A commercial coming of age
Three years ago I felt like something of a lone voice in championing the commercial opportunity for charities. Now, it feels like awareness and interest is definitely gaining momentum.
Tag Archives: Enterprise
The charity entrepreneur
Ideas that look great on paper may not look quite so great to your potential customers. So how do you decide when to invest behind new ideas?
Stop looking for markets to enter
One of the interesting aspects of what I’ll call “the charity mindset”, is that we do things on a shoestring and if we can cover our costs, we’re good to go. That mindset leads to some very dangerous assumptions indeed.
Stop waiting for the data
The best way to develop high value commercial income with genuine impact, is to find unmet need and to create new markets around it, but that means a lot of people inside your charity need to change their expectations.
Video: profit versus impact
In this three minute video, Martyn demonstrates and explains a simple tool that you can use with the executive team in your charity and social enterprise, to quickly prioritise the big initiatives
New thinking for the New Year
2018 could be a challenging year for charities that provide services. But your assets, insights and expertise can be extremely valuable when offered to the right people, and there are often many routes to finding and helping your beneficiaries.
The end game for charities
Scaling up a service to reach all of those who may need it can be a slow, expensive, often impractical route for charities. Here are six alternatives.
Lessons from RNIB
Making good money from providing commercial services isn’t easy for anyone, but it sounds like the folks at RNIB have made some fairly basic errors.
Serious about scale
Scale brings enormous benefits if it’s done in the right way. It dramatically increases the reach and potential impact you can have in the world. But it’s rare that charities put in the time, money and focus to actually bring it about.
Time to shed the shackles
Anyone reading the press over the last year could be forgiven for thinking that working in the charity sector is like living through The Blitz. It feels like the sector’s […]
