If you’d like to create an innovative, cost-effective marketing strategy for your small business, sustainable company, or social enterprise, then this session is for you. Learn how social marketing is quickly becoming a driving force for positive change.
It is an approach used to encourage social change by promoting a behaviour rather than selling a product or service. It can be a powerful, cost-effective tool for small businesses – particularly those with an environmental or social focus – helping guide clients and partners towards more sustainable and charitable behaviours.
What will I learn in the session?
During this session, you will learn how social marketing techniques can help your organisation achieve consumer and employee support, whilst influencing behavioural change. You will also have an opportunity to share your communication or marketing challenge with our experts, who will apply their knowledge of social marketing and work with you to develop the best solution.” Source: University of Derby
City of Derby montage: source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby
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Are you an established business that delivers social enterprise excellence? Want to find out more about how the Social Enterprise Gold Mark can help you build on what’s unique about your business and stand out as an excellent social enterprise?
”Join Social Enterprise Mark CIC at the next instalment of their virtual coffee morning sessions to hear from fellow social enterprises who will share their recent experiences of the Social Enterprise Gold Mark assessment process and how the accreditation has benefited their business.”
You will have the opportunity to ask any questions you may have, and also meet and connect with like-minded organisations, which are also interested in proving their social enterprise credentials.
Due to the interactive nature of the event, numbers will be restricted, so please do book now to secure your place:
The future, post-Covid and all the economic and social change that lies ahead, will need to bring with it a commitment to both training and re-skill for many, but also a distinct, hardy and tenacious set of practical and soft skills for the enduring entrepreneur.
Looking to the future: Image by Benjamin Davies, Creative Commons, Unsplash
This is the message contained in a useful and perceptive series of articles to come from Pioneers Post. It is a landscape of compassion, certainly, given the context of the work, but also a landscape of uncertainty that will be managed through endurance, creativity and a survival ethos.
List of skills updated: 6th June 2021 – see below…
A heady cocktail of needs for the social entrepreneur looking to the future.
‘Experts have warned that half the world’s employees will need to be reskilled by 2025. But with which skills? In our new series, Emerald Works’ Kevin Dunne and Social Enterprise Academy’s Claire Wilson set out seven critical, “no regrets” skills that social enterprise leaders will need to flourish in the post-Covid-19 landscape.’
The seven key skills, promoted by the authors of this thinking are sound and relevant – especially if you are on the brink of leading your new SocEnt project up the enterprise foothills to sustainability.
We were worried, diving into the article, that this was a promotional pivot for a hardened, corporatist lean-into enterprise for good. We should not have worried. Vigorous commitment to the seven principles espoused can, we see, develop individuals with strong technical skills.
Skills that allied with the compassion that got them into the sector in the first place, may well be the key to all our survival.
This brief article provides information about a University of Derby free event for Social Enterprise organisations, which provides a detailed and reflective focus on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2030.
SocEntEastMids is a proud supporter of the event, and we are completely aligned with the aims of the day – and in supporting participants and partners beyond the confines of this single event too.
Creating a more sustainable, compassionate world.
Date and time
Thursday, 17 June 2021
10.00 – 13.00
‘This free event is aimed at social enterprises, to engage them with the sustainable development goals (SDGs), the targets identified by the United Nations to achieve global peace and prosperity.
The event includes a series of talks from academics, policy experts and social enterprises in the field. It will also feature a learning activity, where social enterprises can learn about mapping their social impact and identifying untapped future potential using the SDGs, by reflecting on how these link to forms of wealth that a social enterprise can generate.’
Source: University of Derby
Some key web links to inform your decision to attend:
We are relocating our business base to rural Norfolk.
Our commitment to the support of SocEnt seedbed development, with individuals and partners across the UK, remains undimmed and unfaltering.
All our usual webmail, phone numbers and e-contacts remain as before.
