are able to help others through the use of the banking system.
Listen to the episode to find out more about how being a Co-Op changes how ACU operates, and how they help people who are normally excluded from banking.
Read MoreYacine Bara is the founder of Winnipeg based ChangeWealth, a financial planning social enterprise. They are working to provide an alternative source of income for social impact organizations. We had the chance to speak about how social enterprise can work towards finding better sources of capital to fund their operations, and how social enterprise must be able to function as a business to achieve their social goals.
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