Social Enterprises are entities that leverage the best practices of entrepreneurship to achieve social missions such as addressing climate change, enhancing human health, reducing extreme poverty, improving access to opportunity, helping under-served communities (such as the disabled, the formerly incarcerated), etc. Advance Social Innovation (ASI) is a nonprofit (a 501c3) dedicated to helping social enterprises succeed and become sustainable.In order to help social enterprises succeed, ASI has licensed an innovative mechanism invented by its strategic partner, Reframe It, Inc.--the CrowdDoing approach. CrowdDoing helps social enterprises address gaps in human capital and financial capital. It is designed to help social enterprises to scale and compete successfully alongside companies that have no or minimal social missions. It helps early-stage social enterprises address gaps in human capital by giving them affordable access to highly-skilled volunteers.
Only 8% of social enterprises are at growth-stage and beyond (with more than 100
employees). This creates a mismatch between the needs of social
enterprises and the behavior of impact investors. The vast majority of social
enterprises are at seed stage or venture stage. But impact investors direct
89% of their capital to post-venture, grow-stage social enterprises and large,
established, publicly-traded social enterprises. For-profit social
enterprises with high potential impact have had very limited access to
volunteers. Until now there has been no mechanism for individuals in the
general public to grant their own time to help change the world by increasing
the chances that fledgling social enterprises can bring transformative
social innovations to market. CrowdDoing was created to provide such a
mechanism. Studies show that in addition to raising less capital than their
traditional venture-backed startup peers, social enterprises have less access
to expertise relevant to their needs than their startup peers do.
