Nonprofit organizations operate globally in many areas. They address societal issues in fields like health and social services, culture and arts, environment or education and research.

And sometimes, they even succeed where a classical economic perspective failed. They turn industrial fallow into a lively and inspiring new district. They find a way to foster global hygiene refuse recycling. They come up with exciting stories that help to meet the manifold challenges we face in today’s world.

However, to turn these stories into tales of success it helps to understand how innovative concepts need to be implemented, when financial means are scarce. It also might be a good idea to understand the methods of impact measurement. In short: it is commendable to understand the economic tools to apply entrepreneurship to nonprofits.

This course gives you an introduction to the topics that need to be addressed in order to make informed decisions. And it asks you time and again to look upon your own organization in order to critically reflect your learnings. Our objective is to let you apply your learnings in practice, to change your perspective as a means to understand the logic of social entrepreneurship and how to transfer this into your own organization.

We feel very confident about one thing: entrepreneurship is a concept that is able to address many problems. Globally, there are innovative solutions to be found and this course helps you to devise parts of the skill set you need to develop them.

We suggest that you keep a notebook in which you can write down all the important findings and solutions to the various tasks that you might want to solve during the course. Of course, this is voluntary and your notebook will not be corrected by anyone, but this can certainly help you to get the most out of this course.

“Weeks”, “Chapters” and invitation to comment

Please note that this course was originally published by the University of Basel on FutureLearn. FutureLearn is a global platform offering online courses that encourage social learning, including discussions between learners. On FutureLearn, we added comment sections to certain steps and measured course durations in weeks rather than in chapters.

Here on Tales, we measure courses in chapters. These chapters are equivalent to the “weeks” on FutureLearn. So when you watch a video here and hear an educator talking about “weeks”, you’ll know that this was because the videos were geared towards FutureLearn’s set-up.

Another difference to FutureLearn is the comment option. The educators in the videos will sometimes invite you to discuss something in the comments section. If you don’t see a comment option here on Tales, then the course is not open to comments at this moment in time. But for certain periods of time announced in advance, this course will be open to comments.

The good news is that either way, you can freely access the course and all of its contents at any time. If the comment section is not open, why not write down your comments as you go through the course? That way you can keep track of how your knowledge changes. And should you be able to participate in one of the authors’ face-to-face courses, you can then refer back to your comments and discuss them with your peers.

This project has been funded by fondation Botnar.

Lizenz