Hello everyone. This is Geet Kalra from Yunus Social Business. I hope you had a great time in your previous sessions, learning about how to define a problem and then create a solution. In this session, we will dive deeper to learn how to create an effective social business. To start with, I want you to first define your beneficiary. Who is your beneficiary? These are the people who benefit directly from the product or service that you offer, or you can say these are the people for whom your social business creates value. These beneficiaries could play any role in your social business. First, for social business that provides affordable products to people living at the bottom of pyramid, beneficiaries could be the customers. Second, there could be the suppliers or the service providers, just as artisans that your social business could be providing livelihoods to. Third, in the case of a cooperative, beneficiaries could also be the owners in a social business. And finally, beyond these roles, the beneficiaries may also perform roles of other stakeholders such as in the case of a social business, that they're white sex workers, formal employment opportunities in various industries. It is always useful to categorize your beneficiaries as direct or indirect beneficiaries. Think of your direct beneficiaries as impact multipliers, who multiply the impact that your business creates on their dependence or indirect beneficiaries. For example, the children of your direct beneficiaries may have better education because of your intervention, or better health outcomes. The next question I want you to ask yourself is, do you understand the needs of your beneficiaries? While it is easier to identify your direct or indirect beneficiaries, social entrepreneurs many a times do not understand the needs of their beneficiaries. If you see the most successful social entrepreneurs are the ones who come from within the community, but have had exposure to the outside world. Even if you as a social business entrepreneur or investor do not belong to the same communities as your beneficiaries, it is highly recommended that you live with your beneficiaries for some time and perform extensive surveys. We will learn more about the right questions to ask your beneficiaries in this session. While designing the solution, one question I want you to ask regularly is, does your solution fit the needs of your beneficiary? As you saw in the play punky study in the previous session, the social business could not survive simply because the solution did not fit the needs of the children. If you want to create a change, you have to persistently provide the right solution to your beneficiaries. To learn more about the right questions we talked about, let us refer to this beneficiary empathy map. I like to say it, the first step to create a beneficiary empathy map is to get into the zone of creating it. Now how do you do it? Remove your shoes, I mean, keep your prejudices about your beneficiaries aside, and put yourself in their shoes. We will discuss about every step used for creating this map and you will have an example of Virohan, which we have discussed in the previous session's towards the end of this video. The first step is to define your beneficiary, as we discussed, it is important to put some details about them like name, age, demographics, and how are they impacted by the problem in hand? Who is this individual? Can I create a persona for him or her? For example, in the case of Virohan, as we understood that our beneficiaries are low income youth between the age of 18 to 30 years, who are impacted because of the skills gap in obtaining allied health care and management jobs in hospitals. The second step is to understand what do they need to do for the solution to work? In the solution that we are proposing for Virohan, the beneficiaries would need to do an investment of money, efforts, and time in getting the vocational training. The second question in this, that you need to answer is what a success looks like to you and them? I see it as an extremely important question, as all your efforts, iterations, and actions should point towards the success. The next five questions that we are going to discuss, as I mentioned, requires a lot of research on your beneficiaries. Social entrepreneurs who do not belong to the same community as their beneficiaries usually conduct extensive surveys, also live with their beneficiaries for some time to get answers to these questions. We have clubbed the list of these questions into five main characteristics of beneficially. The first is what do they see, as a solution to the problem or the alternatives being used currently? What are the problems they see with those alternatives? In the past, there have been cases where a social business entrepreneur realized that the problem he was trying to solve was not even seen as the problem by the beneficiaries. While many of you may have this realization too, as you're working on your social business, so it is important to look at the problem through their lens. Coming to the next set, what do they say? How do they perceive the problem? Is there anything that they have said about why this problem exists? What according to them, is that right solution to the problem? Apart from the above, understanding of the local language, plays a big role here. Is there a communication gap between you and your beneficiaries, because of this language? The third is, what do they hear? What do they want to hear as a solution to the problem? Who do they listen to? Who are their influencers, a priest, a local village body, or their own children? What are they hearing from the world at large? Is there anything that differentiates them from other communities? The fourth is, what do they do? It is often said that the solution to the problem lies within the problem itself. You need to understand their behavior. Why this problem exists? Is there anything that is specific to their community? For example, in many cases, your beneficiaries might value social relationships a lot. Microfinance is a prime example of it. Can the same behavior somehow can be included as part of the solution? The fifth and the last question is, what do they think and feel? What are their inner desires? Motivations? At the same time, what are their fears, anxieties, or insecurities? Are they acting in the same way as they feel? Is there a congruency? Most of the businesses traditional or social, that have succeeded, understand the pulse of their customers or beneficiaries. If you want to make a change and solve the problem, and do not want to reinvent or keep coming back to the drawing board, it's better you spend a lot of time at the beginning and understanding your beneficiary. Build empathy by having an attitude of respect, genuineness, and acceptance for them. Be ready to be shocked, because in all probability, they do not think, act, and say things like you do. As they usually say, be prepared to unlearn. You can always refer to this beneficiary empathy map of Virohan as an example. Now, on the social problem that you wish to solve, define your beneficiaries and try getting answers to all the questions that we discussed. Get a holistic view of their traits and characteristics, a high level of empathy will make your social business effective, and thereby successful in the long run. In the next session, we will understand more about other stakeholders of your social business. How do you identify them and engage with them? So see you there.
