Scaling Your Social Venture—Becoming an Impact Entrepreneur

The field of social entrepreneurship continues to grow by leaps and bounds as innovative entrepreneurs find new ways to create a positive social impact on their community. More often than not these ventures find it difficult to expand their initial concepts into new environments. As funding for social programs on a government level tightens, the ability for social programs to broaden and deepen their impact while maintaining financial stability has never been more important. This goal is only achievable when good intentions are combined with comprehensive analysis and planning that takes all aspects of a venture's ecosystem into consideration.

Paul N. Bloom, a professor of social entrepreneurship at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, explores the key components that any social entrepreneur needs to consider when approaching the challenge of scaling. Here Bloom explains the SCALERS model, which stresses that successful scaling requires organizational capabilities in seven areas: staffing, communicating, alliance-building, lobbying, earningsgeneration, replicating, and stimulating market forces. Rich with numerous examples of social entities that have developed these capabilities, Scaling Your Social Venture provides the tools to help social entrepreneurs take their venture to the next level.

Paul N. Bloom is adjunct professor of social entrepreneurship and marketing with the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE) at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. He was faculty director of CASE from 2007 to 2012. Dr. Bloom is the author or coauthor of more than 100 published articles, papers, book chapters, and books, including The Handbook of Marketing and Society and Scaling Social Impact: New Thinking. He was recently named the 2010-2011 winner of the American Marketing Association's Lifetime Achievement Award for the Marketing and Society Special Interest Group, becoming only the third recipient of this honor. He holds a PhD in marketing from the Kellogg School of Northwestern University, an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a BS from Lehigh University. He previously served as a marketing professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Maryland at College Park.