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Balancing your head and your heart
The battle of social entrepreneurship
I was recently training a group of current and potential social entrepreneurs about key stakeholders and how to ensure their buy-in at all stages from idea to execution. We discussed various methods, channels of communication, tools such as Social Return on Investment and how to share stories in a convincing and moving way.
I also got the participants to do a small quiz on how they make decisions. Overwhelmingly, the outcome was that most people supposedly used their head rather than their heart, however at the end of the workshop one lady came up to me and shared her current situation.
She had been running her own social enterprise for 9 years, with success, ensuring schools have access to clean water in Tanzania. However the idea came from the need for social change and better resources, with the financial side, and thus the business, following this. She had recognised herself in what I had said during the workshop.
“With a large numbers of social enterprise coming from the third sector, quite often people care so much about the social goal, they might, to some degree, neglect the financial sustainability.”
Her question was simple — how do you solve this problem?
