Ahead of International Women’s Day last weekend, we spoke to 4 female social entrepreneurs from across the UK to bring the Home Nations centre stage for the occasion.

Along with determination and hard work, it takes a whole lot of love to run a successful social enterprise. In this post, we’re excited to feature the stories of three social enterprises that were built with lots of love at their very core.   

Ishita Ranjan is the Project Manager of Good Finance. She manages the website and content strategy, coordinates partners and stakeholders, and drives the direction of the project. Image   In this post, she reflects on Good Finance's five key learnings from 2019. 

Henna Patel, Communications Coordinator at School for Social Entrepreneurs, shares learnings from experts and social entrepreneurs with first hand experience with social impact measurement.  Image

We’ve all heard of Comic Relief, the major UK charity fighting for a world free from poverty. Through a busy calendar of events, Comic Relief has been fundraising to support organisations around the world since the 1980s. Interestingly, in recent years, Comic Relief has formed a social investment fund called ‘Red Shed’ through its own money. This new fund aims to further the impact of its work through new funding structures.

From curtain makers to music producers, there’s an exciting range of individuals and organisations using creative & innovative solutions to drive social change across the UK. No doubt this is a sector continuing to grow.

What makes a social investor different? To start, social investors want to make investments that have both a social and financial return. In fact, many of the organisations making social investments are social businesses themselves.

Aside from social investment, there's other streams of funding that can help you to improve your organisations energy resilience. 

A few months ago, some 300 social entrepreneurs and social investors got together and started humming. Weird? Possibly. But here’s how it all began…

At a time of political, environmental and economic crisis, we all need to do our bit to build a better world. With inequality on the rise and a climate emergency on our hands, social enterprises are providing us with the hope and solutions we need.

It's estimated that over 3,000 charities and social enterprises have benefitted from social investment in the UK. While we haven't surveyed all 3,000, we've definitely heard a thing or two while chatting to 'the frontline' organisations who have already trodden this path.

The UK has a lot to learn from the US when it comes to failure. Here, that stubbornly stiff British upper lip still prevents most of us from admitting when things have gone wrong. But over in America, failure is worn as a badge of honour.

Social enterprises are often treated the same way when it comes to investment readiness. However, each organisation is unique, and they should be treated as such.

Good Finance’s Project Manager, Ishita Ranjan, shares her highlights and reflections from Good Finance Live held in Manchester earlier this year in partnership with GMCVO. 

In this blog, Melanie Mills from Big Society Capital looks at the one thing you really can’t run your enterprise or charity without. Read on to find out how to protect your most valuable commodity.

Well, the verdict is almost unanimous: due diligence isn’t fun (although we did manage to find one social entrepreneur who actually enjoyed it). Despite not being the most exciting part of running a charity or social enterprise, due diligence is crucial for getting investment. If you’ve just started thinking about social investment, or it’s something you could consider in the future, read more for an introduction to the due diligence process and four simple steps to help you prepare.

Your impact story is the way you explain how your organisation creates change. You need to show that your work does actually work - whether you’re demonstrating the merits of your model to investors, or convincing a potential beneficiary that you can help them.

Carol Botten is CEO at VONNE (Voluntary Organisations Network North East), the regional umbrella and support organisation for the VCSE sector in the North East region. In this blog, she explains why it's worth finding out if social investment could work for you.

If you’re currently considering social investment then we really encourage you to ask investors about their average cost of lending. Social investors don't all do the same thing and they don’t all lend the same type of money.

We’re pleased to share that Good Finance is soon to embark on a new project in partnership with NAVCA (the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action) and The Connect Fund. The aim to increase knowledge and understanding of Social Investment within local Infrastructure and the organisations they support.

It's part of human nature to want to express the best of ourselves and the work we do. However, this can mean that in our career we all at some point tell half-truths. We do this to look better than a competitor & to validate ourselves. It's ok, you can admit this, we all do it at some point.  However, it's a tale told over and over again that one of the biggest mistakes an entrepreneur can make is not being honest with their investor. It’s easy to dance around the truth or upsell achievements. If you’re working together to build something, then you want to be on the same side, and this requires transparency and communication. You need to be sharing the real challenges you’re facing. Yep, it’s going great, our projections are great and the margins are perfect, I’m definitely not losing sleep every night worried...

David Bartram's worked for many years helping social entrepreneurs grow their business and scale their impact. Ahead of his 6 year anniversary working at UnLtd, we caught up with him on his thoughts on the current challenges & opportunities facing social entrepreneurs & the world of social investment.

It's always a pleasure to hear from guest writers about their journeys to social investment. Camilla Elwood is the Ventures Support Manager at UnLtd. When Camilla offered to write a piece about her first year in social investment, we were delighted to get her perspective:

Social impact investing often takes a different approach to traditional investing. Working with a social investor is about much more than the money, it’s also about the people.  This often means that an investor and investee will work together to support each other on a shared mission. For part three of our seven lessons learned blog series, we’re looking over the experiences of two investees and their thoughts on taking on social investment.