We provide social enterprise support to individual women, women's organisations and their projects to develop their financial sustainability.
Why?
There is very little support available for people who want to start a social enterprise, become self-employed or start a business;
The support that is provided either has an astronomical cost attached or other accessibility issues that makes it difficult for our target group women to use;
Our target group of women have specific barriers to accessing mainstream support including; travel costs, time restrictions from caring responsibilities, language, culture, and access to money for their initial start-up.
What?
Because we do our best to support you to start social enterprises, become self-employed or start a business for women who face significant and multiple barriers to accessing mainstream support, our approach is women-centred.
Through experiential learning women are supported to develop their existing business ideas plus gain key skills, such as marketing, managing finances and access legal advice to help further their activity or business.
Support over 2 stages:
Social Enterprise Start-Up: working with you and your organisation to clarify and develop your social enterprise ideas, for example; identifying products and services, pricing and marketing, customers and competitors.
Social Enterprise Development: working with you to take your social enterprise to the next stage- for example; developing new products; exploring new markets; innovation; fundraising; marketing; getting investment ready; legal structures; business and strategic planning.
The sorts of activities you may select could include:
- Ideation workshop; to help you prioritise the income generation ideas you identify by conducting a workshop with key stakeholders, to identify the fee paying programme to develop further.
- Business planning and financial management; business planning methodology that can be used to identify the level of demand and potential for revenue generation.
- Business model; viability of the selected business model for the arena of saleable transactions, workable option and steps to consider when setting up a sustainable pricing structure for their identified enterprise options.
- Market research and financial modelling; market research practice that can be used to identify the level of demand, key customer groups, and the prices they will pay, costs to run the service potential financial projections and additional funding requirements
- Accessible templates that the organisation can use for planning, managing and monitoring the financial position of the service, i.e. a questionnaire to survey a sample of potential customers
- Strategic review exercise to identify potential income streams and cultivate competences within the organisation.
- Mentoring and coaching; guidance and sounding board sessions for staff responsible for business development and income generation
Outcomes:
- Women are equipped with the awareness, knowledge and skills to start a social enterprise, become self-employed or start a business. Many of these skills are also transferrable to an employment opportunity.
- Women will have increased confidence, built strong networks and have knowledge of where to get additional support for start-ups and access to finance.
- Women are mentored through a feasibility study to look at the viability of one of the income generation ideas and provide you with the tools and guidance to use to assess the idea and others in the future.
- Facilitate workshops to establish a knowledge base within staff so they can better support and market sustainability services.
For more information please contact us on Telephone: or Email: