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.
16 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.
This guide introduces 'impact enterprise' as a broad term for businesses creating positive social impact, focusing on core purpose over specific labels.
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.
CPA Australia’s guide aids not-for-profits, including social enterprises, in finance management, governance, risk, compliance, and tax—vital for sustainable operations.
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 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.
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.
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.
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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.
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 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.
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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