The Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI™), a program developed by Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society, assists social benefit entrepreneurs in developing business plans that enable their organizations to reach increasing numbers of beneficiaries. The GSBI consists of three major components:
- On-line, mentored, application process
- Scholarships for an online (4 month) and in-residence (2 week) program for 20 organisations
- On-going mentoring and collaboration for selected organisations
To Apply:
Become a member of www.socialedge.org and, beginning January 4, 2010 complete the following three GSBI™ Business Planning Exercises:
1. Value Proposition (Due Friday, January 15, 2010)
2. Target Market (Beneficiary) Statement (Due Friday, January 29, 2010)
3. Definition of a Business Model (Due Friday, February 19, 2010)
Check the GSBI™ website for more information.
Showing posts with label Business Plan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Business Plan. Show all posts
Friday, January 08, 2010
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Nonprofits: Business Plans Versus Grant Proposals
This post by Patrick O'Heffernan, Are you a business plan or grant proposal social entrepreneur?, on the Social Edge blog comes at a handy time when I've been wrestling with writing a business plan for my nonprofit.
When it was first suggested to me that I write a business plan (about 2 years before I would actually set-up the organisation), it seemed that its purpose would primarily be to determine the feasibility of the world-be organisation. Fair enough. My friends sent me templates and I picked the simplest looking one and started work. Only it was much harder than I had hoped. Along the way, I dropped it meaning to continue with it at some point.
Anyway, fast-forward a couple of years and the nonprofit had started operations. Again I was advised to develop a plan, which which both help map-out the organisation's plan of action, and serve as a fund-raising tool. Fair enough, I thought again.
However, working on it has not been easy, however I have a semblance of a sort-of -ish plan. But, this was not the NGO school I came from. In my previous work experience, our source of funding came primarily from grants, which we got after slaving over proposals or completing often complex and multi-layered application processes. This is what I am used to and was expecting. The notion of asking companies to invest in your idea is a novel one; though perhaps one can think of grants as a form of investment in an approach or person who is going to address a social need.
I have experienced life in the nonprofit during an economic downturn before and it definitely wasn't fun to wake-up each day not knowing if this was the day your position would be axed as part of cost-reduction tactics. I remember feeling that it was crazy that our ability to do our work (not to mention our livelihood!) was dependent on whether we were given money or not, and I vowed that if I remained in the nonprofit world, I would find a better way of doing things.
Maybe that is the opportunity presented by this option to go a more business and bottomline-oriented route.
Patrick O' Heffernan highlights some advantages to starting a business to accomplish social goals:
When it was first suggested to me that I write a business plan (about 2 years before I would actually set-up the organisation), it seemed that its purpose would primarily be to determine the feasibility of the world-be organisation. Fair enough. My friends sent me templates and I picked the simplest looking one and started work. Only it was much harder than I had hoped. Along the way, I dropped it meaning to continue with it at some point.
Anyway, fast-forward a couple of years and the nonprofit had started operations. Again I was advised to develop a plan, which which both help map-out the organisation's plan of action, and serve as a fund-raising tool. Fair enough, I thought again.
However, working on it has not been easy, however I have a semblance of a sort-of -ish plan. But, this was not the NGO school I came from. In my previous work experience, our source of funding came primarily from grants, which we got after slaving over proposals or completing often complex and multi-layered application processes. This is what I am used to and was expecting. The notion of asking companies to invest in your idea is a novel one; though perhaps one can think of grants as a form of investment in an approach or person who is going to address a social need.
I have experienced life in the nonprofit during an economic downturn before and it definitely wasn't fun to wake-up each day not knowing if this was the day your position would be axed as part of cost-reduction tactics. I remember feeling that it was crazy that our ability to do our work (not to mention our livelihood!) was dependent on whether we were given money or not, and I vowed that if I remained in the nonprofit world, I would find a better way of doing things.
Maybe that is the opportunity presented by this option to go a more business and bottomline-oriented route.
Patrick O' Heffernan highlights some advantages to starting a business to accomplish social goals:
- Quicker and sometimes easier to get investment capital
- As long as there's a market need for your products and you're well-priced, your revenues and profits will keep you in business regardless of the latest fads among donors
- You are responsible for your income and you decide what needs to be done to keep it flowing, i.e. no being at a donor's mercy
- Flexibility, because market changes and competition (and not grant agreements nor program officers' requests) drives your business decisions
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