Over the last 15 years, we have worked with hundreds of social innovators and observed first hand the obstacles they face when looking to finance their impact. Here are the three main challenges we have identified that we are sure you have experienced:
Social innovators don’t just want to make profit, they want to solve a social problem. Finding a way of doing so using a sustainable business model is difficult, it requires a real mindset shift.
Even if social innovators develop an investable and scalable business model, they often don’t know how to speak to impact investors. Conversely, investors rarely know how to think about impact.
Social innovators often don’t know the process for raising investment. They don’t know what they need to prepare, what the process involves and what investors are looking for. When they do meet investors, they may not know exactly what to ask for, nor how to negotiate.
We have built a comprehensive online toolkit for social innovators and investors to help them on their journey of raising blended finance, the Social Investment Toolkit. In eight modules, we guide you on each step of the way, from how to define your social mission to creating a compelling investor pitch. We’ll show you how social investors think and what they are looking for.
We explore your ‘Social Change’ Model: what’s the problem you’re solving, how are you going to do so, and how you explain this clearly to investors? We show how a clear social impact strategy can attract investors and introduce the concept of an ‘Impact Chain’.
In this Module, we will discuss how to choose clear Impact Metrics that will help you steer your venture and explain your impact to others. We show how to pick useful metrics and different ways to demonstrate your ‘Social Return on Investment’.
In our third Module, we cover the stages of your ventures, and explore ways to generate income to pay for your venture’s activities by selling goods or services and setting up an effective revenue model.
Social entrepreneurs have many different paths to scaling up their social impact, ranging from open sourcing their ideas to franchising their business. We set out the different options for scaling, and help you pick which one is right for you.
In Module 5, we walk you through the steps to building your Financial Model, so that you can forecast your income and expenditure going forward, as well as your projected social impact.
Module 6 helps you to think through the legal structure for your social enterprise. How you are legally incorporated (whether as a for-profit, not-for-profit or hybrid) influences from whom you can raise investment, and in what form.
Here we explain the different forms of finance that you can raise, covering different types of debt, equity and grants. We discuss the key features of each and how to pick the right financing option for your organisation.
In this final Module, we explain the key materials that you will need to prepare before entering investor discussions, including how to prepare a Due Diligence Package, a Business Plan and an Investment Slide Deck.
All the written materials of the Online Social Investment Toolkit are also available as a beautiful, full colour printed book which can be bought on Amazon. Click on the icon below to buy. Contact us if you have any questions.
