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by tommaitland 2140 days ago
I co-founded Raisely, we’re a social enterprise. Impact is baked into our constitution, we report on it before profit, we restrict who can use our SaaS and we’re a bcorp. I wouldn’t call it “riding a wave” or just “talk” - it’s just genuine global citizenship.
2 comments

I've just checked your site out, I really like that you offer core services for free and then up-sell on marginal services!

I'm curious -- who do you report the impact to, and how?

Is there a framework in how you went about pricing to balance the profit-motive and the impact-motive?

There isn’t much around to govern social enterprises, so we don’t have much of a framework.

We report impact regularly internally (it’s in dashboards the whole team has access to) and through the B-Corp certification we get assessed in detail every few years. Our staff hold us to account, more than our customers or the law.

For us we found a mechanism where benefit and profit are aligned, and I think most good social enterprises have done the same. That’s to say that the more impact we have, the healthier we are on classic business metrics.

Can you tell me a little more about the mechanism you found? I'm understanding it as your staff holding to you account -- how do these conversations typically go?
Have you taken any investors? If so was the bcorp an issue?
No haven’t raised yet (haven’t needed to), but have spoken to VCs. Being a bcorp hasn’t ever been mentioned as an issue.