For years, some of us have mused about some kind of national system to drive sales to social enterprises. The basic idea is that there are government agencies and socially-minded companies who might be willing to purchase large quantities of goods and services from social enterprises, provided someone would identify qualified suppliers and make it easy to order from them.
While such a national system is still a ways off, the first tentative steps were taken in this direction by Social Venture Partners of Rhode Island, who recently launched their Buy With Heart program.
With a lot of volunteer help and a barebones budget, they identified more than 100 social enterprises in Rhode Island, mostly nonprofits, organized them into logical categories, and created the above web site to present their offerings. That by itself was an impressive accomplishment: the first-ever statewide directory of social enterprises.
They are now in the process of developing promotional strategies to drive traffic to this website, which would then (they hope) lead to demonstrable sales increases. They are also now developing a methodology for identifying and vetting additional social enterprises to include to their directory, particularly for-profit companies, which is no small task to undertake. Finally, they are exploring strategies to monetize this work so it will become self-funding.
Here in the Rockies, SEA Colorado (local chapter of the Social Enterprise Alliance) is also in the process of developing a statewide SE directory. We intend to learn from the Buy With Heart program, and possibly develop some kind of partnership with SVP-RI to build on their expertise. The eventual goal of course would be a national directory and procurement strategy for social enterprises.
Now, for the first time, there seems to be some movement in that direction. Yeah!
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Social enterprises can thrive only when demand driven. This is a great idea to not only help the social enterprises survive and thrive but to help consumers become aware of the goods and services sold by social enterprises. I’d like to see such a directory in Alaska.
I think this is a great idea. I’ve been trying to do something similar but to drive volunteers and donors to about 150 non school volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs in Chicago.
I’ve been building a directory of these programs since 1993 and have put it on-line in a map-based searchable directory which you can see at http://www.tutormentorprogramlocator.net. You can refine your search to look for programs offering different types of tutoring/mentoring, serving different age groups, in different times of day, and by zip code.
I’m trying to find investor/partners to add features to this that would work like the corporate advertising department of big companies to create “sales” and “events” that would increase the number of people who browse the map and provide support to different organizations. While it would be great if each of these non profits could produce t-shirts, cards, or other marketable goods and services their primary mission is helping kids. Thus I feel there is an opportunity for an intermediary to create products and services that motivate donors to give, and give often. If some of the local program learn to add products/service features by learning from each other that would only enhance their ability to become more consistently funded and better able to achieve their social mission.
If any of you would like to help develop this and use it in your own communities let me know.