Dear friends and stakeholders of Socential,

our social entrepreneurship marketplace initiative has entered into an exciting phase: the setting up of a pilot version featuring some of the leading Swiss social entrepreneurs and their new projects – planned for launch on January 1st 2010.

The rigorous work out into our business planning in the first half of 2009 is now proving valuable, as we are seeing that we have the right market focus as well as an implementation plan making sure we stay on track in terms of what needs to be done.

The technical solution is currently being developed by our trusted technology partner Astina, and we’re also thrilled to have been able to engage a very competent and dedicated firm for our corporate re-design, virtuallyhandmade, to give us a new, more professional look, including the web design of the to-be online marketplace.

On the communications side, we’re increasingly making efforts to reach out to further stakeholders – at the same time, more and more players in the social market are reaching out to us to discuss opportunities in the exiting field of social entrepreneurship. In this context, we’re also keen to give due credit to our social investors, partners, and advisors – as you will see on the updated website – without these people and organizations, we wouldn’t have come this far, and certainly not in this short period of time. The continued commitment of PricewaterhouseCoopers has been crucial to provide the time as well as expertise to keep us going strong through this phase. Further, the financial support granted by Avina Stiftung has enabled us to make some of the necessary investments for implementing the service.

In this rather intensive phase, we’re hoping to be able to give you more frequent updates on our progress, as well as posting notes on relevant market developments and trends. So stay tuned!

Linus & Patrik