Ian C. MacMillan - The Social Entrepreneur’s Playbook, Expanded Edition: Pressure Test, Plan, Launch and Scale Your Social Enterprise

O n June 18, 2013, Wharton Digital Press published The Social Entrepreneurs Playbook: Pressure Test Your Start-Up IdeaStep 1. We provided the ebook for free to more than 10,000 active and aspiring social entrepreneurs as part of what publishing industry blog ThinReads called one of the more unusual ebookexperiments of the year.

We used our own start-up-to-scale-up method to publish The Social Entrepreneurs Playbook because the book is itself a social enterprise: it seeks to generate modest, self-sustaining revenues from book sales while helping social entrepreneurs start up their ventures with less risk and a greater likelihood of success while helping others.

The free ebook introduced readers to the first phase of testing a social enterprise start-up idea: defining the social problem and articulating the revenue-generating solution, developing a qualified advisory group, defining and segmenting a seed target population, identifying the most competitive alternative, and addressing the operating realties.

We invited readers of the free ebook to join the Social Entrepreneurs Playbook Advisory Group by taking a survey. This crowdsourced feedback helped shape the complete edition of the book, which you now have in your hands or on your screen: The Social Entrepreneurs Playbook: Pressure Test, Plan, Launch, and Scale Your Social EnterpriseExpanded Edition.

Nearly 300 readers joined the Social Entrepreneurs Playbook Advisory Group, many of whom are aspiring and active social entrepreneurs and philanthropists. Their ranks include founders, CEOs, executive directors, managing directors, and other leading social entrepreneurs and supporters. Members hail from for-profits and nonprofits and from all around the world. For a list of the advisory group members, see the Acknowledgments.

In addition to providing feedback on the free book, members of the advisory group shared where they were in the start-up process, what their biggest challenges were, and what they needed to know to be successful. The expanded edition you are now reading covers the issues that the advisory group told us are important. It includes the complete three-phase method for successfully testing, planning, and launching and scaling a social enterprise.

If you have read the free ebook, you will still want to start at the beginning of this book. Phase one has been expanded to include advice on setting revenue and social impact goals, how to navigate the inevitable sociopolitics, how to develop a strong concept statement, and more.

We wrote this book to share what we have learned over the past 12 years while working with social entrepreneurs. We want to broaden the impact beyond those we work with directly by assisting anyone devoting resources to helping the less fortunate, wherever that might be, in making a positive social impact and generating an income while doing so.