Managing the Double Bottom Line

A Business Planning Reference Guide for Social Enterprises

Kim Alter

356 Pages, Revised Edition, 2000

Managing the Double Bottom Line This manual is intended to equip social entrepreneurs with a business planning tool for their market-led social enterprises and help them improve their social enterprise program performance by:

Sharing Save the Children's stories from the trenches, including lessons learned that lend themselves to developing best-practices social entreprise programs as well as experiences that are better avoided.
Equipping practitioners with program planning and management, market research, and business planning tools that can be applied to any type of social enterprise.
Furnishing a guide that can also be used as part of a training curriculum by practitioners providing business education or technical support services to clients, implementing partners, other social enterpreneurs or students.

Throughout, the manual aims to engender strategic thinking. Exercises are conceived to be multidimensional, pushing practitioners to "think outside the box." Starting, then running, a social enterprise is far from a static process. Businesses need to reinvent themselves constantly to adapt to ever-changing environments. This entails endless strategic reflection and analysis on the part of social entreprise managers and stakeholders, with an understanding that each decision they make may have a ripple effect on other aspects of their business.

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Preface and Table of Contents (412 KB)
Chapter 1: Business Planning For The Social Enterprise (443 KB)
Chapter 2: The Vision, Mission, Objectives and Business Description (253 KB)
Chapter 3: Target Market (291 KB)
Chapter 4: Strategic Frameworks (392 KB)
Chapter 5: The Marketing Plan (479 KB)
Chapter 6: The Operation Plan (522 KB)
Chapter 7: The Human Resource Plan (467 KB)
Chapter 8: The Financial Plan (910 KB)
Chapter 9: Lessons Learned (234 KB)
Appendix (153 KB)

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

“A must read for anyone planning to launch a social enterprise. Alter provides early stage entrepreneurs with the background and "how-to's" needed to avoid costly mistakes while building toward future success.”

Jed Emerson,
Senior Fellow, Generation Foundation

“Managing the Double Bottom Line is the best business manual I've seen! I use it in my work with social purpose enterprises, and I recommend it for plain 'ol business owners and managers, as well. In it, Kim Alter illustrates business management theory with in-depth case examples from an existing social purpose enterprise. And then, to make the lessons-learned operational, she gives us well thought out templates for use in our own enterprises. It's a wonderfully usable book!"”

Cynthia Gair,
The Roberts Enterprise Development Fund