“Social entrepreneurs” – those who measure their business’s success beyond simply generating a profit and also focus on the positive impact the business makes on society – often have the most in-depth, on­the­ground experience in identifying funding needs related to sustainability challenges and finding solutions to meet them.

By working together, social entrepreneurs and financial firms can maximize their positive impact from a sustainability perspective. Here are three ways to start such a partnership:

1. Firms can create incremental benefits by introducing social entrepreneurs to their stakeholders.
Mainstream firms and foundations can help social entrepreneurs marry their business acumen with their social mission by mentoring, promoting, sponsoring, and providing technological solutions to them. Meanwhile, firms can gather more investment for social entrepreneurs, enabling them to scale up their impact and address t sustainability challenges more effectively.

2. Financial services firms can devise more effective philanthropic funding models for social entrepreneurs.
There is a rising trend among philanthropy clients to switch from giving­based philanthropy models to outcomes­based philanthropic initiatives.We believe these new initiatives offer great potential for enabling social entrepreneurs to scale up successful local SDG solutions and deliver them to a wider audience.

3. Social entrepreneurs can amplify their impact with help from the technology sector.
Mainstream technology firms offer new operating models and solutions that help social enterprises scale up their impact. Technology entrepreneurs and leaders are playing larger roles on the boards of social enterprises and non­governmental organizations (NGOs).

Read the source article about why financial firms should partner with social enterprises at UBS Intellectual Capital.