You may have come across Social Impact Venture Builders and their work at events or within your social media universe and wondered how you can get involved. To provide some inspiration and hopefully spark an idea or two, I have compiled a few ways in which you can directly support this new way of achieving impact.
Fundamentally, the methods used by Social Impact Venture Builders depend on support from interested stakeholders. We cannot do it alone and welcome your involvement in any form.
Support a Venture
Ventures are nascent businesses that are at the start of their journey towards sustainably realising their impact goals. Sustainability is assured by ensuring the model of each venture is market driven and results in profitability. By supporting a venture in any number of ways including, purchasing from them, providing feedback on their product or service, or by spreading the word as a vocal advocate, their chance to reach profitability and thus sustainability is improved.
Create a New Thematic Area
Before starting any venture, Venture Builders select the social issues where they desire to intervene by creating projects within an area of focus, for example Food Security or Financial Inclusion. Prior to designing these projects, areas of interest must be identified, then analysed, to determine whether there are systemic social issues of interest for which the venture building approach is appropriate. By bringing your personal or professional experience from a particular area you can help to reimagine and reshape an entire sector, industry or field of practice that any particular Venture Builder may not have realised was ripe for reinvention.
Fund a project (or start a new one!)
The early work of any Social Impact Venture Builder depends on partnerships with donor and grant partners whose goals are the delivery of sustainable impact solutions to the problems of interest. These funding partners do not have a profit motive and are able to provide the room for a Venture Builder to research, test, validate, pilot and possibly pivot proposed ideas until any particular solution is ready to seek commercial capital – often after years of work. These are the (patient) funding partnerships that are critical to the success of any Venture Builder, without which no work is possible. Whether you are new to Social Impact Venture Building or have engaged one before, there are ample opportunities to fund projects at various stages, timelines and commitment levels.
Invest in a Venture
Finally, the work of any Social Impact Venture Builder approaches success when its ventures are able to raise commercial capital and use this capital to recruit a co-founding management team, start to become independent from the Venture Builder themselves and start to scale. Once at this stage, it is increasingly likely that the impact goal will be reached! If there are any projects or ventures that interest you, follow their story. When each are ready, either invest in them if you are able or tell their story. The more success stories that reach this stage, the greater momentum and inspiration the entire community can enjoy!
I hope this brief set of ideas helps provide a few practical ways to become involved in the work of all Social Impact Venture Builders. Good luck!