We are now situated on the outskirts of Swaffham, Norfolk UK. We are two minutes away from the the local Waitrose store and the town wind turbine blades cast a shadow across our access road. (Easy to spot…Ed).
Swaffham is an ancient market town, and from the 14thC was a centre for the wool trade in Norfolk. Now the town has a wealth of local entrepreneurship and businesses to support the rural hinterland.
Find us here on the edge of town…
PE37 7XD
EcoTech Business Centre, Offices of SmithMartin LLP, Unit 27d, Turbine Way, Swaffham, Norfolk, UK.
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The SEEE toolkit has six distinct sections, designed to help smaller organisations to understand their impact. By methodically gathering evidence, reflecting on it and transposing the information into useful data presentations.
Giving the information and responses, which we all collect in the social business sector, an organised and accessible face.
Using the toolkit you will work through themes around information collection, engagement, conversations, outcomes, data processing and organised planning and dissemination.
The toolkit is not free, but your licence enables up to five people in the organisation to collaborate and contribute to process. As well have access to all the worksheets you create on the toolbox system to move your information project forward.
Poverty and economic and social exclusion can often be invisible in rural areas, we would argue. The trees are no less green, the landscape no less bucolic, if the individual residents or communities are economically and socially disenfranchised.
During 2020 and our following of the thrashing dragon’s tail that is Covid, the media is full of economic data, socio-economic opinion and, perhaps the newest media feature, the ubiquitous graph.
How many of us, we wonder, fully understand the context of the data we are being asked to support or accept. How many of our communities can use data to successfully mount the argument that their’s is the community that needs to be refreshed and supported too?
There is a new toolkit on the block in 2020.
The Institute of Economic Development (IED) and the Rural Services Network (RSN) have devised a new practitioner-focused toolkit which is intended as a guide for “anyone seeking to raise rural relevance in the economic agenda”.
This pivotal report looks at the current policy drivers and meta-trends governing the development of the rural economy.
There is a strong section on the collection and analysis of data to establish the needs and desired outcomes for a given community of interest.
Finally, the document looks at best practice in the rural environment, ranging across coping with ageing in communities, wealth creation and digital expansion, or the need for it.
There is nothing in the toolkit that will be radical for the dedicated, urban social entrepreneur. What the toolkit does is to translate ambitions into a rural context, helping the players in communities to shape and define their developmental argument.
The toolkit also offers, we think, very sound thinking in its data analysis sections on how deep to drill for data, how to manage and structure what you find and finally, what the output should look like.
All skills and limitations that any or all researched arguments for economic development can use. Be they rural or devoutly urbanist in approach.
We wish all our readers, clients and new friends in 2021 the very best of everything and a brighter, busier, more convivial context for their projects…
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Our partnership was pleased to make a contribution to a research project recently, which sought to define what and how Social Innovation practices improve the social innovation culture of UK Social Enterprises.
The core assumptive definition of Social Innovation for the project was that of ”...a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals”. (Source: Phills et al., 2008, p. 36)
Some of the key findings of interest to us clearly reflected our experience of SocEnt development and community business/community development processes in the past.
Community is the source of the innovative process…
Design thinking stimulates the search for solutions through experimentation and quick action, is iterative, is based on collaborative work and facilitate the involvement of users (beneficiaries), who are the centre of the innovative process.
The agile method facilitates the communication and integration between several actors involved in the innovation process by dividing the project into stages.
Using the knowledge, competency, partners and relationships that already exist in the SE is a viable option to encourage innovative activities.
(This latter implication is in fact the basis of our project delivery at SocEntEastMids – we share the knowledge and expertise for free at the point of engagement…Ed.)
Alignment between employees’ personal interest / belief and social enterprise mission and dual role of client and employee are a powerful booster for intra-preneurship.
(For us, again, culture and mission are irrevocably intertwined…Ed).
Finally, we were both delighted and surprised to see the modest size of the innovatory organisations included and the durability of their projects. Fourteen years of age was the average.
