This is the first book on creating and running a social enterprise to combine theoretical discussions with current cases from around the world, filling a huge gap in the literature. It serves as an eminently practical blueprint for those who wish to build, sustain, and grow social ventures.
 
Building a Successful Social Venture draws on Eric Carlson's and James Koch's pioneering work with the Global Social Benefit Institute, cofounded by Koch at Santa Clara University's Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship. Since 2003, over 200 Silicon Valley executives have mentored more than 800 aspiring social entrepreneurs at the GSBI. It is this unparalleled real-world foundation that truly sets the book apart. Early versions of the book were used in both undergraduate and MBA classes.

Part 1 of the book describes the assumptions that the GSBI model is based on: a bottom-up approach to social change, a focus on base-of-the-pyramid markets, and a specific approach to business planning developed by the GSBI. Part 2 presents the seven elements of the GSBI business planning process, and Part 3 lays out the keys to executing it. The book includes “Social Venture Snapshots” illustrating how different organizations have realized elements of the plan, as well as a wealth of checklists and exercises.

Social ventures hold enormous promise to solve some of the world's most intractable problems. This book offers a tested framework for students, social entrepreneurs, and field researchers who wish to learn more about the application of business principles and theories of change for advancing social progress and creating a more just world.

In this groundbreaking guide to building a profitable social enterprise, leading entrepreneurs Julius Walls and Kevin Lynch show readers how to solve the profit/mission paradox and run a successful business that puts its social mission first.Business has the power to change the world, but some businesses embrace that opportunity more aggressively than others do. Social enterprises put their change mission first – what they sell or what service they provide is a means to accomplishing a larger goal, rather than an end in itself. Their front-and-center commitment to doing good makes social enterprises immensely attractive. But if you want to run one successfully, you have to manage a tricky balancing act. How can you be as efficient as any of your for-profit or nonprofit competitors while at the same time staying true to your social purpose? In this groundbreaking guide, social entrepreneurs Kevin Lynch and Julius Walls draw on their own extensive experiences and those of twenty other social enterprise leaders to focus on the fundamental blocking and tackling tactics that make the difference between success and failure. Exploring the many paradoxes that can hamstring social enterprises, the authors explain how starting and running a social enterprise requires leaders to adopt an entirely different mindset and often a wholly different perspective on the day-to-day choices they’re forced to make. Likewise, Walls and Lynch help readers grapple with a different set of expectations from employees, investors, customers, and the community. For social enterprise practitioners, these expectations present an added layer of difficulty – but they can also offer unique advantages, which the authors explain how to leverage. Whether readers are looking for guidance on finding and hiring talent, marketing, finances, or scaling, this practical, accessible guide offers clear and compelling answers that light the way.

• The popularity of social enterprises has exploded in recent years – this is the authoritative guide to starting and running one
• Offers practical, from-the-trenches advice from two leading social entrepreneurs on confronting the challenges and seizing the opportunities social enterprises present
• The newest book in the Social Venture Network series – over 50,000 books in the series sold to date

Whether you're an entrepreneur building a new enterprise, the leader of an established socially responsible business, or a marketing professional at a Fortune 500 company who wants to make a difference, this "in-the-trenches" guide provides action steps for creating marketing programs that benefit your company and the world.
Using real-life examples from Patagonia, General Mills, Clif Bar, and many other companies, Marketing That Matters shows how to define your company's mission, goals, and potential audience in ways that are flexible, creative, and true to your organization's core values. They offer ten practices to engage customers using innovative marketing techniques--from discovering how customers make decisions to building committed communities of customers, employees, and strategic partners who will spread the word about your company--and potentially change the world. Marketing that Matters is the definitive handbook to help you incorporate social responsibility as a core element in your company's marketing strategy.

