Think big start small

This is the first of the key steps to moving your charity into a social business.

It is important to understand what you are trying to achieve by using business, rather than donations and grants, to address your social objectives.

A good reason for doing this is to reduce your dependency on donations and grants, allowing your organisation to become financially independent.

This means you do not have to continually justify your existence by lobbying the Government, Multi-laterals, local businesses and philanthropists for donations and grants to ensure that your organisation can continue operating.

But changing behaviours and habits is not easy to do.

It takes planning, attention to detail, dedication and most of all the willingness to change.

This is what faces those who are turning their charity into a social business.

My advice is to focus on one area of your organisation to change rather than converting your whole organisation over night.

This will allow you to test and track progress on this one area without committing to large scale change.

Large scale change means a larger risk, so by converting individual sections you minimise the risk of incurring high costs, effort and impact to your reputation and brand.

Launching new products or services will take time, but it will give you an income stream that will supplement the donations you are currently receiving.

Ultimately you want it to work the other way round, where you have donations that are used as a top-up for your main income streams, which is selling products and services to cover your costs.

Step 3 will give examples on how you can look at individual sections without committing to covert your whole organisation in to a social business in one go.


Mike.