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The double bottom line
SMG students help United Way shepherd social ventures
Nonprofits are not designed to make money, but a growing number are generating revenue through so-called social ventures. Think Girl Scout cookies. The SMG graduate students in Kristen McCormack’s Social Entrepreneurship course know a lot about designing and implementing social ventures, and this January, they will help a number of local nonprofits do just that.
The SMG students are participating in a new initiative called the Nonprofit Venture Network: Massachusetts Bay (NVN:MA), which is sponsored by the United Way of Massachusetts Bay (UWMB) and Seedco, a New York City–based agency that helps small nonprofits design and fund business ventures. “This new program is part of UWMB’s efforts to strengthen the nonprofit sector’s ability to impact the community it serves,” says Milton Little, Jr., president and CEO of UWMB. “Our goal is to help agencies that have an established track record of success and a good business idea find an additional source of revenue to achieve their mission.”
About 30 local nonprofits have applied to participate in NVN:MA. This fall, UWMB and Seedco will select the most promising business ideas and hold a series of workshops to teach the organizations how to develop marketing skills. When McCormack, an SMG executive in residence and director of the public and nonprofit management program, heard about NVN:MA, she saw an opportunity for her students to provide marketing research and to help the nonprofits write their business plans.
Why do nonprofits need help from graduate students? “Developing a revenue-generating business can be a risky proposition for an organization founded to realize a social mission,” says Diane Baillargeon, president of Seedco. McCormack agrees. “Sometimes the culture of running a business is alien to social-service agencies,” she says. “Many of them are only thinking about a single bottom line — the people they serve — and with a social venture you now have to also start worrying about profit, cost of goods sold, volume, and marketing.”
Those are skills that McCormack’s students have honed over the past two years. “This experience will pull together every aspect of what they’ve learned since they’ve been at BU,” McCormack says, “from marketing to finance, from accounting to strategic planning and policy. They need to integrate these components into something that will provide value for the nonprofit and for society.”
United Way looks to BU community to assist families, children in need
1
October 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations