Social entrepreneurship, hybrid organizations and B-Corps

Social spin-offs from established non-profit organizations; factors influencing the behavior of corporate donors

Alessandro Signorini

Social enterprises can be defined as organizations that combine a social direction and a purpose with business activities in the marketplace (Hall-Phillips et al., 2015). Social enterprises have the ability of generating and retaining profits when benefitting social causes in comparison with traditional non-profit organizations (Lee et al., 2017).

This research concentrates on a specific typology of social enterprise, a social enterprise that is generated as a spin-off from an existing non-profit organization (Schmitz and Scheuerle, 2012). Social spin-offs from non-profit organizations are designed to achieve different and often contradicting objectives (McKeever and Pettijohn, 2014; Addae, 2018; Leimisder, 2014) and can be affected by a number of problems that should be carefully evaluated by the non-profit organizations (Han, 2017). The focus for this research will be one factor that can influence the non-profit organizations when establishing social enterprises, i.e. the response of the corporate donors to the social spin-off.

#corporate fundraising #non-profit organizations #Social spin-offs #start-ups