Socential

Social [′sō-shəl] : of or relating to human society, the interaction of the individual and the group, or the welfare of human beings as members of society.

Entrepreneur [äⁿn-trə-p(r)ə-′nər] : one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.

Social entrepreneurs drive innovative and sustainable solutions to social and environmental issues. They identify a pressing social problem and use entrepreneurial skills to solve it. Their work differ from traditional charity as they use innovative business models and methods to ensure effectiveness and scalability and also differ from traditional business as they put the benefit to society first.

Socential [sō-′sen(t)-shəl] empowers high calibre social entrepreneurs to realize their ideas and projects. We are building an online marketplace for investing, networking and collaboration in social entrepreneurship.

We provide social entrepreneurs the valuable access to dedicated capital, resources and know-how.

We offer philanthropists, social investors and individuals who would like to empower innovative solutions to social issues the chance to contribute their skills, products, services and funds.

Update: 31.03.2010  Socential has appointed Naoko Felder-Kuzu, who since January 2010 is also heading social investment management at Socential, as one of the new board members: http://www.socential.org/804

Naoko, born in Japan and raised in El Salvador and Guatemala, is an advisor on microfinance and impact investments based in Zurich, Switzerland. She advises asset managers as well as foundations. Her first book Making Sense-Microfinance and Microfinance Investments was one of the first books on microfinance investments. In her second book “Kleiner Einsatz, Grosse Wirkung” or Microfinance and Beyond: Introducing microfranchising and social businesses she portrays the innovative social/businesses models that provide sustainable solutions to the problem of poverty. Her expertise and passion is on promoting business models with a double bottom line (financial and social returns) and bridging the economic divide through the creation of entrepreneurs in developing countries. She is a board member of a family foundation in Switzerland.

We are very much looking forward to working with Naoko on our common vision to empower social entrepreneurs, and see a great value in having her expertise on board!

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

On July 7th, Socential attended the ECOSOC Innovation Fair, presenting at a booth shared with the UNDP South-South Exchange Forum, the founders of the Human Development Investment Exchange, HDSX.  We also attended the forum Building Partnerships and Financing Cooperation across Developing Countries, which featured presentations of some key pioneer online social marketplaces and social entrepreneurs working with them to share knowledge and obtain resources.

In his introductory speech, Yiping Zhou, Director of the Special Unit for South-South Cooperation in UNDP, noted that Fortune Magazine has recently added corporate social responsibility to their rankings, which once again confirms the trend of the social responsibility making its way into corporations’ business, away from just being a side topic.

He also noted the current mind shift in UN, moving away from building capability and implementing projects themselves, to acting as an enabler for local initiatives building the capacity where it is needed and adapted to local conditions.

Francisco Simplicio, heading the HDSX initiative, mentioned three main trends he sees in social markets:

• Trend 1: Moving towards Social Business (from classical charity)
• Trend 2: An increasing number of new investors and players
• Trend 3: Evolvement of facilitation services and platforms

The main driver behind the HDSX, which is currently being piloted, is that great solutions in social markets have difficulty scaling up. So what they aim to do is to facilitate the sharing of best practices, as well as attract more social investors.

Tamzin Ractliffe, founder of the Global Federation of Social Investment Exchanges, GSIX, talked about the need for making the entire continuum of social return only -> social and financial return projects and organizations investible. Creating marketplaces will reward initiatives combining doing good with doing well.

Virginia Davis Floyd of the social business METRAF GIE told a vivid story of the difficulties of finding investors for their nutrition project (despite a genuine business plan, having onboarded important partners, and being able to offer investors a combined social and financial return on investment!), and was thrilled to get the opportunity to access social investors via a marketplace.

Several of the social entrepreneurs present were also keen to stay in touch with us at Socential, and evaluate future collaboration opportunities, such as attracting investments from the Swiss market and benchmarking leading social enterprises in Switzerland.