We Know Social Enterprise
One stop shopping for social enterprise technical services.
We empower social entrepreneurs, development professionals, and their supporters to solve the world’s problems through entrepreneurship, business tools, and sound management practices.
EXPERT CONSULTING
From blackboard to boardroom, from startup to scale, whether a new venture or an existing one, Virtue Ventures offers social entrepreneurs and development practitioners a full suite of consulting services along the social enterprise continuum from idea to impact.
Virtue Ventures helps intermediaries design and implement social enterprise programs, including end-to-end support on incubators and accelerators. We also help NGOs introduce and integrate social enterprise into their organizations. We build NGO capacity to lead and execute on change and achieve sustainability.
Virtue Ventures advises donors and social investors, on giving strategies and impact investing.
CAPACITY BUILDING SERVICES
Entrepreneurial Leadership
Leading social change can be a tough and lonely venture. Virtue Ventures offers coaching, mentoring, networking, and linkages to social entrepreneurs, NGO leaders, and board members. We also provide social enterprise and stakeholder leadership development and skills building through customized executive training and experiential education.
Organizational Development
Virtue Ventures strengthens social enterprises and international development organizations by working with clients to integrate entrepreneurship, business tools, and sound management practices into their organizations. Using a whole organization approach, we help our clients identify capacity gaps in their organizations that prevent them from achieving their objectives. Then we work with them on plans and a process to address gaps --i.e. financial management and health; operations and systems; human resources and leadership; organizational culture; and stakeholder engagement -- that result in higher performing organizations.
Performance Management
Virtue Ventures' signature methodology helps its clients identify, capture, and measure performance across their organizations that informs strategic and management decision making and drives success. Our framework measures social enterprise efficiency, depth of social impact, blended-social and economic value creation, and market adaptability, and is designed to help clients implement change based on performance. We help clients set priorities and manage tensions that arise in social enterprises. We also work with them to define meaningful social impact indicators for their organizations and to apply impact measurement frameworks.
Strategic Planning
Virtue Ventures facilitates strategic planning and plan development for new and transitioning organizations. Strategic plans address: common vision and mission; mission-aligned strategic goals; strategies to accomplish goals and organizational strengthening; strategies tied to performance and impact measurements; and issues such as growth and scaling, legal structure, raising capital and exit.
Virtue Ventures designs, builds and integrates systems into client organizations to support information management required to make informed decisions. Our systems focus is on improving financial management, operational efficiency and marketing outreach, and measuring and monitoring social impact. Virtue Ventures also offers systems support in process engineering, knowledge management, service delivery, cost and activity based accounting, client/customer feedback and satisfaction, and monitoring and evaluation.
Systems
Virtue Ventures helps its clients incorporate revenue and financial and resource management strategies into their organizations to mobilize resources beyond grants. These strategies may include social enterprise, income generation, improving efficiency, membership fees, asset leverage, unrelated (to social mission) businesses, and strategic fundraising, such as crowd sourcing and online campaigns.
Financial Self-Sufficiency
EDUCATION & TRAINING
Professional development programs in real-life social entrepreneurship. Our learning-by-doing methodology builds skills and experience of social entrepreneurs, aspiring social entrepreneurs, professionals and students to make and lead social change.
Highly effective experiential learning programs for development professionals, practitioners and donors. Hands on capacity building training can be designed to address: organizational sustainability and strengthening; skills development; social enterprise design; leadership; scale and sector specific enterprise.
Conventional, yet Creative Training
We are big fans of applied and experiential learning methods even when we deliver trainings in a classroom. Social entrepreneurs and development practitioners are doers and live and learn in the throng of doing. For that reason, we optimize learning in our training programs we limit PPTs, and emphasize"learning-by-doing" methods and practical exercises such as peer learning, co-collaboration, simulations, storytelling, and video and photo imagery and application exercises.
ACTION RESEARCH
Virtue Ventures conducts practical and results-oriented action research to diagnose problems or weaknesses and develop practical solutions to address them as well identify opportunities or areas of improvement that lead to better social and financial outcomes.
Our methodology is build on a bottom up, participatory, qualitative and reflective process of iterative learning, evaluation, investigation and analysis.
Virtue Ventures's past action research has produced practice-to-theory academic frameworks, informed government policy, led to strategic or program plans for practitioner and funders, and best practice tools and resources for social entrepreneurs.
INCUBATION & ACCELERATION
Virtue Ventures has strong competency in social enterprise incubation and acceleration. Our team has worked with fourteen incubators in ten countries on four continents (some for several years and multiple cohorts), dating back as far as 2001. We designed and led social enterprise incubators in Bulgaria, Liberia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, India, Afghanistan, Morocco, and Uganda. We contributed to a UK Healthcare Incubator run by Oxford University; and two social enterprise accelerators in the US, one on each coast. We evaluated and advised on incubation methodology and strategy for social invention incubators in three countries: Peru, Indonesia and India.
In the mix, we have worked on many social enterprise start up incubators as well as some special focus incubators and accelerators. These include capacity building for scale; transforming NGOs into social enterprises; humanitarian and civil society organizations starting social enterprise for financial sustainability; employment creation social enterprise; and microfinance.
Contact Us
Voicemail: +1-206-600-2992