The Impact Accelerator at the Social Capital Markets Conference is available exclusively to SOCAP Social Entrepreneur Scholarship recipients. Accelerator programming is tailored to meet the unique needs and challenges of innovators who are working at the intersection of money and meaning. Attendees learn relevant skills and receive mentorship while building relationships with fellow entrepreneurs, making connections with respected leaders in the space, and getting guidance on how to optimize the SOCAP conference experience, all before the opening plenary.
SOCAP15 Impact Accelerator Recap
The Impact Accelerator at SOCAP brings new speakers, workshops, and breakout sessions each year. Though our planning for the 2016 Impact Accelerator is still in progress, this recap of last year’s Accelerator will give you an idea of the type content that will be offered.
Over 120 SOCAP Scholarship Entrepreneurs from around the world participated in the SOCAP15 Impact Accelerator, held at the General’s Residence at Fort Mason Center.
The keynote presentation, Design for Impact, was given by Kevin Starr, the Founder and Managing Director of the Mulago Foundation. Mulago is a private foundation that fights poverty by providing unrestricted funding to for-profit and non-profit organizations with a scalable solution and proven ability to create positive change. Starr’s seminar was designed to help social entrepreneurs create an effective impact model. He urged the importance of focusing on the precise articulation of the intended impact, a map of the behaviors that will drive it, and an understanding of scalability to better design a model that can achieve impact at scale.
Following the keynote, entrepreneurs participated in Investing in Storytelling to Drive Social Impact, a workshop led by Kimaya Dixit and RJ Bee of Hattaway Communications, the creator of the Rockefeller Foundation funded interactive online storytelling platform Hatch for Good. This workshop gave entrepreneurs practical advice on how to create powerful, compelling stories that inspire and demonstrate impact. SOCAP Scholarship Entrepreneurs learned how to lay the foundation for strategic storytelling, choose the best platforms to create and promote stories, and how to best measure impact. Participants shared their inspirational stories while discussing their own storytelling challenges and brainstormed possible solutions as a group.
The morning’s programming was rounded out by a panel presentation on How to Get the Most Out of SOCAP that included Ross Baird, the Cofounder and Executive Director of Village Capital, and pioneer in social finance and entrepreneurship Penelope Douglas.
Breakout Sessions
Accelerator attendees got to choose from a number of breakout sessions in the afternoon, including:
Revenue and Capital Strategies for Scale
Megan Christenson of Civic Accelerator led a discussion-format session that designed for entrepreneurs without a finance background to learn how to articulate, bring to life, and defend their revenue models and investment needs. Entrepreneurs heard examples on how to uncover opportunities for growth and scale within their financial models.
The Path to B Corp Certification
Ben Anderson and Jessica Friesen of B Lab spoke on B Corporations-why they exist and how they are leading a movement to redefine success in business. They offered tools and resources to understand how to run a better business as well as learn about the business case for B Corp certification.
Series A: Raising your first $1M+ Round
Mark Straub, Co-founder and Director of Khosla Impact, featured a compilation of lessons from the Valley and the Village on how to raise money — from social and sometimes, anti-social, investors. Straub drew upon writings and talks by Paul Graham, Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel and Tim Draper as well as his years of venture capital and impact investing in India, China and the United States. This interactive discussion was specifically geared towards entrepreneurs who are hoping to move from the seed stage to larger, more institutional levels of investment.
Social Impact Projection: Quantify and Communicate your Impact to Investors
Adam Caplan and Garrett Melby of GoodCompany Group offered this session. GoodCompany Ventures’ Social Impact Projection (SIP) provides a framework for understanding, quantifying and communicating the relationship between a company’s core revenue drivers and its social outcomes. For entrepreneurs, this model helps to refine a growth strategy that optimizes both financial and social returns. For impact investors, SIP makes the risk-return dynamic as explicit for social outcomes as it is for financial outcomes.
Developed with the support of Investors’ Circle, the SIP model applies best practices for social impact evaluation to the specific context of a seed stage impact ventures. By drawing on data and assumptions that most entrepreneurs have developed for their financial projections, the SIP analysis is designed to be completed by entrepreneurs in under ninety-minutes and communicated via templates that integrate easily into investor presentations.The session’s goal was to provide entrepreneurs with a Certified Social Impact Projection that will generate new insight for the management team and give them a way to communicate their impact potential in a quantitative model that resonate with investors.
Apply For Your Chance to Attend the 2016 Impact Accelerator at SOCAP
You only have until June 20th to apply for the 2016 SOCAP Social Entrepreneur Scholarship.
Don’t miss your opportunity to come to SOCAP16 and participate in the Impact Accelerator.
Apply Here
The Impact Accelerator is only one of the benefits of being a scholarship entrepreneur at SOCAP. All selected applicants will receive a pass to the full SOCAP16 conference and more.* Last year’s awardees described the value of being a SOCAP Social Entrepreneur Scholarship recipient for us in their own words. Read what they said about the SOCAP Entrepreneur Experience.
*Please note: Scholarship does not include travel expenses.