We understand the research team are still open to engagement from the UK SocEnt sector regarding the process of social innovation. (See contact details in the report above.)
Long, may the innovation last!
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Originally framed for corporate tech entrepreneurs, don’t be put off. The concepts can also hold good for social enterprises thinking of pivoting all or part of their business to reflect new circumstances. New community businesses responding to the request ‘…come and tell us about your project/business idea‘ will find the simple brevity useful, we would argue. Particularly if you are having a ‘where do we start’ moment!
This is a film about the art of the presentation. It can help you to acquire the skill in assembling your knowledge, the making of a telling argument to convince your audience about your community project, your funding renewal or your pending impact investment, amongst many possible goals.
Delivered last year (2019) by the late Professor Patrick Winston at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology(MIT), it is ostensibly for would be academic scientists. But there is much to discover about your own existing skill set, your preconceived ideas about your audience and it also delivers challenging ways to maximise your effectiveness.
We watched it in the office, as part of an exercise to think about refreshing the ways we use to pitch, for a new project we have coming up.
We winced as we realised we had delivered ‘death by PowerPoint’ sessions in the past, and some of us had allowed our purple prose to even cross the whiteboard, cross the meeting room and exit out into the car park.
Professor Winston was sharing a life time of thought. We think everyone will find something in it…
Source: Originally published as part of the MIT OpenCourseWare programme.
How to write well and effectively?
This filmed lecture, from the University of Chicago by Larry McEnerney, is about writing for the real world. It is delivered in accessible language and the key ideas have real relevance for writing in the Social Enterprise/Social Impact sector.
For McEnerney ‘writing in the real world’ can involve the use of jargon, being able to identify your readers, clarity of purpose and the use of the written word ‘to change the world’. He also has some interesting takes on the process of being paid to write.
Practical examples of the techniques and the understanding of your text start at around the 20 minute mark.
Speak well, write well, pitch well – improve the reach of your project, your idea or your community ambitions.
Source: First publ. 2015, as part of the UChicago Social Sciences Leadership Lab programme
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By far the most numerous query we get, both for sources of information, or for direct advice and guidance, is around the governance, formation and change relating to Community Interest Companies.
Below are links to the latest forms, examples and formal guidance notes on Gov.uk – if we can help with your changes, formally or informally, do just ask – our services are free. (Sourced: August 2020)
Board meeting image: You X Ventures, Creative Commons, Unsplash
Formal Note‘When applying to form a community interest company (CIC), this form should be submitted to the CIC Regulator alongside the appropriate Companies House forms, memorandum of association, articles of association and payment’.
Formal Note ‘When applying to transfer assets of a community interest company (CIC), consent should be submitted to the CIC Regulator signed by a director of the company, detailing assets, value and actual consideration received’.
Formal Note ‘There are 2 types of community interest company (CIC) report: detailed and simplified. The majority of CICs complete the simplified report.
The detailed report is reserved for CICs that have more complex financial arrangements. If you complete this type of report, you might need to get professional advice in relation to the financial information sections.
CIC reports are placed on the public register and made available for the public, which provides an opportunity to showcase your CIC’s activities and the benefits provided for the community over the last year. Your report does not have to be especially detailed, but you should identify highlights’.
Formal Note ‘When applying to convert a company to a community interest company (CIC), this form should be submitted to the CIC Regulator alongside the appropriate Companies House forms, memorandum of association, articles of association and payment’.
Formal Note – The community interest statement
‘…a statement of the steps that have been taken to bring the proposed alteration to the notice of people affected by the company’s activities (signed by each of the company’s directors).
When applying to alter the objects of a community interest company (CIC), this form should be submitted to the CIC Regulator alongside:
Companies House form CC04 – to notify the change of the company’s objects a signed copy of the special resolution to alter the objects of the company a copy of the articles of association, as altered’.
