Social Business Model Canvas

Published by Net4SocialImpact Support on February 21, 2021February 21, 2021

The Social Business Model Canvas is a tool for creating a solid business model around your social enterprise. It’s also a collaborative tool that helps you communicate different business models with your stakeholders and brainstorm new ones.

The original Business Model Canvas has been altered in various ways by experts. These alterations reflect the fact that a social enterprise is a business venture, which is inherently driven by social mission.

In the case of a social enterprise, the business model should be understood as the analysis of the rationale, infrastructure, capabilities and use of resources that enable stakeholders to create value – economic and social – for themselves and for the organization.

These various templates are designed in order to help their users to overcome some of the challenges faced by social enterprises. These are:

• Strategy Challenge arising from tensions and conflicts created by the parallel pursuit of economic and social goals;
• Legitimacy Challenge arising from the hybridity of social enterprises, which limits the possibility that stakeholders have to use using familiar categories for shaping their expectations regarding the behaviour of social enterprises;
• Mission Measurement Paradox that arises from the practice diffused among managers of social enterprises of using growth measures instead of adequate measurements of social impact;
• Governance Challenge that refers to the task of designing systems and processes concerned with direction, control and accountability that are the most adequate for the pursuit of mission and objectives.

Further sources:
https://sehub.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/Social%20Business%20Model%20Canvas_1.pdf
https://socialenterpriseinstitute.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Social-Business-Model-Canvas.pdf

https://bmtoolbox.net/tools/social-business-model-canvas/