Resource library
This library offers a curated collection of valuable tools, guides, and resources that exist in the social enterprise sector. Explore guides, articles and many more to support your journey, whether you’re starting a social enterprise, tackling sector challenges, or navigating the impact economy.
52 results found
This concise resource provides a comprehensive guide on how to conduct market research, aimed at beginners. It explains the importance of market research, outlines different types and methods, and offers a step-by-step process for conducting research. The guide emphasises the critical role of market research in understanding customer needs, identifying opportunities, and making informed business decisions. It also discusses the implications of ignoring market research and provides tips on effectively communicating research findings.
This resource provides a guide to conducting an Empathy Mapping exercise, a technique used by teams to better understand their customers' needs and experiences. It outlines a step-by-step process for creating empathy maps, including preparation, running the session, and determining actionable insights from the exercise. The guide emphasises the importance of basing the empathy map on real customer data rather than assumptions, and suggests ways to use the resulting insights to improve products or services.
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Arts Law Info Sheets
PlatformsArts Law offers free/low-cost legal advice and resources to Australian artists, with targeted services for Indigenous artists and resources for social enterprises.
This guide introduces 'impact enterprise' as a broad term for businesses creating positive social impact, focusing on core purpose over specific labels.
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Australian Copyright Council (ACC)
PlatformsThe ACC is a non-profit legal service offering resources on copyright law, with guides and fact sheets for creators, including social enterprises.
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Australian Tax Office (ATO)
PlatformsThe ATO offers essential tax and super info for businesses, including social enterprises, covering worker status, payments, and related obligations.
Dark Matter Labs examines governance in social enterprises as an interconnected system, focusing on balancing power, autonomy, responsibility, accountability, and risk. It challenges traditional hierarchies, linking governance to broader social issues, and introduces the "Beyond the Rules" initiative.
The Brand Pyramid and Keller's Brand Equity Model are complementary frameworks for understanding and building strong brands. The Brand Pyramid illustrates five stages customers go through in developing brand loyalty: Presence, Relevance, Performance, Advantage, and Bonding. Keller's model, depicted as a four-level pyramid, focuses on how companies can build brand equity: Brand Identity, Brand Meaning, Brand Response, and Brand Relationships. Both models emphasise the importance of understanding customer perceptions and emotions, and creating positive brand experiences.
This report by Social Enterprise Australia reveals that 12,033 social enterprises contribute $21.3 billion to Australia’s economy, employing over 206,000 people.
A 2-minute introduction to the Business Model Canvas - a tool that helps people design and develop business models for new ventures. This method comes from Strategyzer's best selling management book Business Model Generation and has been used by entrepreneurs and enterprises around the world.
The Common Foundations from Canada provide easy-to-understand general guidance on measuring impact. The report focuses on five essential practices that comprise a minimum standard of impact measurement.
‘Can you scale your social enterprise?’ is a question often heard. This blog by Gord Tulloch challenges a narrow view of ‘scale’, which usually refers to volume and growth. Tulloch suggests there are five pathways to achieving ‘scale’ or impact, including increasing numbers, changing the rules, changing beliefs, changing norms, and changing the conditions that enable agency and distributed action.
CPA Australia’s guide aids not-for-profits, including social enterprises, in finance management, governance, risk, compliance, and tax—vital for sustainable operations.
ICDA supports community sector governance with training, accredited courses, tech tools, free resources, and financial guides for not-for-profits and social enterprises.
This is a long-form video lecture from Harvard Innovation Labs for conventional start-ups and business, but it provides a comprehensive framework for thinking about and planning 'go-to' market strategies. This includes developing a "brand essence" and integrating other key assets into a marketing and sales cycle.
This Stanford article outlines nine strategies for effective board leadership in social enterprises, focusing on building legacy, fostering respect, clarifying roles, and supporting executive success. Key tactics include tailored board experiences, efficient meetings, succession planning, professional recruitment, feedback, and addressing underperformance, all aimed at creating a collaborative, impactful board culture.
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Impact Boom Blog and Podcast
PodcastsImpact Boom has undertaken 100s of interviews with social entrepreneurs and change-makers from across Australia and around the world. Produced as podcasts and blogs, their platform provides an amazing range of impact insights and stories.
The free, self-directed Impact Investing Hub Playbook supports Australia’s impact investing ecosystem, offering modular content on Impact Investing, Impact Measurement, and Revenue Diversification, tailored for investors, advisors, and organisations seeking investment.
This playbook by Acumen and EY offers a guide for building businesses that support low-income and marginalised communities while staying financially sustainable. It explains that markets aren’t driven by invisible forces but by human choices that can shape a fairer economy.
The AIGI Indigenous Governance Toolkit supports Indigenous organisations in building strong, culturally-rooted governance.
Protecting intellectual property is essential for social enterprises. IP Australia offers info on patents, trademarks, and more, including registration support.
A Theory of Change articulates the link between intentions, activities, outputs, and outcomes. It presents a hypothesis of how we think we can create change in the world. This short video uses an example to explain how to use the tool to define goals and the pathways to reach them.
On Monday 17 August 2020, the Australian Law Reform Commission co-hosted with the University of Melbourne a webinar with a panel of experts discussing the potential for a future ALRC inquiry into legal structures for social enterprises.
A rich introduction to the history of measurement and how different drivers have informed how we think about, and practice, impact measurement and evaluation today. Also includes some useful graphics that help distinguish different terms and approaches from each other.
This guide by CSI explains what an outcomes fund is - a financing mechanism that pools funding to support organisations addressing social issues, with payments tied to achieving specific measurable outcomes. It outlines the key characteristics, benefits, and development process of outcomes funds and includes links to other resources. These types of funding mechanisms are likely to become more common over the coming years and could potentially expand revenue options for social enterprises. Learning about them will support thinking and planning around collecting data and adopting evidence-based approaches.
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Prepare for funding, SEFA
ReportsCreated by SEFA, this guide outlines four key areas—Purpose, Plan, Profit, and Prudence—for social enterprises to focus on when preparing for funding.
This handbook helps you answer, ‘what problem are we really trying to solve with our social enterprise or project?’ Understanding this helps to find better solutions. This canvas and supporting guide offer a selection of tools to help you frame problems, recognise different types of problems, and open up opportunities for action.
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Raise Finance, BCCM
PlatformsThis guide offers essential insights into how social enterprises can expand funding beyond grants and donations by involving their community and members. This guide focusses on how you can achieve this by using a co-operative structure for your social enterprise.
SafeWork Australia offers resources for workplace health and safety, including psychosocial safety. Black Dog Institute supports mental health with free NSW training. Local SafeWork bodies, like SafeWork NSW, also provide helpful resources.
Seedkit
PlatformsSeedkit is a nationwide project and platform that helps social enterprises measure and communicate their impact. Its self-managed reporting platform allows social enterprises to measure, track, and communicate operations and impacts via customised dashboards and reports.
Justice Connect’s guide helps social enterprises with legal needs, covering structures, governance, setup, compliance, and operational issues for all stages.
"Social Investment Explained" was produced by the Big Lottery Fund and Social Enterprise UK. It aims to help community and social enterprises understand investment options and readiness requirements. While it’s UK-based it offers good questions for consideration for Australian organisations too.
This manual offers social entrepreneurs a practical guide to building relationships with social investors, covering the investment landscape, strategies for finding and approaching investors, and best practices for due diligence and negotiating lasting partnerships.
This web portal provides access to a library of documents related to Victoria's Social Procurement Framework, which governs how the Victorian Government undertakes social procurement when procuring goods, services and construction. It includes the framework itself, case studies, buyer guidance documents, and other resources. This information provides insight into how a government entity approaches social procurement. For social enterprises, it offers guidance on how to engage with government buyers, and demonstrates the types of social and sustainable outcomes a government is likely to be seeking to achieve through its procurement activities.
This video tutorial covers what social procurement is, key drivers, how the Social Traders marketplace works, and what you need for your social enterprise to be ready for social procurement. It includes two parts. Part 1: Understanding what social procurement is, key drivers and how Social Traders’ marketplace works. Part 2: Understanding what you need for your social enterprise to be ready for social procurement.
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Social Shifters
PlatformsSocial Shifters is an international charity helping the next generation of young leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs to tackle the world’s most pressing social and environmental issues in new ways. Their website offers e-learning, videos and downloadable digital tools to support social enterprise startups.
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Social Startup Studio
GuidesSocial Startup Studio is an initiative by Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Its goal is to support and foster the development of social enterprises. The studio website offers a huge range of practical resources for social enterprise startups.
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Support for businesses in Australia
PlatformsThis Australian Government website offers essential legal and governance info, covering business laws, risk management, health and safety, plus tools and templates.
Theaster Gates, a potter by training and a social activist by calling, tells his story of transforming abandoned buildings to create community hubs that connect and inspire those who live there. A famously inspiring talk, it shows how problems can be reframed as opportunities, how to start with what you’ve got, how to make something out of nothing and how culture can be a catalyst for social transformation.
The Community Investment Handbook is a guide for communities and practitioners on establishing cooperatives to meet local needs, raise funds, and build circular economies within the framework of national legislation.
This toolkit offers quick, easy-to-apply methods for creating, adopting, or adapting ideas to achieve better results, featuring tried-and-tested tools from various sectors, each with key references for deeper exploration.
This Field Guide to Human-Centred Design represents how IDEO thinks about design for social impact. It includes 57 clear-to-use design methods, and case studies of human-centred design in action.
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The Funding Centre
PlatformsThe Funding Centre is a portal providing information on grants and fundraising in Australia. It is an initiative of Our Community, a social enterprise that provides advice, tools and training for Australia’s community sector, as well as services for business and government.
This guidebook, made by and for social entrepreneurs, covers building effective boards to balance social mission with financial goals. It includes advice on governance structures, board composition, recruitment, roles, and managing conflicts, highlighting how governance needs evolve as social enterprises grow.
The Lean Startup Summary
VideosIn this video Erik Abrahmsson shares his key takeaways from the Eric Ries book, The Lean Startup. He distils them into five key principles. Erik suggests that by following this "build-measure-learn" cycle, startups can reduce waste, improve efficiency, and increase their chances of creating products that truly meet customer needs.
This video offers an alternative framework for creating a Theory of Change. It’s led by Chris Gaines from SoPact, a US-based social enterprise.
This is a paid resource. Written by Ian C. MacMillan and James D. Thompson and published in 2013 the book provides a step-by-step framework for launching and scaling a successful social enterprise, drawing on the authors' extensive experience in entrepreneurship and social innovation.
This report shows social enterprises, led 50% by women, make up 3% of global businesses, generating $2 trillion revenue and 200 million jobs across 80+ countries.
This booklet goes beyond the Business Model Canvas as a general tool. It outlines how Ingrid Burkett, an Australian social entrepreneur, applies the Canvas to the specific needs of social enterprise. The booklet walks you through how to use the Canvas step-by-step.
This report provides an excellent guide to developing impact measurement and management strategies. Critically, it advocates for enterprises adopting different strategies depending on their stage of development versus a one-size-fits-all approach.
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