SoJo: Modeling Social Enterprise

SoJo is an online resource hub — optimized for web and mobile — focused on helping early-stage social innovators turn their ideas into action. Founded in Canada as a for-profit venture in 2010, the company depends mainly on volunteer part-time staff and competes for traffic in cyberspace with its own content providers. Many skeptics doubted the idea would ever work: why would content providers forego traffic on their own sites by relinquishing their “good stuff” to SoJo? Yet by 2012, with over 2,000 active users, 50 content partners, 1,300 Twitter followers, 80,000 articles viewed and more than 1,000 unique pieces of content that earned global praise from traditional business media outlets, SoJo is well positioned to grow even further and faster. However, its founder and chief catalyst, an award-winning social entrepreneur, is anxious to make the company self-sustaining by generating revenue through product and service extensions and by increasing its user base a hundred-fold. How can such a social enterprise be modeled to support the pace of growth it needs to remain the one best resource for change-makers the world over?

The case is ideally suited for core and elective courses on social enterprise, sustainable development or sustainability.<ul><li>To offer students first-row seats to the experience of becoming a social entrepreneur and the symbiotic relationship between one’s self and one’s venture.</li><li>To experience first-hand the resources SoJo offers for social start-ups and the positive impact these resources have for budding social entrepreneurs.</li><li>To explore the social impact of a social enterprise and to model its growth.</li></ul>

• social enterprise
• social innovation
• social change
• youth entrepreneurship
• Canada