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Read MoreWhat is a social venture?
You might sometimes hear us talking about social ventures, and there are similar words that people sometimes use (like social enterprise or social projects), but what exactly are they?
Between charity and business?
Some people would say that’s much too simple. But it’s a good place to start thinking about it.
Most of us would probably define a charity as a not-for-profit organisation that raises funds and/or carries out good work in aid of a particular good cause.
A business, on the other hand, is a money-making enterprise that aims to sell a product or service of some kind.
And then there are social ventures. These sit in the gap between a charity and a business. Or, rather, they are a little bit of a mix of both. It looks like a business, yes, but it was founded on an aim to do good things.
Example – Give me tap
A prime example is Give Me Tap, which sells people a £12 stainless steel water bottle to get free water from cafés who are participating in the Give Me Tap scheme. So when you’re out and about, rather than paying for bottled water, you can just head to the nearest place participating and guarantee they’ll fill your bottle up when you hand it over.
It’s clever because the scheme not only reduces the amount of waste from mineral water bottles, but £6 from every bottle sold goes towards sanitation and irrigation projects in Africa. Amazingly, every two bottles sold can give a person access to water for life.
The reason this is a social venture is because it was founded on trying to help a good cause (water projects in Africa), but it isn’t exactly the same as a charity because it works by providing a service much a like a business does – selling bottles and creating a network of cafés and restaurants who also provide a service to its customers.
Want to know some more? Take a look at this music video as a tribute to Jay-Z’s Public Service Announcement to tell everyone about Give Me Tap!
We’ll be posting some more examples of social ventures to make things even clearer tomorrow, so keep up with us on Facebook and Twitter to be the first to know.
