Top Trends for 2010: Social Enterprise

It's a new year and a good time to cite some trends likely to shape the cause-wired, social enterprise landscape this year.

To be sure, 2010 will be another tough year economically for many social start-ups and advocacy groups. At the very least, proving social impact will matter more than ever. But these same rising pressures to make measurable change also will lead to new kinds of investments and innovative new forms of collaboration and consolidation among social enterprises and entrepreneurs. Low-cost social media will be used ever-more widely and creatively by social enterprises and advocacy groups to aggregate new levels of clout, funding, innovation and community support.

In short? Collaboration and consolidation, online and off, will be the year's mega-trends for the sector. Here are some of the ways these trends will likely show up in the weeks and months ahead. (And this list is just for starters. Please add your own predictions in the comment box at the end of this post.)

* More "giving silos" will fade or disappear. Divisions between traditional "do-good" sectors will continue to fade or fall away as more disparate organizations, companies and consumers seek to achieve a branded, demonstrable impact on social problem-solving with the dollars, hours, and ideas they spend or contribute. As a result, look for social entrepreneurs to collaborate more -- online and off -- around new ways to prove, measure, and scale social impact across time, place, sectors and ideologies. The recent launch of the Global Impact Investing Network, for example, will push the cause of social investing by bringing together global philanthropists, ethical banks and social entrepreneurs and enterprises to apply the microfinance model to health care and other services needed by those now living in poverty around the world. Additionally, look for even more offline, regional conferences that celebrate collaboration across sectors for social change. Case in point: The two-year-old CUSP conference in Chicago features social innovators who are reshaping society by design, regardless of whether they are from the corporate, education, religious, nonprofit, entertainment, or technology sectors. CUSP was one of a half-dozen such conferences held across the country in 2009. Look for more such efforts in 2010 to scale cross-sector social innovation for greater impact.

* New ways to measure impact will emerge. Mobile and location-awareness technology -- because it will enable people to get closer to measuring their personal impact on the world in real-time -- will continue to radicalize the social enterprise space and the giving experience (watch for Foursquare, Google Latitude, Loopt, FireEagle and other such geo-location "games" to become more socially conscious this year), reshaping how and what people donate. Giving money will become less important than giving voice, giving time, giving influence, and giving work. Look for social networks to create new ways to reward those who demonstrate the most activity around socially-conscious activities.

* Micro-activism will proliferate. Look for new start-ups modeled after The Extraordinaries, an online micro-volunteering enterprise that enables people to give short bits of their time via their mobile phones from anywhere at any time. Also look for more micro-gift enterprises to emerge, such as Dreambank.org, which allows causes or individuals in need to receive a portion of what they need or want from many people rather than get gifts or input they can't use (such as wool blankets for weather-disaster victims in tropical climates). Additionally, look for more micro-funding groups like World Nomads, which through its Footprints program funds large-scale international development projects through micro-donations. Expect, too, the rise of micro-seed funding and 1-to-1 financing of social entrepreneurs. Additionally, look for more examples of micro-work enterprises, such as SamaSource, which uses the Web to outsource digital work for larger companies to educated people living in poverty in developing nations. The micro-craze will also lead to more innovative uses of social media platforms like Twitter and Ning by social enterprises to crowdsource micro-services and influence that scales.

* More small causes will be aggregated to achieve greater social impact. Consider the innovative umbrella group, Wildlife Direct, a Kenya-based nonprofit enterprise that aggregates autonomous wildlife conservation activists under a single umbrella and gives each exposure to individual donors. Says Paula Kahumbu, a PopTech fellow and the group's executive director: "Underfunding is conservation's biggest threat. By giving each of the wildlife activists a blog, we enable individual donors from around the world to communicate directly with the people they are funding." [Think donorschoose.org meets The Huffington Post meets wildlife conservation.] The goal, says Kahumbu, is to create a single platform for the many smaller groups working to save wildlife in Africa. "We have much to share with each other -- each activist or group of activists is working on a different animal or aspect of the problem. We are stronger working together than we are alone." Additionally, the newly-launched Social Entrepreneur open API, which is a search engine for finding social entrepreneurs, is an effort to provide an exchange and transfer of information so as to avoid duplication in the "do-good" sector. One site to keep watching in 2010 is SocialActions.com, as well as Compathos, which connects volunteers and financial resources with nonprofits through digital storytelling.

* Co-working will go mainstream. Until recently, co-working spaces -- which Wikipedia defines as "the social gathering of a group of people, who are still working independently, but who share values and who are interested in the synergy that can happen from working with talented people in the same space" -- were concentrated most heavily in San Francisco and New York. In the past, co-working has mostly been a way for newbie start-up founders to share space and expenses. 2010 will likely see the expansion and formalization of these types of spaces both geographically and intellectually, as more will become incubators for start-up funding and volunteer support. Example: The Unreasonable Institute, a new nonprofit, has announced it will bring 25 global social entrepreneurs to Boulder, Colo., this summer for 10 weeks to co-train, co-work, and explore seed funding collaborations. Look for more such social enterprise institutes and retreats to pop up this year, based on the 20th century model of artist's colonies and writer's workshops.

* Online swarms will gain clout. The combination of mobile phone, geo-location, and real-time organizing technologies and platforms will embolden "flash cause and consumer mobs" to exert their influence in new and expanded ways. Globally, mobile data traffic is set to double every year through 2013, increasing 66-fold between 2008 and 2013. Look for more nonprofits to "hire" members of online social networks who have the most online and mobile followers to help them raise funds and awareness on-demand; look for a continued rise in new consumer-complaint platforms such as Quiet Riots, a UK start-up that offers disgruntled consumers a way to crowdsource their complaints and give companies a way to address them. Look, too, for more companies and nonprofits to be held more publicly accountable for their actions. Case in point: JPMorgan Chase's recent online contest snafu.

This list is just for starters -- and not meant to be comprehensive. That's where you come in. What are some of your predictions for the social enterprise sector in the year ahead? Go ahead, name one or two -- and tell us what we missed.