The William James Foundation’s Sustainable Business Plan Competition offers a total of $150,000 worth of services & cash to the best new for-profit plans with social and/or environmental goals. Entrants can be any age or anywhere in the world, but must be starting or growing for-profit companies that are either pre-revenue, or are within five years of their first revenues. All entrants who are accepted into the competition receive an average of 20 pages of feedback around. Deadline for 5-8 page summaries is Oct. 12.

Enter discount code ‘SOCAP20′ for 20% off application fee!

>>> Learn more and apply now!

Life at the BoP study is a joint work of the team at Movirtu and their strategic research partners, TNS. They listened in detail to nearly a hundred end users in Senegal, Tanzania and India during the course of this work. They selected ‘leading edge’ users: those likely to be engaged with and influential in technology. They spoke with women entrepreneurs, smallholder farmers, and youth.

There are many stories and characters here: a Senegalese student who lives far from her family, prays every day and is as rapturously devout in her study as she is in her life. There are a group of teens in Coimbatore, a city akin to the UK’s Manchester, where boys can quote you an ad for the latest megapixel phone. Women entrepreneurs in Senegal shake their heads and commiserate about the increased cost of living.

>>> Learn more and watch their video ‘Introduction to Life at the BoP study’

During SOCAP/Europe in Amsterdam, the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship taskforce launched its Social Investment Manual. This manual provides social entrepreneurs a comprehensive yet easy to use guidebook on how to develop successful relationships with social investors. The guidebook presents an overview of the social investment landscape, offers concrete approaches to finding and approaching the right investors for social enterprises, as well as the best practices for having a successful due diligence process and for negotiating a mutually beneficial long-term social investment arrangement.

The manual, which was created with the research support of the Chair for Entrepreneurial Finance at Technical University of Munich (TUM) and with the support of a taskforce led by Andreas Heinecke, Schwab Social Entrepreneur and founder of Dialogue Social Enterprise, provides a valuable first step for many social enterprises to develop the informational know-how to position themselves best and to leverage opportunities for social investment that can increase the scale, scope and impact of their organizations.

The task force welcomes your comments to keep building this manual as a useful resource for social entrepreneurs. Please contact us to share your input (info@schwabfound.org).