Social entrepreneurs that are doing great work can be difficult to find. After finding them, donors must complete a time consuming and, sometimes expensive, due diligence on the entrepreneur and social and business model before funding them. If a tool existed that allowed other donors and funders to search for vetted social entrepreneurs doing great work in a particular region and on a specific issue, it would save donors time and money. In addition, the listed social entrepreneurs would have greater exposure to funding sources and perhaps find other social entrepreneurs they could collaborate with.
Social Edge launched the Social Entrepreneur Search widgets this week. In collaboration with funders who are known for their successful efforts in finding, researching, and funding social entrepreneurs, they have populated an open source database that shares the information of social entrepreneurs that they have funded to anyone that wants to access it. The open source database allows anyone to query, syndicate, or republish the data on their websites.
There are many opportunities with this new tool: (1) emerging social entrepreneurs can find others to collaborate with; (2) donors or funders can feature their own grantees so others can help the social entrepreneur scale their work; (3) donors or funders can assume that the social entrepreneur must be doing something right if they have passed due diligence by another donor or funder; (4) the database reduces the time and cost of funders or donors completing their own due diligence efforts; and (5) journalists and writers can locate a social entrepreneur quickly if they wish to feature them in their work.
Since it is an open database, Social Edge also lists many opportunities to improve it, including possible expansion of the listing and encouraging other developers to add layers to the data.
While I believe in the sharing of information and investing in the "best of the best" social entrepreneurs, I am afraid a tool like this will continuously support those already doing great work and leave other emerging and new social entrepreneurs to struggle for funding and recognition. In addition, the database is populated with social entrepreneurs from five funders (Civic Ventures, Draper Richards Foundation, PopTech, Schwab Foundation for Entrepreneurship, and Skoll Foundation). All five funders have their own unique set of criteria and focus on selecting social entrepreneurs that they support. Their due diligence process is also unique to their own criteria. This inconsistency still requires prospective donors and funders to complete their own due diligence. Perhaps the idea is that if a large funder supported the social entrepreneur then the social entrepreneur is "endorsed" or "validated" to some degree.
There are many social entrepreneurs located in Asia in the database but certainly not enough. Perhaps we can encourage other donors and funders to join in the expansion of the database to include not just vetted social entrepreneurs but also unknown, vetted social entrepreneurs with promising social and business models.