A Guide for Nonprofit Groups That Start Mission-Related Businesses

NEW BOOKS

Mission, Inc.: The Practitioner’s Guide to Social Enterprise
by Kevin Lynch and Julius Walls Jr.

More and more nonprofit groups have started businesses — and as such enterprises have steadily grown in popularity more businesses are failing, note the authors of this book. That is in part because such businesses are different from those that for-profit companies run, and because managers often think their charitable missions will “prevail over reality,” they write.

Kevin Lynch, president of Rebuild Resources, which helps people with substance-abuse problems find and hold jobs, and Julius Walls Jr., chief executive of Greyston Bakery, a charity-run business in Yonkers, N.Y., that provides employment to needy people, present a guide on how to build and maintain a social enterprise, covering finances, hiring, marketing, evaluation, and expansion.

The authors discuss 10 paradoxes social enterprises face and devote a chapter to each of them.

For example, they say marketing can’t mask bad products. “All the mission in the world won’t make someone eat a lousy, overpriced spaghetti sauce. You have to be good.”

To succeed, the authors say, an organization must make personal connections with customers. They urge readers to make their missions human, connect missions to their products’ attributes, quantify missions often (for example, telling customers that a purchase can accomplish a specific goal), reach out to the public, and create “ambassadors” who can talk enthusiastically about their social enterprises.

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 235 Montgomery Street, Suite 650, San Francisco, Calif. 94104; (415) 288-0260; fax (415) 362-2512; http://www.bkconnection.com; 187 pages; $16.95; ISBN 978-1-57675-479-5.