Resources For Early-Stage Social Entrepreneurs
Welcome to our resource page. The primary goal of Rally is to help passionate entrepreneurs, like yourself, transform their early-stage work into sustainable ventures that create positive social change. The resources provided below will assist you in navigating towards that goal.
Social Lean Canvas
The social lean canvas is an adaptation of the lean business model canvas developed for social ventures. It forces social entrepreneurs to address the major areas of their business model on one page while keeping their social mission paramount. It’s intended to be a living document that forces timely questions as strategies change. Additionally, each section of the canvas is numbered. We highly recommend that you address the sections in sequential order because they build on top of each other.
Theory Of Change
The Theory of Change (TOC) Canvas is like a roadmap that outlines both the impact goals that a social entrepreneur wants to achieve and the strategy they plan to use to achieve them (see the template on the following page). The TOC will help you articulate social change efforts by clarifying:
Intentions – why are you doing what you are doing.
Expected outcomes – what do you expect will happen as a result of your actions.
Shows the pathways and interventions necessary to reach intended results.
The TOC Canvas will challenge you to prove the efficacy of your approach to affect the change you want to see in the world. A helpful TOC is supported with academic research to validate the strategy being advocated by you to move from Current to Desired state. It also, then, identifies the key indicators that ought to be measured by the enterprise. In this way the TOC brings discipline and alignment to practice; ensuring logical coherence to your work and expected results. We ask that you bring a completed TOC canvas to the first rally. During this time, we will use it to evaluate where risk, assumptions and blind spots exist in your social model.
Customer Persona
Customer personas can provide tremendous value and insight to your venture. For example, it will help you:
Develop a deeper understanding of customer needs and how to solve for them.
Guide product development by creating features that help them achieve their desired outcomes.
Prioritize which projects, campaigns, and initiatives to invest time and resources in.
Create alignment across the organization and rally other teams around a customer-centric vision.
And as a result, you’ll be better equipped to serve your customers and deliver a superior experience that keeps your customer coming back for more. But if you don’t nail down your customer personas, every aspect of your product development process, user experience, and marketing campaigns, will suffer.
Founder’s Talks
Founder’s Talks are one-on-one fireside chats with thought leaders, academics, top executives, investors, and founders. During these one-hour discussions, our guest give their unique insights on impact, social issues, scaling, gaining customers, raising capital, building a brand, and much more.