• A step-by-step guide any organization can use to build an effective, ethical marketing strategy
• Features examples from such companies as Patagonia, General Mills, Clif Bar, and many others
• Written by two award-winning entrepreneurs known for their inventive marketing approaches

Growing a successful business is about meeting the needs of customers--and, by extension, the needs of the entire community. Turn your business into a good citizen and you can help ensure its success and contribute to making your community a great place to live and work. Growing Local Value shows how to build a values-driven business that is deeply embedded in local life. Drawing on real-world examples from Greyston Bakery, Wild Planet Toys, Powell's Books, and many other companies, Laury Hammel and Gun Denhart show how you can leverage every aspect of your business--from product creation to employee recruitment, vendor selection, and raising capital--to benefit both the community and the bottom line. Growing Local Value explores in depth how your business can contribute to its community--and the benefits it will receive when it does.

• By the cofounder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies--the nation's most prominent advocacy organization for local businesses--and the founder of the internationally known children's clothing company Hanna Andersson
• Details specific business practices that will enable local businesses to strengthen both their communities and their bottom lines
• Offers a host of real-world examples from companies such as Greyston Bakery, Wild Planet Toys, Powell's Books, and many others

Go Green While Making Green You already know why your company should go green. This comprehensive guide tells you how to do it profitably. It details every step of the process—from getting employee buy-in and conducting a current sustainability audit to developing a plan of action and measuring progress. Nuts-and-bolts guidance helps you make continuous, cost-effective improvements and shift the prevailing business culture by infusing green practices into your organization’s very DNA. Through illustrative examples from a wide variety of industries, this book shows how to: • Design sustainable products • Green your facilities • Find green vendors • Use renewable energy • Reduce harmful emissions • Recycle waste products, and more The emphasis is on practicality—stand-alone chapters you can read when you need them and tools you can use to implement change in any area of your organization. enough

• The first book to show small and medium-sized companies how to go green not just cost effectively, but profitably.

• Offers detailed, specific advice and tools for greening every area of an organization

• Copublished with Social Venture Network, one of the nations leading socially responsible business organizations

If you run a small to medium-sized business and youre wondering whether or not to go green, this book probably isnt for you. Although David Mager and Joe Sibilia do include ten reasons that sustainability makes economic and ecological sense, theyre not here to convince you why. Street Smart Sustainability is about howdetailed, nuts-and-bolts, step by step advice on how to green business green profitably.

Read cover to cover this is a comprehensive A to Z handbook, but each chapter also works as a self-contained stand-alone guide to a specific business function.  So if you need to you can go right to whichever chapter speaks to your needs at the moment. 

Mager and Sibilia begin by discussing how to get employee buy-in to and motivate your company into becoming sustainable. Then they cover how to get startedauditing your current sustainability position, developing a plan to move forward, and quantitatively measuring your progress.

With a plan and metrics in place, Mager and Sibilia move on to the particulars.  They detail how to design products to be sustainable from the get-to, green your facilities, use renewable energy, minimize your carbon footprint, find green vendors to work with, reduce harmful emissions, and recycle waste products. The book is filled with real-world examples from a variety of businesses and industries. The emphasis is always on practicalitybesides seasoned advice Mager and Sibilia provide a wide range of tools you can use immediately to implement their suggestions

Street Smart Sustainability is a road map to the sustainable low-hanging fruit at a time when the public is hungry for businesses that demonstrate genuine respect for the environment. It provides simple tools so you can make continuous, cost-effective improvements in your sustainability practicespractices that diffuse into the organizational DNA and become fixtures, shifting the prevailing corporate culture.

How do you build the kind of company you've always wanted to work in--one that serves people and the planet while being financially successful, too? What do you do when you believe that business should serve the common good, but everyday business pressures--meeting payroll, battling competition, keeping customers and investors happy--are at a fever pitch? Leading a small business when you measure success more broadly than with a single financial bottom line is no easy task. True to Yourself is a practical guide to doing just that. It provides tools you can use to combine profit with purpose, margin with mission, value with values.

• By the author of the New York Times bestseller Making a Life, Making a Living
• The second volume in the Social Venture Network Series for small businesses
• Draws on the author's experience and interviews with 75 innovative small business leaders to offer a practical guide to leadership practices needed to build a business that reflects your values
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